Return to Stourhead: Day 5

Tim e-mailed me at Tisbury to say that the long trench G would stay open over the weekend.

Peter needed time to draw the sections and there was no rush to backfill… as long as the deep hole was fenced off at night to protect the unwary.

I drove over at 5 and found that the smaller trenches no longer existed.. the soil had been returned and the machine had compacted it. The turf had been replaced. Soon the scars would be hidden by the new spring growth.

Fantastic May was working its magic at Stourhead and the every plant seemed to be showing off. Particularly the gloriously colourful rhododendrons.

I walked over to Peter.. working with pencil, drawing board and tape measure. Head and shoulders visible. Down the long trench, out in the park.

A pleasantly-mild and over-clouded evening. Perfect for archaeology …. and the ground drying at last… the swallows had returned … and now flitted again… back and forth over the grassland.

‘Lorraine came today. She said the pottery found this week compared well with that from last July’

‘Did she identify anything medieval?’

‘Just the odd piece…the one sherd we were pretty sure about turns out to be Iron Age’

‘ I guess with all the earth moving and landscaping done over the years something earlier must have been disturbed. Martin and Anne, who did the geophysics last year, thought there might be a ring ditch in the park. Perhaps a levelled Bronze Age burial mound ‘

‘Most of the ceramics, as we’d expected, can be dated to the17th-18th century. A nice tobacco pipe bowl circa 1650’

‘Anything new today?’

‘Very little digging, mostly cleaning for photographs and recording the archaeology in the trenches.. before things got buried again. The Greensand lumps in Trench I might just be a land drain. One of the visitors suggested it.’

‘That makes sense’

‘None of the stones were mortared and it doesn’t follow the alignment of the other walls’

‘Did you check the line of the wall corner in trench H with the long wall in this trench?’

‘Yes we marked it out.. ‘old-school’.. with ranging poles, and found that the walls align with each other. It seems likely that they mark the west edge of a through route’

‘Then the 2025 sewage pipe will follow the trackway line abandoned 300 years ago.. between the North and South gates of Stourton Castle. It works for the archaeology…. can’t be certain …but it’s a good story.’

Peter smiles.

‘It’s always good to have story. It can be flexible and can be revised if anyone goes deep enough to see the Castle again. Anyway, we’ve proved that all the Stourton Castle remains will be protected below the line of the new sewage pipeline when it goes through next year. Only the top of Colt Hoare’s brick sewage culvert will be breached by the pipeline’

‘Thanks Peter. That’s what we needed to know… and you found the northern edge of the Castle’

‘Just as well we shifted the original trench location to the north’

‘Well.. it’s been brilliant. Do you need the tools any more?’

‘No, we’ve finished with them now. They’re stacked by the railings’

So I walked across the park….loaded up the car and drove away.