At last, years of planning and anticipation are over, and it’s finally time to put spade (or rather mini-digger) in the ground. It’s always one of the best moments of every project, the moment when there’s a return for all that planning and the thrill of the unknown about to become known.
The premise was simple enough. We’re hoping to rediscover the lost bathing house. It’s an honest premise – the building is lost and we’re hoping to find it, but given the strength of the documentary evidence that shouldn’t be too challenging a task. It is true that we don’t know precisely where it stood (and getting that right to a few centimetres either way is crucial; a trench misplaced by only a few inches will just not see what you’re looking for); and we certainly don’t know how thoroughly the building was demolished or how the site was treated after demolition – all of which will affect the nature of any archaeological deposits.
So, the gameplan was that we’d find either intact masonry or rubble filled foundation trenches, probably within 30-50cm of the surface. With luck we might find floors, and perhaps the remains of the plunge bath. We weren’t sure exactly where the walls would be, or what alignment they’d be on. Neither did we know how much mid-nineteenth century landscaping they’d be under. But finding all that out was the object of the exercise.
Against such easy expectations, the first hour grew increasingly nerve-wracking. The mini-digger exposed greater and greater depths of what looked just like the local natural substrate, with no evidence of building rubble or other remains at all. Thankfully, it eventually became clear that it was too loosely packed to be truly “natural”, but the absence of any trace of the building was puzzling and worrying. Finally we started to see tiny fragments of wall plaster (and then roof tile) turning up, and eagerly hurried them into plastic finds bags, thankful to be finding something! (The desperation of that moment is a bit emphasised now by the piles of plaster fragments we had by the end of the day, and the amount we’re leaving in the spoil heap!).
And so the day went on. What we’ve ended up with is entirely unexpected. We’ve excavated the trench to the full 1.20m depth that Health and Safety regulation permits. Right along its length it seems that we’re only encountering man-made archaeological levels, but they are not from discrete features like foundation trenches. Instead they are much larger horizontal layers. Some are rich in building waste, almost certainly from the bathing house, which had clearly been systematically sifted for anything reusable. At the base is a denser grey clay, smelling of sulphur – typical of soils formed in waterlogged conditions. Could this be is a lining put in under the plunge pool, or even relate to a pond formed by the spring before the bathing house was built.
This unexpected sequence asks many more questions than it answers. It’s possible that we happen to have hit the site of the plunge bath, and that we’re effectively working in the filling of a large, atypical, hole in the ground. The other alternatively is that the garden landscape here has been radically remodelled over time – an exciting and hitherto unsuspected alternative.
Tomorrow’s work will take our understanding another step further forward, but more than likely we won’t get a grip on the full answers until the dig in August.
So, at the end of day one we’re not where we were expecting to be at all. But we’re somewhere pretty interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment