I am starting regret my choice of subtitle for promoting this project. At present the Bathing House is proving very adept at justifying its sobriquet….
We started the day in high spirits, with examination of the stone-capped drain we found yesterday in prospect. Recording and removing that went according to plan, and then we started digging deeper – only to discover what looks suspiciously like natural substrate. But no sign of the Bathing House or any other structure. Cleaning up the trench as a whole, we can now see something like a buried topsoil under the Victorian landscaping (particularly to the south of the trench) below which the drain lies – or at least through which is may have been cut. Above it, the huge dumps of landscaping soil clearly define a very substantial project extending over a wide area. However, we came to realise how little building material it contained compared with the layers we met with in July – starting to cast doubt on the presence of the building.
At this point the choices were two–fold. Firstly, the building might lie deeper and what seemed to be natural layers are part of its construction. Or secondly, we are being misled by the historic mapping and are looking in the wrong place. The latter is probably the more likely, but the former can’t be ruled out yet. But exploring deeper will mean a much bigger trench, and there are other areas of the site to examine first.
So we opened trench three, sited to the east of the trial trench, over where the east wing of the building should be. The opening moments were positive, encountering the familiar landscaping layer, overlying a rubble deposit, both with a much healthier array of fragments of building materials than we saw yesterday.
But then, disaster – at least for our predictions. Only a foot or so down we hit a solid mass of crushed limestone, which really appears to be the underlying geology, soon forming the steep, emphatically natural, bank to the east of the site. We found the limestone several feet above the height of the path, and its impossible to imagine how it could have remained in place under the footprint of the building.
The unavoidable truth now is that it will be impossible to reconcile all of the available documentary information and the archaeology. Something is misleading us in some way – the problem is trying to pin down exactly what, and which bits of “evidence” to discount.
Fascinating though uncovering this unexpected history of this small corner of the garden is, this is not helping the project’s core aims.
Fortunately, discoveries in the last minutes of the day cheered things up considerably. We persevered with Trench 3, extending it south towards the path and were rewarded with what looks (at the moment) like a feature (perhaps a foundation trench) with a rubble fill. And from out of that fill came a small but unmistakable fragment of marble, perhaps from a fire surround. As if that weren’t exciting enough, just next to it was a square block of architectural stonework, with a square hole for housing an iron rod (like a railing) on one side, and what looks like a gutter channel on the other.
So we’ve plenty to look forward to exploring in the morning!
really interesting... on to the next one
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