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Srr|Mlngifi Catittoeti THIRD SERIES, No. XVI.—OCTOBER, 1858. ON THE NORTHERN TERMINATION OF OFFA'S DYKE. (Read at Rhyl.) If we except the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus, there is no boundary line in Britain which has so many claims upon our notice as the one which Offa drew from the mouth of the Wye to the estuary of the Dee. In some respects the interest attaching to it surpasses that which belongs to the Roman works that preceded it. The tribes living immediately to the north of Hadrian's wall were swept away by Ida and his Angles in the sixth century; and the Picts, whom the other wall was intended to bridle, were, as a nation, exterminated by the Irish Scots in the ninth. But the two races which Offa's Dyke sepa¬ rated in the eighth century still find themselves face to face along its course, and their national fortunes have been intimately blended with its history for upwards of a thousand years. Any attempt, therefore, to settle the course of this celebrated boundary, with greater precision than has hitherto been done, cannot, to say the least, be considered as labour thrown away on an unworthy subject. The doubts which have so long existed with respect to the northern terminus of the Clawdd Offa, and the strange mis-statements on the subject which were so long admitted without protest, or even question, are certainly not to the ARCH. CAMB., THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. 2 Y