Day 3 The Iron Flowers

We mostly missed the rain today which is always good news. The middle trench was completely cleaned for photographs and drawing and we saw that the brick wall had a lime ash render and that it and the basement floor had been painted with a bluey grey coating. Perhaps a bitumen treatment to counter rising damp.

Drawing the middle trench after excavation. Note the bluey grey colour painted onto the floor and the rendered brick wall behind he drawing board.

Today we found large slabs of the old floor with the impressions of the polychrome tile shapes impressed into them. We found lots of shaped tiles which we could place on the impressions and start to reconstruct a small part of the floor (not enough time for that but possibly a good activity. A Victorian equivalent to the mosaic making we simulate at Roman sites).

Slabs of broken cement flooring with the impressions of the lost tile floor. The many coloured tile pieces fit into the impressions.

Then we started finding the iron foliage and flowers. Paul (as usual) found the first pieces in the north trench and then Chris found an iron rose in the south trench. These were remains of the intricate decorations that once embellished the great iron frame Tyntesfield’s glass conservatory.

The iron flower (what type? The one in the south trench was a rose) and groups of leaves presumably fixed on finials or wrapped around slender columns. In tray thin bronze strip perhaps for holding the conservatory glass in place.

The heap of debris is a giant jigsaw with most of the bits missing.

The depth of debris beneath the gravel on the Tyntesfield Conservatory site. It’s full of interesting bits. The smaller fragments of tile and glass seemed to have settled on the bottom and then the main heap of debris spread over the top of it.

Day 2 The Lion’s Paw

Yesterday, we realised that a marvelous polychrome ‘mosaic’ tiled floor did not survive in our long trench at the west end of the Tyntesfield conservatory. The basement construction levels were likely to be deep so today we cut our losses and reduced the trench from 14m long to three smaller trenches.

It’s a good thing we did because the rubble went down and down. Terry and Paul dug down in two of the trenches and set aside all the fragments of interesting architectural building material. Terry found the first coin, a Victorian ‘bun’ half penny dated 1888. Well spotted amongst the heap of render, brick, mortar, rubble, moulded stone, shaped plaster, slate and loads of little white, red, green and brown shaped tiles that once decorated the conservatory. Very grumpy with whoever decided to smash the floor up before burying it almost 100 years ago.

Today’s trenches showing the heap of rubble we needed to dig through with selected architectural bits we set aside.

Three of us cleaned back the wall footings against the the south wall to reveal a two brick wide inner wall, presumably to contain plant beds or support shelves for plant pots within the conservatory. Above this was a square brick structure which might have supported a decorative plant container. It was all becoming more interesting than we thought yesterday, but as one of us said. “archaeology tends to raise more questions than it answers”. We must all become experts in Victorian conservatories and how they worked.

The inner walls emerging in the SW corner of the conservatory. Perhaps supports for shelves or beds that were used for exotic hot-house plants. The square brick structure top centre may have been to carry a decorative plant container.

Suddenly, Paul called out and brought something to show us from his trench. It looked like a strange hand (which was alarming) but on closer inspection we could see that there were claws emerging from each finger. This was thought to be part of a seated Lion holding a banner which the Gibbs family used as an emblem and can be still seen on the ridge tops of Tyntesfield House. It was made out of terra cotta or cove stone and soon Terry found the haunches of a seated Lion in his trench. Both were decorated with red paint.

The back of the paw looks like a hand

But it has claws. This is probably part of a Gibbs family emblem, a seated lion. Examples cans be seen on the ridge tops of the mansion.

At the end of the day we found the basement floor of the conservatory. A cement screed on brick with a heap of glass and tile fragments above it. Built out of it was a brick support wall, like the Roman pilae built to support mosaic floors above a hypocaust. The heated floor of the conservatory was very much like that, except it was driven by a steam boiler rather than slaves stoking a fire in the flue.

The basement floor of the conservatory with brick support wall for now destroyed conservatory tiled floor.