Day 5 In View of All This

A busy day finishing things off. The excavation was almost over. Polly took the last of the rubble infill out of the south west corner trench and found a dark soily layer immediately above the lime ash basement floor. This had more personal things in it such as a tobacco pipe bowl and a couple of pieces of tea cup, white with a red line pattern. Then the site was polished for photos. Levels were taken across the site and the the finds were sorted and assembled in large labelled plastic boxes.

Tyntesfield Conservatory before it was demolished after it was damaged in the snow storm of 28th March 1916.

The sun came out and the lion made an entrance by popular demand and a small crowd gathered around it. We ran out of National Trust Archaeology badges and I rushed around drawing and Anthony helped out. Doug and Michael cleaned trench E, it was photographed planned then backfilled. The other trenches will be left for the next few weeks for visitors to see.

Putting the lion back together. We added the hind legs which came from another lion but almost fitted.

So what did we discover from the last 5 days about a building demolished almost 100 years ago. We delved beneath a blank gravel area with a palm tree at its centre defined by low stone walls… and found that there was no surviving decorated floor. It had been well and truly smashed and imploded into the heating basement below.

The stone foundations of the conservatory had then been capped and cemented, with a decorative urn on the south-west corner to make it more of a garden feature.

The clues to the conservatory lay in its sea of rubble and although we recorded the locations of special finds and marked them on the plan, it was a jumble, and objects had been spread around and did not relate closely to their resting place.

There was far more brick and far less ironwork than we had expected and we concluded that materials had been salvaged and the metalwork may have been sent for the WWI war effort. However, the rusting flowers and leaves we found, some with traces of paint, give us a clue to the decoration. Lots of glass, lots of coloured square and triangular ceramic tiles. Some strange bright orange/pink and mauve lumps of material, a few lead cames for fitting round decorative glass, bronze strips for holding sheets of glass in place. Carved edging stones and curved mortar that perhaps held heating pipes in place. Shaped column bases, sheets of render and cement and some moulded fragments of decorative plaster and a couple of pieces of stone tracery. Long strands of wire, perhaps for training plants and of course the lion fragments and our special lion.

A thin brick or stone wall ran 0.4m within and parallel to the main walls and these contained rubble and soil and occasionally stone and brick pads presumably supports for decorative plant containers. Our trench from the centre ‘palm tree’ bed 5m out into the gravel picked up the ring wall which supported the iron columns that rose to support the dome.

The ring foundation. A stone pad to support one of the iron columns around the dome.

At the end of the day we cleared up what the low brick walls were. These short narrow walls were built up from the basement floor. They had been levelled with slate and half bricks to achieve a particular height. The two in the south west trench had shaped curving mortar surviving on top of the brick and from this we concluded that they were for carrying the heated water pipes from the boiler beneath the decorated floor to provide heat to the ‘hot house of desire’.

One of the brick basement walls that supported the heated water pipes.

The finds are stored at the house and will be sorted by material to enable appropriate conservation.

Our archaeological home for the last five days.

Thanks to everyone who got involved.

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.

Tyntesfield Conservatory Day 1

Tyntesfield today. Waiting in the conservatory on the west side of the mansion before the start of the dig. The palm tree marks the site of the central dome of the building

Doug and Richard were there when I arrived and then Sue. Paul gave an introduction to the site and said the reason the conservatory was demolished was because the dome collapsed after heavy snow in March 1916.

Paul gives an introduction to the history of the conservatory.The items on the table were disturbed when scaffolding was erected to re-roof the house a few years ago.

We marked out a line to sample the west end of the conservatory and then raked off layer 1 the gravel surface. Below this was an ash and sand soil and beneath than building rubble.

The west wall found beneath the turf verge and dwarf walls against the south wall. Only bits of the colourful tile floor here though.

From the chunks of mortar floor with tile impressions and the bits of polychrome floor tile it looks as throught the floor was broken up before burial back in 1917. The soil is deeper closer to the house we will see what we discover tomorrow.