Under the First Tower Corfe Castle

Sometimes, at a distance, when the sunlight hits Corfe Castle… it seems whole again..

Just an illusion..it has been a battered shell since 1646, when, after a long siege, it was captured and blown apart by the Parliamentarians.

They made sure that the supporters of King Charles could not use it again..unpicking the defenses, trenching under the walls, packing with gunpowder and throwing the turrets and walls in all directions.

But this blog is also about something that happened 300 years earlier ..when Corfe Castle was one of the brightest and best within the league table of medieval fortresses.

About 1250, the 1st Tower was created for King Henry III.

When first added to the defensive circuit, this structure was a cutting edge design, built to protect the southern and western approaches. The barons were often restless.

A wonderful thing, with its rounded tower and its 3 arrow loop embrasures.. from these, bowmen or more probably cross bowmen could take aim and fell an attacker up to 300m away. A crossbow bolt could penetrate a knight’s armour.

We only know of one illustration and then only in plan.. drawn for the new owner Sir Christoper Hatton..14 years after it was sold to him by Elizabeth I. Such castles were old fashioned by then.

Ralph Treswell’s 1586 survey of Corfe Castle shows the 1st Tower between the steps up to the Outer Gatehouse (right) and the Outer Bailey latrines (left). 60 years later it was blown in two.

The Parliamentary demolition team searched for weak spots and made them weaker. They set their charges and the explosion fractured the 1st tower.. right down its central arrowloop. It must have sounded like an earthquake in the town.. and when the dust settled, the east half leaned drunkenly outward and the west half  had been flipped 180 degrees coming to a rest half way down the hill slope.. This is where it has remained gathering soil, vegetation and scrub for another 371 years.

Looking along the west wall of the Outer Bailey from the SW Gatehouse towards Corfe Village. The scrub covered fallen 1st Tower lies below the castle wall hidden by vegetation directly below the position of the church tower.

Other parts of the Castle have been cleaned and consolidated over the years but the chunks that lie tumbled across the slopes, or down by the river, have not. The largest of these pieces is the First Tower, and now …the scaffolding is upon it.

So last week I headed south through a cold winter morning of dramatic contrasts: on the high chalk downs, bright melting sunlight above vales of mist.. but down on the heath, thick freezing fog and brittle white frosted trees.

The caged Tower loomed but nobody was on it. I found them in the tea rooms beside the Outer Bridge. Architects, builders and property staff… after warm drinks we headed for the vertical ladder up from the ditch.

The route up to the First Tower from the Castle Ditch. The standing half of the tower is on the right with part of the 13th century cross-loop visible, the other half is part buried beneath the lowest scaffolding.

A good time to visit. Most of the centuries of roots and soil had been removed. We climbed over the scaffolding and saw, up close, the medieval construction, types of mortar, the galleting of the joints and the different beds of Purbeck stone, the arrangement of rubble and fine ashlar.

But everything in reverse. When we got to the top, we saw the great slabs of Purbeck Marble laid down as foundation layers before the tower proper was built above. Someone saw tool marks around their edges and suggested they may have been recycled coffin cover rough-outs.

The foundation of the Tower made of large long slabs of stone, then rough block work, not meant to be seen, followed by the finely worked ashlar burr stone forming the battered plinth (three course vertical, three at 60 degrees and then vertical again rising to the top of the rounded tower).

A stranded whale of a thing, its construction now more visible than at any time since it was built.

Could we laser scan it and capture this revelation in time?

Yes it can be done.

It will be partly obscured soon, new mortar and capping needs to be placed over the Tower to protect the newly exposed structure from weathering.

Both halves will be digitised.

The scaffolding will be edited out, and then, by the touch of a button… the First Tower will be reunited again.

 

 

 

Stourhead? Where’s Stourton Castle?

In south Wiltshire, on the border with Dorset and Somerset was built a great and ancient house. It lay at the centre of a large estate and was known as Stourton Castle..

but there is a problem…

We don’t know where it is

We have a picture.

An enhanced drawing based on John Aubrey’s original sketch.

Drawn from a 1670 sketch by the antiquarian John Aubrey.

The place was massive and must have looked a bit like Lacock Abbey

Lacock Abbey in north Wiltshire. Stourton Castle was arranged around two courtyards like this and would have been of similar scale and outward appearance.

but it’s gone.. apparently without trace.

The story of the removal of Stourton Castle and the creation of Stourhead House has a touch of Poldark about it.

The Stourtons (old money Poldark) and the Hoares (new money Warleggan)

The Stourton family had taken their name from the village of Stourton (the farm by the River Stour), a place recorded in Domesday and at least Saxon in origin. The Stourtons claimed that their line went back to a mighty Saxon lord… Botulph.. and William Camden, writing in 1607, saw a ‘monstrous bone’ displayed in Stourton Castle… a leg of their legendary ancestor.

The surviving records trace the family back to the 12th century but the Stourtons only emerge as lords of the manor in the 13th century documents. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the family did very well and built up cash reserves via good marriages and military service in France.

Their manor house blossomed and flourished. Aubrey’s picture shows that it was built around two large courtyards and had a tall tower and shows parapets with military style battlements.

Things fell apart for the Stourtons in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the early 16th century, William Lord Stourton was working for Henry VIII in France and left the care of his estate to his trusted steward William Hartgill…he also looked after Lord Stourton’s  wife Elizabeth.

When Lord Stourton died in 1548, his hot-tempered son Charles inherited the Estate. He rode with a band of henchmen to Kilmington near Stourton and found his mother living at Hartgill’s house. A feud grew up between the men and eventually, in 1557, Lord Stourton kidnapped William and his son John, murdered them and buried their bodies in a cellar within the Castle.

As a catholic, with Queen Mary on the throne, Charles believed that he would get away with the murders. However, William Hartgill had friends and they made sure that the Castle was searched, the bodies found and Lord Stourton arrested. He was convicted and executed in Salisbury. His wife was forced to pay for her husband’s property which had been forfeited to the Crown following his trial. She was also separated from her eldest son John, who was only a child at the time.

The family backed the wrong side in the Civil War. In September 1644, Parliamentarian forces set fire to one of the gates, captured the house, ransacked it and made it untenable.The eldest son John was killed at the battle for Bristol and when the Royalist cause was finally lost, the estates were confiscated and heavy fines were imposed.

The family fortunes continued to decline and by 1686 the impoverished Stourton family had mortgaged their ancestral home and by 1704 it was for sale.

Enter the Hoare family who had made a fortune through banking. In 1720, they purchased the whole estate, demolished the castle and built a new flashy Palladian villa… quite the latest thing. They changed the name to Stourhead. The house at the source of the River Stour.

The Hoare family made sure the transformation was carried out quickly. They paid for a survey of their new property in 1722 and the Estate Map shows the new house completed… Stourton Castle was gone.

The 1722 map shows the new Stourhead House with its garden intruding slightly into the top left hand corner of the stable courtyard. The courtyard is below and right of the house. With a large gateway facing south. Was this the outer courtyard of the old house?

Finding the site has been difficult, the normal techniques have proved to be inconclusive and the quest for the Castle has become a great archaeological challenge.

It seemed simple at first. The 1880s 25 inch OS map marks a cross about 100m east of Stourhead House with the legend ‘site of Stourton Castle’ So we geophysed it and the results were very disappointing. Since then, year by year, we have surveyed around the house but nothing has been revealed.

When Meg did her student placement for the National Trust, I asked her to find the Castle and her MA dissertation tracked down the documentary references and descriptions of its chambers and halls and its chapel, which included a decorated tiled floor inlaid with the initials WS for William Stourton. Documents in the record offices of Cornwall, Wiltshire, Somerset and nearby Longleat House were examined. These built up the background: the estate, the farmland, the deer park and hunting lodge, the warren and the warrener’s lodge… bits about the repair of the great house and its approximate location… but nothing to pin it down.

We looked at the fabric of the stone-lined cellars of Stourhead House. Had they built the new house on the old?

The cellars of Stourhead House. Some reused stone but nothing to indicate that these were once the cellars of Stourton Castle.

We examined the stableyard to the south. This includes in its walls great chunks of reused? stone and a 16th century? doorway. Was this the remodeled outer courtyard of the Castle?. We dug a trench on its north side, hoping to find medieval walls leading to the inner courtyard.. just 18th century pottery above deep soil.

Our fieldwork in Stourhead Park. Earth resistance meter against the railings and our trench beside the stables courtyard to the left. The Hoare family’s 1720s mansion Stourhead House can be seen top right. The site of old Stourton Castle lies somewhere to the right of this picture.

So where is it hiding? A LiDAR laser survey of the parkland ground surface might help or more sensitive geophysics… perhaps ground probing radar. Everything seems to point near the cross marked by Ordnance Survey. A line of pre-Stourhead House chestnut trees are aligned north towards this point where there is a mound in the park. From the east, an old drove-way passes through Drove Lodge and runs as an earthwork into the park.

Our site is most likely to exist where these two alignments meet. Surely the backfilled cellars and extensive robbed out walls lie there or thereabouts.

We’ll keep looking.

Boundaries & Hedges: Look Deeper

Look into this photo…look deep into this photo.

What do you see?

Yes, I know.. it’s just a bit of farmland.

Look deeper…there’s at least 4000 years of farmland here.
Look at the hedgerows….they’re very precious …on a European scale, our bushy boundaries are surprisingly rare and wonderful for wildlife.

Off to the left is the edge of Badbury Rings.. so we’re on the Kingston Lacy Estate in Dorset again.

Kingston Lacy for me is like Miss Marple’s village.

We are on the south side of the grand Beech Avenue. William John Bankes had this planted for his mother in 1835.

This land has been ploughed for many generations. Bottom centre, there’s a dark circle with a black blob in it.

The ploughing has levelled an Early Bronze Age burial mound and all that is left is the cut of the quarry ditch. From here the chalk was dug to heap up the bright white mound over the grave. Perhaps the body is still in the grave pit marked by the blob.

The Round Barrow was once an eye-catcher. About 1000BC the land was divided into units by linear boundary ditches. Perhaps population was rising. Boundaries needed to be clear and well defined. The barrow mound formed a good fixed point and the boundary runs against it.

Look again. This linear boundary does not follow a straight line. It has to weave between existing fields. Can you see the white ghost lines of the chalk field banks it has to negotiate. These are small ‘celtic’ fields, in use from the Bronze Age through to the Roman period and later.

Many hedge and wall field systems in the west still follow boundaries as old as this.

Nothing is completely static.

Look up to the centre right and see a group of dark-lined enclosure ditches overlying the ghosts. I walked there with the farmer once and recovered scraps of Roman pottery from the new ploughed field. Stock enclosures, Roman development over part of the old system.

Zoom out a little… can you see broad bands of darker and lighter stripes running roughly with the hedgerows?..

These are the remains of the furlongs and strips of Shapwick’s common arable field system. A time of centralisation when scattered farmsteads and fields became concentrated. Devised by the Saxons, around the 10th century, communities farmed their scattered strips within the great fields, managed by the lord’s manorial court.

At Kingston Lacy, this system continued right down to the 19th century. We have a great map showing all the strip fields in 1773-4, it tells us who farmed what.The small guys were being squeezed out by the larger farmers.

How old fashioned! This was the advice of William Woodward, the surveyor, who advised the Bankes family to enclose the land. In 1813, a new map was made and the land was divided up into large economic farms with straight hedge boundaries. The smallholders became farm labourers.

Look into this photograph. Look deep into this photograph. We are east of Badbury now. Towards Kingston Lacy Park.

Bottom left is the tree-edged enclosure of Lodge Farm. All the names in the landscape matter. It’s ‘lodge’ after the medieval hunting lodge.

The stone lodge itself now has a lawn in front of it. A 15th century building on the site of an earlier building at the gateway to the royal deer park and warren of Badbury. This park is documented right back to Henry de Lacy’s time in the 13th century.

Top, right of Badbury, is the medieval High Wood, and middle right is a hedgerow strip marking the deep survival of the broad medieval deer park ditch. Designed for fallow deer to leap in but not get out. Deer were valued for their high status meat, a preserve of the rich carefully nurtured and guarded.

Badbury Warren was maintained right up to bachelor John Bankes’ day. There were complaints that the thousands of rabbits kept there, got out into the corn and coppices and damaged the crops.

John’s mum Margaret always kept the accounts and when John took over the Estate he followed her example….right up to 1740, when he closed the account book and left a few sheets of paper there.

One of these contained the inked in costs of enclosing the Warren. All the hedges in this photo were planted at this time. Their names give away the old use of this new farmland…’Lodge Field’, ‘Deer Hill Field’, ‘Hare Run Field’ and ..

‘Watch House Field’ (watching for poachers? a dangerous job, one of the medieval keepers Henry Warren was murdered…)

Sometimes… in the right conditions…. the Roman road from Poole on the coast to Badbury can be seen running from Lodge Farm across the fields.. aiming for the saddle of land between the hills of Badbury and High Wood.

Not in this photograph though..

each year brings new conditions of ploughing, drought, snow and frost and …new revelations of the past become possible…

Look into this photograph…north of Badbury now…what can you see?

The spaghetti junction of Roman Dorset! We’re looking down the barrel of the late 4th century road from Old Sarum (Salisbury), the London Road, to the civitas captital of Dorchester (still Dorset’s county town).

This late road crosses two, perhaps three earlier roads. The Poole road turns in the middle left of the photo and splits.

First joining the field boundary running to bottom centre (the road to London).

Second crossing the centre of the field, under the Dorchester road, and continuing to Bath and….

Third.. following the straight, thick hedge boundary between Badbury and the arable fields. Another road, long forgotten, heading for the Somerset Roman town of Ilchester.

This boundary, preserved and managed over the centuries.. ancient, ancient boundary held in the landscape as a hedge…once a Roman road.. it became a convenient straight marker in the 12th century to divide off  the new manor of Shapwick from the royal manor of Wimborne Minster…

and today it remains the parish boundary between the St Batholomew’s Church of Shapwick  and St Stephen’s of Pamphill.

Everything in the landscape speaks. Ancient public footpaths, names of fields, woodlands, coppices…all  full of stories and ….hedgerows are particularly precious and vulnerable…

 

 

 

 

Solsbury Hill and the Bath Skyline

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night…. Peter Gabriel 1978

Solsbury Hill on the north-east side of the World Heritage City of Bath may be particularly famous for this song (if you’re a Peter Gabriel and Genesis fan) but my job this week has been to write about its archaeology.

The NT are commissioning new guide books and Brean Down and Bath Skyline are on the go at the moment.

This land does what it says in the property title. It occupies the skyline to south, east and north of the city and has been acquired bit by bit over the years. It enables the National Trust to buffer development on the high ground and conserve views to and from Bath.

The view from the front of Ralph Allen’s 18th century Neo-Classical house looking north-west across its designed parkland landscape towards the city of Bath. The palladian bridge over the lakes can be seen in the middle distance

Anyway here is the draft for the guidebook. This bit gives a bit of an overview..

In the minds of our ancestors, Bath would appear as a rare, wonderful and magical place where hot water issued from the ground.

No wonder the god of the spring required worship, and prehistoric objects including Iron Age coins were cast into the hot water long before the Romans arrived. After the Conquest, the Romans created a monumental shrine complex to worship the celtic god Sulis which was then partnered with the Roman god Minerva. This place became a site of pilgrimage from far and wide.

The surrounding landscape had light limestone soils and were a magnet for early farmers; ideal for early cultivation using the primitive ploughs of the time. When the Romans arrived, they saw the qualities of the easily worked local beds of Bath freestone. The Saxons were less inclined to build in stone but Bath boasts great stone buildings from the medieval period to the present day. In the mid 18th century, Ralph Allen recognised the qualities of Bath stone and marketed it by building the great house and designed landscape of Prior Park as his shop window.

View of Ralph Allen’s great house looking south from the middle lake of the designed landscape with the palladian bridge in the foreground.

He helped develop the Georgian city which gives the place its World Heritage Site Status today.

There’s a bit about Bushey Norwood which has the earthworks of a prehistoric farm and a bit on Bathwick and Rainbow Wood once part of the Bishop of Bath’s deer park where the remains of Roman buildings survive.

Bushey Norwood prehistoric field system looking south-west towards Bath

The main bit is on Solsbury Hill….

This is a stunning location, an ideal place to build an Iron Age hillfort.

Many centuries later, its abandoned earthworks were adapted into a medieval strip farming system. These narrow fields were marked by mere stones, each engraved with an allotment holder’s initials.

People have visited this place for thousands of years: stray finds dating to the later Neolithic (2600-2300 BC) and Bronze Age (2300-700BC) demonstrate this; but the key feature is the 8 hectare (18 acre) hillfort, a defended settlement occupied over 2000 years ago. A visit to Solsbury Hill will help you appreciate its strategic position overlooking the Avon valley: a near level hill-top protected by steep slopes with clear views in all directions.

Two pieces of archaeological work: one very recent and the other over 50 years old, help us to imagine the lives of the families that once lived on Solsbury.

Excavations from 1955-1958 revealed that the hill-top was surrounded by a carefully constructed stone faced rampart with an entrance on the north-west side. Within this was evidence for the warrior farmer community which once occupied this place. Their homes were round houses, each constructed of a ring of timber posts infilled with mud and woven branches with a thatched conical roof.

In 2012, a geophysical survey of the interior by the Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society, revealed the sites of over 50 round houses. These homes and store buildings show up clearly on the survey plan because each was surrounded by a distinctive circular drainage ditch.

The 1950s digs showed that the earliest houses were built before the hill-top was defended. Then the first rampart was built and then pulled down… perhaps after an attack. Then another wall was constructed but this time associated with a new form of pottery.

Does this suggest invaders and if so what happened to the original Solsbury dwellers? But perhaps they never left; just bought some more fashionable pottery and rebuilt their defences (the marvelous vagueness of archaeological evidence).

The dig director was W.A. Dowden of the Bristol University Spelaeological Society. He looked at the cooking pot fragments found in his trenches and concluded that the fort settlement had been occupied in the middle Iron Age c.300BC and had been abandoned at least 100 years before the Roman army conquered the area c.AD44.

The excavation revealed the farm produce from the surrounding countryside: quern stones, once used to grind the harvested grain into flour and the meat bones of their grazing animals; domestic cattle and sheep.

A bridle bit demonstrated that the wealthier occupants rode horses; two decorated weaving combs were a reminder that clothing was made here and two spearheads and sling stones demonstrated that the inhabitants were armed and ready to defend their homes.

Solsbury Hill Iron Age hillfort looking south-west towards Bath. The earthworks of the medieval and later strip farming system can be seen as earthworks hiding the earlier round houses.

As you stand on the hill top, imagine it crowded with Iron Age round houses and people, then sweep them away and see the ridges of long strip fields with medieval farmers trudging up and down behind ox teams, ploughing the settlement ruins buried below.

It still needs some editing… but next time you go to Bath, visit the Skyline and enjoy the archaeology and views of the City.

The Knight and the Otter, Boynton Church

Wiltshire is named after Wilton, once the county town;

Wilton is named after the River Wylye which meanders from my home town of Warminster to the 13th-century cathedral city of Salisbury.

In NT terms from Cley Hill to Mompesson House but…

this blog tells of a rare encounter; so forgiveness please as I stray from National Trust boundaries.

I am on holiday after all.

The faster route is the main valley road, following the the edge of Salisbury Plain. The slower, more beautiful route lies close to the other side, a sleepy, tranquil drifting lane against the high chalk ridge dividing Wylye from Nadder.

A string of ancient settlements, parishes and manors follow the river to Wilton; each with thatched flint and limestone cottages and little mansion houses. Bishopstrow, Sutton Veny, Tytherington, Corton, Boynton….it’s good to glide along these lanes on a bicycle..and do it often to catch the seasons passing. The bluebells are all but gone now.. the bright green leaves are reaching their peak, the copper beech trees are maturing to a deeper red, the red campion are giving way to a landscape of buttercup yellow, white ox eye daisies and corn parsley….

So many generations have farmed here and seen these changes year by year. A harder life with lower yields, terraces of contoured strip lynchets stand out in shadow on the steeper slopes, helping to extend the arable onto more marginal land.

Last week, a chilly overcast day turned into warm sunshine so Jan and I went for an afternoon cup of tea at Boynton …but the cafe was closed.

We could go to the church instead. I’d been a couple of times before.. in the autumn, but this was during the historic churches ride. The parishioners signed our sponsorship cards and fed us cakes and lemonade as we cycled to the next one. Not much time to get your head round the history of each place.

The Church of the Blessed Mary is hidden down a lane beside the High Street; we parked under a tree and opened the churchyard gate..the door was open. A peaceful place, just the sound of birdsong and the children playing in the nearby garden. Inside it was mainly 13th century, across the nave was a chapel with the bright light from a large circular window drawing us to the life sized sculpture of a knight. His shield revealed the coat of arms of the Giffards, an ancient family, whose ancestors accompanied William I when he brought his army from Normandy in 1066.

Boynton had long been a Giffard manor and the chapel was their family chantry. The adjacent building had housed the chantry priests who were provided with an income to say daily prayers for the family.

Rich and pious medieval families would build chantries sometimes in churches and sometimes as separate foundations like Stoke Sub Hamdon in Somerset and Wilkswood Farm in Purbeck.

The stone knight was well preserved; quite often sculptures were defaced during the religious turmoils of the 16th and 17th centuries but not this one. Though it had once been brightly painted. Traces of gold, red and white paint survive. An oyster shell, the artist’s palette, was found during the 1950s renovation still with splashes of colour within it.

What was that at his feet? An unusual sleek animal with a long broad curving tail.

The 1960s guide book identified the animal as an otter ..and the knight as Sir Alexander Giffard. Otters were once a feature of the River Wylye. Was this a symbol of Sir Alexander’s riverside manor? Otters were driven from the Wylye valley for many years.. but more recently there have been rumours.

The guide book’s preferred explanation for the stone otter was more symbolic. The otter-like escape of Sir Alexander that saved his life! He was a crusader and in 1250 fought beside the Earl of Salisbury in the battle of Mansourah in Egypt. When all was lost, he evaded capture by slipping into the nearby river and swimming away….

He died in 1262 and soon afterwards the chantry was created. His tomb has remained through the generations, lying in this quiet place, dressed for battle, with a sword at his hip and an otter at his feet. I suppose back in the day otters were quite common.

Two days later Jan said we should go to Langford Lakes.. a little beyond Boynton. It’s a nature reserve between the Langford villages. Archaeologist does nature..armed with bird and wild flower books we stepped out onto the first lakeside jetty.

A brown thing dipped beneath the water. I pointed to the spot expecting a duck to surface but something very unexpected popped up. It was a large sleek otter, brown teddy bear face and rounded ears. I don’t think he’d arrived from Egypt.

Sunset over the Wylye Valley

He gave us a look and glided away.

Corfe Castle Begins

It would be wrong to let the day go by without our NT anniversary post. This was the Outer Gatehouse at Corfe Castle, Dorset on 7th April 1986. I was there again today 30 years later.

The ticket office and the turnstiles are gone now and the Outer Bailey today was alive with people dressed in medieval costumes, amongst the tents and archery practice. Lots of children on holiday getting involved and soaking up the atmosphere.

In 1986, Nancy and I met the first mini-bus full of National Trust working holiday campers and we began to cut the turf to understand what lay under the grassy mound.

Under the turf was a courtyard of limestone gravel and the west wall of the Outer Gatehouse guard chamber which had fallen against the curtain wall (to the right) burying a flight of stone steps.

The mound turned out to be a large block of walling, part of the Outer Gatehouse guard chamber which had been blown up in 1646. After the second siege, the Parliamentarian soldiers captured the Castle and undermined the walls. It seems that they filled the guard chamber with gunpowder and blew it to pieces. Everything flew outwards and the barrel vaulted roof dropped onto the floor burying the guard chamber fireplace and flagstone floor.

Nancy excavated the diamond leaded window which had been scattered outside ..as the blast tore through it.

Nancy excavating the diamond leaded window pieces. The stone west window of the guard chamber top right.

We found that the top and edges of the collapsed wall had been picked over and a lot of the good stone blocks had been nicked by the locals to make repairs to their houses.Well, why not after all the damage that had been done to their properties during the Civil War… some of the Corfe cottages acquired some very grand fireplaces in the 17th century.

The west wall had fallen and broken over the stairway that once led to the top of the gatehouse.

Clearing the broken blocks of fallen gatehouse to reveal the stairway up to the top of the curtain wall. Part of the first floor of the gatehouse can be seen to the right 90 degrees out of true.

We cleaned the revealed walls, photographed and drew them and then it was time for the stone masons to come and consolidate the masonry.. the mystery of the mound of grass had been revealed.

I got a particular buzz when we cleaned the steps and saw the wear marks of the feet on the stone. Nobody had walked there for 350 years. We walked up and down them..our feet where theirs had trod.

 

 

 

 

Sewage and the Infirmary at Lacock Abbey

Sorry to have to mention this but there has long been a problem with sewage at Lacock Abbey.

Looking north. Lacock’s 2008 south park and monastic church resistivity survey in action . Meg and Tony are standing on the church site which became a Tudor garden beneath Fox Talbot’s ornate 19th century windows.These windows were built into the monastic church cloister wall. The T junction of paths in the photo can be seen as blue bands on the resistivity plot (next image). The narrower path leads through a door beneath the smaller window into the cloisters.

We thought it had been sorted out in 1995 (and there was good archaeological recording then) but the River Avon often floods in winter and at such times the system isn’t up to the job. When the Abbey was built in the 13th century…. it was a lovely setting beside the river but to be honest it’s too low lying. The people who built the village on the higher ground knew that. When Ella Countess of Salisbury came to build her nunnery, the locals may have shaken their heads…good meadow land but don’t you know it’s on a flood plain!

Our resistivity plot is full of detail. Top is north and the blue upper edge of the image is the Abbey with other unsurveyable paths and walls as parallel bands of blue. To orientate you to the last photo, the doorway to the left of Meg leading to the cloisters is the narrow vertical blue line top centre. Below this across the broader blue path is a circular feature,once a 17th century fountain cut at its lower edge by the early 18th century garden wall, shown as a very thin blue line with the Tudor garden paths and boundary wall, now under parkland grass visible further down the plot. The old London Road is the wide feature running from right to left across the bottom of the plot. The sewage pipe route ran along the bottom edge skirting the parkland tree(which is the small blue hole in the lower left of the plot) and then curved round to the right to run along the edge of the plot . The trench was routed to avoid the detail of the Tudor garden.

One of the wonderful things about Lacock is that so much of the medieval structure survives. William Sharrington, who got the Abbey after the 1530s Dissolution, didn’t need the great monastic church so he knocked it down but he kept the cloisters and incorporated much of the dining room, dormitory, chapter house etc. in his new grand home.

The start of the pipeline on the east side of the Abbey where the old sewage works were. A medieval carved stone marking the point were the infirmary wall and drain were found.

The infirmary’s gone though. There’s just a passage from the cloisters into the east park with its name on. This was where the sick and the elderly nuns were cared for somewhere near the site of the modern sewage works.

So, in linking the Abbey sewage plant on its east side, to the village on the west, the new trench had to cross the park and follow the east and south sides of the Abbey. This was a minefield of archaeology ..and one does ones best to avoid cutting through it.. but the trench was bound to hit something.

We knew about the infirmary on the east and William Sharrington’s Tudor garden on the south. Both areas had been surveyed using geophysics and using this and all other available evidence Nathan plotted the route. Closer to the Abbey to avoid the Infirmary and swinging further south to skirt the garden.

It was bound to hit something, Lacock’s archaeologists Jane and Tony watched the work as it progressed and halted the excavation when necessary to record everything that came to light.

Lacock from the south west the trench skirting the parkland tree, the corner of the Tudor garden was just clipped by the trench before the pipeline continued round to the east skirting the 18th century bastion wall which separates Abbey and Park.

I visited before backfilling. Holes in the ground…if they can’t be avoided, are great opportunities to see and touch the story of a place and Lacock’s story is a fine one. A morning walk along the trench from the village and then to the south. Quiet along the line of the old London Road and then cutting behind a parkland tree the trench curved towards the east and clipped the very edge of the SE corner of outer Tudor garden courtyard. Nicely built, it gave reality to the ornate plan we had revealed by resisitivity in 2008. Just beyond this, the digger had clipped the lid of a deep 16th century culvert heading south from the Abbey. I turned the corner marked by the stone wall of the early 18th century garden bastion and followed the trench along the east side.

The corner of the Tudor garden exposed on the south side of the Abbey a couple of weeks ago.

There were Jane and Tony in the distance, most of the trench had exposed debris… waste picked over and discarded, that Sharrington had spread out across the park and garden during his great alteration from a religious institution to a grand country home.

Tony showed me the infirmary wall, a wide, fine ashlar stone structure. Here there was much medieval pottery, oyster shells and bones from meals that had once been eaten by the monastic community. One metal object was decorated with curving lines inlaid with silver, perhaps a pendant but Jane is looking for comparisons.

A copper alloy decorated ‘pendant’ found close to the Abbey Infirmary.

Beside the wall, there was another stone structure. To lay the pipe, the top stones had to be moved but there was enough space to send a camera down. It was a beautifully made drain… presumably nobody had glimpsed its interior for 700 years.

Photo along the the 13th century monastic drain revealed beside the infirmary. The last person to see this was probably the medieval builder.

I went on to the Lacock meeting. I was late.. looking down holes Martin they said. Take the opportunity, I encouraged them, it’s a great hole.