Dorchester was one of the largest stations of the Romans in England, and their amphitheatre just outside the town was the most perfect in the country, the Roman road and Icknield ways passing quite near it.  There were three great earthworks in the immediate neighbourhood—­the Maumbury Rings or Amphitheatre, the Poundbury Camp, and the far-famed Maiden Castle, one of the greatest British earthworks; in fact Roman and other remains were so numerous here that they were described as being “as plentiful as mushrooms,” and the whole district was noted for its “rounded hills with short herbage and lots of sheep.”  We climbed up the hill to see the amphitheatre, which practically adjoined the town, and formed one of the most remarkable and best preserved relics of the Roman occupation in Britain.  It was oval in shape, and had evidently been formed by excavating the chalk in the centre, and building up the sides with it to the height of about thirty feet.  It measured 345 feet by 340, and was supposed to have provided ample accommodation for the men and beasts that figured in the sports, in addition to about 13,000 spectators.

In the year 1705 quite 10,000 people assembled there to witness the strangling and burning of a woman named Mary Channing, who had murdered her husband.  This woman, whose maiden name was Mary Brookes, lived in Dorchester with her parents, who compelled her to marry a grocer in the town named Richard Channing, for whom she did not care.  Keeping company with some former gallants, she by her extravagance almost ruined her husband, and then poisoned him.  At the Summer Assizes in 1704 she was tried, but being found pregnant she was removed, and eighteen weeks after her child was born, she was, at the following Lent Assizes, sentenced to be strangled and then burned in the middle of the area of the amphitheatre.  She was only nineteen years of age, and insisted to the last that she was innocent.

About a hundred years before that a woman had suffered the same penalty at the same place for a similar offence.  This horrible cruelty was sanctioned by law, in those days, in case of the murder of a husband by his wife; and the Rings were used as a place of execution until the year 1767.

There was a fine view of the country from the top of the amphitheatre, and we could see both the Poundbury Camp and the Mai-Dun, or “Hill of Strength,” commonly called the Maiden Hill, a name also applied to other hills we had seen in the country.  The Maiden Hill we could now see was supposed to be one of the most stupendous British earthworks in existence, quite as large as Old Sarum, and covering an area of 120 acres.  It was supposed to be the Dunium of which Ptolemy made mention, and was pre-Roman without a doubt.  At Dorchester the Romans appear to have had a residential city, laid out in avenues in the direction of Maumbury Camp, with houses on either side; but the avenues we saw were of trees—­elm, beech, and sycamore.