I wonder if it’s significant that it was the remains of a hurricane coming from Canada that rather deflated the events planned for today….
It was on 12 September 1759, that the summer-long siege of Quebec, the leading city of the French settlements in North America, was brought to a successful conclusion by General James Woolf. It’s that event that may well have given the Quebec garden its name, as English landowners became more jingoistic in response to colonial rumblings in North America in the later 1760s, and started erecting monuments to the battle. There seems to have been a small brass gun on the site (removed before 1801) thought to have been fired on the anniversary of the battle, and it’s been suggested (rather unconvincingly) that the islands and the water around them depicted Quebec with its rivers on either side.
Well, we couldn’t let an opportunity to revive a 200 year old custom pass, now could we? We couldn’t manage to find anyone with a cannon to spare, unfortunately, but a loud “Huzzah” in memory of the brave Redcoats, as the culmination of a special guided tour exploring the symbolism of the gardens, wouldn’t be a bad substitute.
Unfortunately, the remains of hurricane Katia had other ideas. With very strong winds buffeted the estate, tearing limbs off the trees, the estate had no option but to close the gates at 1pm, for safety reasons. From the forecast, it looks like Katia may also stop play tomorrow.
However, it was possible to catch up with Justin and Robert on site. They’d spent Sunday (when we had even more visitors than we’d had on Saturday) starting to carefully clean down the sections – vertical faces – of the machine excavated trenches. This is crucial for revealing the details of the archaeological record. Although one can see the larger scale changes in the soil profile as mechanical excavation progresses, the detail only emerges when the soil surfaces are carefully cleaned by hand with a shovel or trowel. This is especially true along the long edges of the trenches, where the digger’s bucket blade smears the layers, one into another.
The north-eastern 20 metre trench has cleaned up particularly well (as shown in the photo above). We’re now confident that we have found both the shore of the pond and the island, pretty much as they are shown on the 1891 25” survey. The substrates on the two sides are rather different – the island’s has lots of pebbles in it, the shore none. This might suggest that a large open pond basin was opened first and then the island was constructed within it: however, that would be a lot of extra work to go to, rather than just leaving the island unexcavated in the first place. We know from many previous excavations across the estate that the subsoil (which is made up of the “sludge” that was left behind by the melting ice sheet at the end of the last glaciation) varies hugely from place to place – so the variation here could be completely natural. However, we’ll need to dig further to establish exactly what’s going on, in order to understand the development of the site fully. Meanwhile the cleaning has revealed what seems to be remnants of the topsoil on the island, confirming the depth at which we should be looking for the shorelines in the other trenches. That will help to guide the work to be done when the mechanical digger is back on site – probably on Wednesday.
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