SDO9820 - The Southampton and Dorchester Rail Road works, Dorset County Chronicle

The Southampton and Dorchester Rail Road works had yesterday reached to within two hundred yards of the Amphitheatre. The workmen are busily engaged in deep cuttings, as it is intended that the carriages shall pass under two roads, viz., under the Wareham and Weymouth mail coach roads, about fourteen feet. These works, therefore, are being carried on by digging several feet below the surfaces of Fordington Field, and the roads named; operations which will, of course, considerably augment the expenses of the undertaking in this vicinity. The men, it is to be regretted, [?] frequently led into scenes of extravagance – to say the least of [?] for there is an over-payment here which is frequently in-[?] to the last degree; Twenty-one shillings, or fifteen at least [?], do not render as much service to the recipients as nine [?farthings] to the farmer’s men; for the greater part of the navigator’s cash makes unto itself wings, and vanishes in the beer-shops; in many cases before the week is half over they are frequently in want of nourishment for some days, therefore not very capable of giving their best services to their employers, some others have recourse to the mutual kindness of the paymaster and the ganger; the wife of the latter, often keeping provisions for sale is secured in opening weekly accounts by the usual arrangement. It has occurred that on the arrival of Friday, the pay evening, five workmen have had to receive each a ballance (sic) of one shilling only to begin operations for their future support. Specimens of antiquity, stated to be Roman remains, have been found on the present scene of operations, on the Wareham road. A Correspondent says, “The men who are excavating for the railway in Fordington Field, cut, on Monday last, through a kind of pit in the chalk, full of a light mould with a considerable quantity of Roman or Romano-British pottery; and bones of the horse, sheep, and other animals. There was no token of cremation, and the pottery seems rather domestic than cinereal.”