Part of the Stem of a Roman Monumental Candelabrum of Stone, from York

Abstract

In 1876, while the York railway station and goods yard were being planned anew by the North Eastern Railway (now the London and North Eastern Railway), a carved stone was found on the ‘hill near the New Goods Station’, a site of which the exact position, now obscured by still more extensive railway development, is discussed below (see p. 7). The stone was presented by the Directors of the North Eastern Railway to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, which already owed much to their public spirit; and it was in due course described, in the Society's catalogue, as ‘a fragment of pillar, 2 ft. 8 in. high, ornamented with human heads and basketwork, over which a man is climbing’. In the Society's Annual Report for 1876 it had, however, won no particular description and was doubtless regarded as among ‘the one or two sculptured stones’ blandly recorded as having ‘added to the completeness of the collection of Roman antiquities’.