SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House EUREKA! (or “I HAVE IT”, as was first said by another man in a bath, probably in a bath house….).

Main excavation, Day 3
MN 16th August 2013

Phew!

I never really doubted that we’d eventually pin the building down, but it comes as a great relief to have actually done so, after the challenges of the archaeology on this site so far.

Our work today was focussed on exploring the discoveries made late-on yesterday afternoon. By widening the trench we quickly confirmed that what had looked like a robbing trench (an emptied foundation trench, refilled with waste rubble) was exactly that, and that we’d found at least one wall of the Bathing House. Determining exactly how it’s orientated (and whether this matches any of the historic maps) will have to await detailed surveying, but its already clear that the wall – very probably the back wall of the bathing house – is not where any of the maps suggested it would be. It looks very much as if the whole building lies 3-4m further south than we’d been expecting, which may well have contributed to the earlier trenches’ lack of success. This displacement suggests that the façade of the building may actually lie under the present path.

It was a good morning, with one discovery following on another. The robbing trench was soon joined by a second stone block cut to receive a cast iron railing. This wasn’t perfectly aligned with the first (seen last night), but is close by. Further excavation should show if they were in situ or are simply rubble left behind on site (which seems less likely in view of the general dearth of rubble). Cleaning the floor of the robbing trench revealed some last remaining courses of in situ brickwork from the wall, and also the possibility of the remains of a mortar floor to its south. We also found two more fragments of imported marble to go with the one collected yesterday.

Tomorrow’s focus will be finishing the bulldozing of trench 3, and then cleaning up and recording what we’ve found so far. There are plenty of questions still to answer. Due to the layout of the site we haven’t been able to follow the wall to its eastern end, so we’re presently unsure which part of the building we’re in. Its also interesting that today’s finds are more or less at the depth we’d first expected to find them when we dug in July. We need to try to establish why the stratigraphy dips down to the west so suddenly, in the few short metres between trenches 3 and 1.

But for now there’s the satisfaction of persistence paying off. All the more so as today several volunteers and members of staff have confided their belief that the building was 150 metres away, and I was looking in completely the wrong place! This story stems, I think, from a number of retellings of a former employee’s story of a leaky water supply “fed by the old bath house”. Oral traditions are often helpful but not, I think, this time. The historic maps have not proven precise in terms of detail, but it seems that they have successfully brought us to the right general area.

Unless, of course, this isn’t actually the Bath House, but some entirely unknown, unrecorded building….. and I’d rather not think about that, at least tonight!