Main excavation, Day 5
MN 18th August 2013
The last, frenetic, day on site went really well. After a little morning rain, the sun came out and with it even more visitors than on previous days. Numbers were no doubt boosted by the very good press coverage we’ve been getting, and a growing band of loyal supporters who’ve been coming back to check on our progress, day after day.
Today’s agenda was pretty full with all the work to complete the site recording before backfilling on Monday. Then, this being the sort of site that’s been throughout the project, the archaeology had a few more surprise cards to play. It causes archaeologists a wry smile that so many excavations make their most interesting discoveries in their last few hours – it almost makes you wonder why we bother with the earlier days of the dig: we should just skip to the last day!
Tasks to complete in trench 3 included completing excavation of the large pit started yesterday, and carefully cleaning the south-eastern part of the trench, which has had relatively little attention so far. With the intervention of the morning rain this wasn’t completed until towards lunchtime when, under Richard and Nicky’s skilful trowelling, some significant, if ephemeral, new features emerged. These included a new stone-capped drain, set perpendicular to the back wall, and what appeared to be the bedding for a narrow brick wall, perpendicular to the new drain.
Cleaning these features and the rest of the trench, ready for recording, took much of the rest of the afternoon, and we three then worked on into the early evening. It wasn’t planned (and I felt a bit guilty about taking yet another slice of Nicky and Richard’s weekends) but it was a delightful way to draw the project to a close. Studley is wonderful at any time of day, any time of year, but it’s even more so than ever on a sunny summer evening as peace descends on it. What a special place to have the opportunity to dig.
One last task involved excavating some small investigative slots to explore some of the features a little further (a task that, relieved of duties talking to visitors, I actually got to take part in!). These confirmed that a secondary (damp-proofing?) drain ran along the full length of the inside of the remains of the north wall, though it didn’t turn south to join up with the newly discovered drain further to the south. That just came to a blind end part way across the site, its purpose unexplained. The brick wall bedding proved to be just that – a layer of bedding sad less than half a centimetre thick. We were very lucky to spot it, a testament to Richard’s troweling skills indeed.
So there we are. As on any archaeological project, the majority of the discoveries that the work will uncover will e emerge from the post-excavation work, the business of analysing what we found and what it means. So there’s plenty more excitement to come in the weeks ahead, which we’ll report here in due course. But it is sad to come to the end of this excavation, especially having anticipated it for over 20 years.
Tuesday 20 August 2013
Sunday 18 August 2013
SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House - This site doesn’t give up its secrets easily.
MN 17th August 2013
It’s all right – we haven’t lost the building or anything ghastly like that - but even on the penultimate day of the field project, the site’s archaeology is refusing to sit still and play nicely.
Our main missions today were to complete the bulldozing of trench 3, continue with the excavation of the features revealed within it, and start cleaning up ready for recording.
First off, though, it was a good time to get out the tape measure and confer with Eli Hargrove’s 1798 description of the building. This says that the changing room (presumably mirrored by the room with the plunge pool) measured 10 feet wide by 13 long. In yesterday’s Blogs I speculated that the south façade of the building might lie under the modern path; in fact, 13 feet from the rear wall of the building just lies north of the path. However, any evidence of the north wall’s presence is yet to show itself, while it’s not impossible that Hargrove might be as inaccurate as the maps have proved to be. Meanwhile, the ten foot room width should be easily accommodated within trench 3 - even though the east and west walls remains as evasive as the southern one.
The bulldozing and excavation work answered some questions, but asked more. First off we explored the masonry found near the second railing base which – with the eye of faith – looked a bit like a step. In fact, it proved not be, though still of some interest. It was clearly laid within a sequence of layers peppered with demolition rubble, and therefore post-dating the building’s destruction. The masonry was, though, carefully put in place. When lifted the main block proved to be a door step, a significant piece of stonework, and was laid on a row of other blocks of stone, including our fifth and largest fragment of marble. Altogether, this group of stones represents the overwhelming majority of the dressed stone we’ve seen on the site. The workmen obviously had some purpose in mind when they made this ad hoc structure – but what that was remains a mystery.
A bigger mystery then emerged as we realised that a larger part of the trench surface, along most of its western side, was a very large pit. This cut from the southern side of the wall foundation to the southern edge of the trench. The good news is that this explains why we saw deeper stratigraphy in the nearby trench 1, in July. The not so good news is that it’s function is very hard to explain in terms of what we think we know about the bathing house. It’s almost certainly much bigger in plan than the plunge pool, while – at about 2 feet - not nearly deep enough to be related to it.
Justin’s rather radical suggestion is that it might represent the site of the whole building, demolished and then its foundations – and the substrate between the foundations – dug out, lock, stock and barrel. If that’s the case then the surviving sections of the wall east of the pit would need to be from a retaining wall running in that direction from the building’s north-east corner, perhaps sheltering some form of yard.
I’m not entirely convinced by this. There’s what seems to be a lime mortar surface south of the wall, not entirely suitable for an outdoor yard. Moreover both the bricks of the wall foot and an additional brick structure to the south have been laid to create voids within the basal brickwork. The most likely purpose behind this would be to provide additional drainage to keep the downslope area to the south dry – a awful lot of trouble to go to for an external yard. It’s much more the sort of arrangement one would expect to damp-proof a building.
On the other hand the absence of any north-south walling at this stage is perplexing. For my money, I still think it likely that we’re seeing the floor of the east wing, but we may have lost the west wall of the wing to the post-demolition excavation of the large pit. Why the pit was dug remains a mystery, and one we’re not likely to solve in the course of the present excavation.
But there’s another day to go and who knows what we’ll find on this least predictable of archaeological projects.
Saturday 17 August 2013
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!
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!
Friday 16 August 2013
SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House Why did I call this the search for the Lost Bathing House? Main excavation, Day 2
MN 15th August 2013
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!
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!
Thursday 15 August 2013
SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House Anticipation or trepidation? Main excavation, Day 1
MN 14th August 2013
Lunchtime:
Exciting and intriguing though they undoubtedly were, the results of July’s excavation couldn’t help undermining our confidence that we knew what to expect from this site. In practical terms, that’s made it a little harder to decide how exactly to take the investigation forward – and that in turn lead to a good long head scratching session on site with the plans this morning!
In the end we decided not to follow the angled drain seen in July (yet), as that would involve a lot of earth moving and then backfilling. We’ll just assume that it might connect with the plunge pool. That in turn suggests that the pool was located in the west wing of the bathing house. We hope to find that by excavating a new trench 4m to the west of the last one, measuring 3m by 4m (with the option to expand it). Going back to transcriptions of the 1838 map (still the best lead we have), that should be over the southern end of the west range. We hope to get to grips with the east wing by means of a separate trench to be opened up later in the week.
It’s now lunchtime, and all one can say in reply to the often asked “What have you found yet?” is half a brick. Fortunately that happens to be stuck in the section (the side of the trench), clearly showing that what in other regards looks awfully like natural subsoil really is archaeological! The equivalent early digging in July really was unsettling, producing nothing man-made for the first couple of hours. Provided that the archaeology behaves itself and does what it did in July we should get down to the more interesting archaeological stuff just beneath the Victorian landscaping layer after lunch.
Close of play
Well we did find some more interesting archaeology, but we’re not down to the Georgian yet. At about 2:40pm we found a masonry structure that proved to be a stone capped drain. There’s no clear sign of an insertion cut for this feature, which suggests that it was built as a freestanding feature during/as the landscaping layers were being laid down. You’d need a firm base for that – perhaps the floor of a bathing house? We’ll explore that tomorrow.
At the end of day three, the Bathing House remains elusive, but we are learning more. Perhaps the most important finding of the day is the proof that the deep deposits we found in July are not isolated, sitting – for example – in a hole left behind by removing the plunge pool. They reiterate that this whole area was hugely remodelled after the building was demolished – and important chapter in Studley Royal’s history that we knew nothing of before.
Its also interesting that, as yet, we’re not finding anywhere near as much building rubble as in July. This might be because the landscaping is even deeper here – a puzzle for the morrow.
Lunchtime:
Exciting and intriguing though they undoubtedly were, the results of July’s excavation couldn’t help undermining our confidence that we knew what to expect from this site. In practical terms, that’s made it a little harder to decide how exactly to take the investigation forward – and that in turn lead to a good long head scratching session on site with the plans this morning!
In the end we decided not to follow the angled drain seen in July (yet), as that would involve a lot of earth moving and then backfilling. We’ll just assume that it might connect with the plunge pool. That in turn suggests that the pool was located in the west wing of the bathing house. We hope to find that by excavating a new trench 4m to the west of the last one, measuring 3m by 4m (with the option to expand it). Going back to transcriptions of the 1838 map (still the best lead we have), that should be over the southern end of the west range. We hope to get to grips with the east wing by means of a separate trench to be opened up later in the week.
It’s now lunchtime, and all one can say in reply to the often asked “What have you found yet?” is half a brick. Fortunately that happens to be stuck in the section (the side of the trench), clearly showing that what in other regards looks awfully like natural subsoil really is archaeological! The equivalent early digging in July really was unsettling, producing nothing man-made for the first couple of hours. Provided that the archaeology behaves itself and does what it did in July we should get down to the more interesting archaeological stuff just beneath the Victorian landscaping layer after lunch.
Close of play
Well we did find some more interesting archaeology, but we’re not down to the Georgian yet. At about 2:40pm we found a masonry structure that proved to be a stone capped drain. There’s no clear sign of an insertion cut for this feature, which suggests that it was built as a freestanding feature during/as the landscaping layers were being laid down. You’d need a firm base for that – perhaps the floor of a bathing house? We’ll explore that tomorrow.
At the end of day three, the Bathing House remains elusive, but we are learning more. Perhaps the most important finding of the day is the proof that the deep deposits we found in July are not isolated, sitting – for example – in a hole left behind by removing the plunge pool. They reiterate that this whole area was hugely remodelled after the building was demolished – and important chapter in Studley Royal’s history that we knew nothing of before.
Its also interesting that, as yet, we’re not finding anywhere near as much building rubble as in July. This might be because the landscaping is even deeper here – a puzzle for the morrow.
Wednesday 24 July 2013
SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House- is the bathing house still lost? Trial trenching Day 2
Mark Newman 21st July 2013
One of the seven hundred plus people who saw the trial excavations over the weekend was called George. He was short, blonde, four years old and full of lots of clear, penetrating, questions. After we had dispensed with “Why do you have a bucket?” and its natural follow up “Why do you have another bucket?” he Paxman-like moved to the killer blow. “Why are you doing this?”
Excellent question and not the easiest to answer simply.
There is the pragmatic answer: we want to improve the drainage here, and want to be sure that we don’t damage any archaeology. But its not the full answer. There’s a big dollop of curiosity to see a building we’ve known about for years but none of us have ever seen, too. And then there’s the bigger picture, learning more about how the gardens at Studley developed, so that we understand them better. George didn’t look entirely (or, to be honest, even slightly) convinced. He could see it was really a first class excuse to play with “boy toys” like the mini-digger, as he eyed it keenly over my shoulder. O.K, I admitted, so there’s probably a bit of that in there too…..
Yesterday did come as something of a shock. Before setting out to dig one tries to understand the “site formation model”. That’s the way in which archaeological remains are likely to have been formed, what they are likely to look like, how deeply they are likely to be buried, and what’s likely to have happened to them after deposition. The map and illustrative depictions of the Bathhouse are all pretty consistent, leading to expectations of remains of the building within 30-40cm of the ground surface next to the present path (and that that path is unchanged from its Georgian form).
The uncertainties we sought to resolve by trial trenching were intended to be two fold. Firstly, it wasn’t clear what sort of masonry remains we’d find. Depending on what the demolition men were told to do, we might find the bases of walls (or even floors) left in situ, or failing that clear foundation trenches cut into the substrate and filled with rubble. What was likely to survive would in part depend on how the lower part of the building was constructed (illustrations show it approached up steps, so the floors would have been above contemporary ground level). Secondly, as there was no clear horizontal platform on the valley side where the building had been sited, we could be certain there would be deposits of landscaping materials put in place to blend its site into the natural slopes behind. We didn’t know how deep these would be – a matter of small interest in terms of the history of the garden, but of much greater interest for planning the August excavations. It’s a tight site, and we need to plan for the size and location of spoil heaps.
Against such a reasonably predictable site formation model, the discovery of deep stratigraphy right across the site came as a considerable surprize. But by close of play on Sunday, a reasonably coherent story had emerged. It was really useful to extend the trench south towards the present path early in the day. The direct physical relationships between the path and the substrates were obscured/destroyed by an early-modern drain (which had undergone several episodes of failure and repair), but there was no sign of natural substrate rising up towards the path. This strongly suggests the rather unexpected conclusion that the path’s height has been raised. If so, then this probably occurred during the landscaping works after demolition of the bathing house.
The post-demolition landscaping layers were certainly present, and in considerable depth. We will need to plan a broad trench in August if we want to dig deeply down through these layers (which we will want to).
But the rest of the deposits we saw will need a lot more thinking about. The amount of building material – including brick, tile, slate, paving stones, floor tile, and decorative wall plaster – present, strongly suggests we are in the right location. By the end of the day on Sunday, Nicky, Justin and I were reasonably open to the possibility that the major deposit of rubble seen in the floor of the trench was perhaps filling a foundation trench at greater depth. On reflection, it was about in the position where we’d predicted the location of masonry when we’d picked the trench location in the first place.
The water-logged, smelly, clays at the same depth remain a bit of a mystery. As speculated yesterday, they might be something to do with a sub lining below the pool, but this isn’t incredibly convincing. That would only really work if all of the deposits we saw were filling a large pit, cut – perhaps - for the pool. We can test that quite easily by further trenching (at 90 degrees to the first trench) in August. On the other hand these soils could have formed under a pond fed by the spring, predating the bath house. If the ground continued to stay wet and smelly during the building’s life, then that might have contributed to its demise. It might even have been the cause for greatly raising the level of the ground surface, which we now seem to have evidence took place.
But it has to be admitted that, for the moment, the lost Bathing house remains lost. We have clear clues to follow up in August. There’s every chance that the main rubble layer in the trench floor is in a foundation, just as we predicted, and that the back of the building lies further north than we trenched. The unpredicted depths of deposits certainly raise the likelihood of extant masonry, if we can get down to the previous ground level. On the other hand the nature of the rubble we’ve seen so far suggests that building materials were carefully gathered for reuse, perhaps encouraging thorough reuse..
That drain at the southern edge of the site provided one last clue. Although it obviously postdated the re-landscaping and included lC19/eC20 building materials, it didn’t just run parallel with the path. In the west section of the trench we could see the drain spurred, with a branch heading off to the north-west away from the path and towards the suspected site of the west wing of the building. It’s hard to see what this could have been intended to drain…. except perhaps the outflow from the former plunge pool?
One of the seven hundred plus people who saw the trial excavations over the weekend was called George. He was short, blonde, four years old and full of lots of clear, penetrating, questions. After we had dispensed with “Why do you have a bucket?” and its natural follow up “Why do you have another bucket?” he Paxman-like moved to the killer blow. “Why are you doing this?”
Excellent question and not the easiest to answer simply.
There is the pragmatic answer: we want to improve the drainage here, and want to be sure that we don’t damage any archaeology. But its not the full answer. There’s a big dollop of curiosity to see a building we’ve known about for years but none of us have ever seen, too. And then there’s the bigger picture, learning more about how the gardens at Studley developed, so that we understand them better. George didn’t look entirely (or, to be honest, even slightly) convinced. He could see it was really a first class excuse to play with “boy toys” like the mini-digger, as he eyed it keenly over my shoulder. O.K, I admitted, so there’s probably a bit of that in there too…..
Yesterday did come as something of a shock. Before setting out to dig one tries to understand the “site formation model”. That’s the way in which archaeological remains are likely to have been formed, what they are likely to look like, how deeply they are likely to be buried, and what’s likely to have happened to them after deposition. The map and illustrative depictions of the Bathhouse are all pretty consistent, leading to expectations of remains of the building within 30-40cm of the ground surface next to the present path (and that that path is unchanged from its Georgian form).
The uncertainties we sought to resolve by trial trenching were intended to be two fold. Firstly, it wasn’t clear what sort of masonry remains we’d find. Depending on what the demolition men were told to do, we might find the bases of walls (or even floors) left in situ, or failing that clear foundation trenches cut into the substrate and filled with rubble. What was likely to survive would in part depend on how the lower part of the building was constructed (illustrations show it approached up steps, so the floors would have been above contemporary ground level). Secondly, as there was no clear horizontal platform on the valley side where the building had been sited, we could be certain there would be deposits of landscaping materials put in place to blend its site into the natural slopes behind. We didn’t know how deep these would be – a matter of small interest in terms of the history of the garden, but of much greater interest for planning the August excavations. It’s a tight site, and we need to plan for the size and location of spoil heaps.
Against such a reasonably predictable site formation model, the discovery of deep stratigraphy right across the site came as a considerable surprize. But by close of play on Sunday, a reasonably coherent story had emerged. It was really useful to extend the trench south towards the present path early in the day. The direct physical relationships between the path and the substrates were obscured/destroyed by an early-modern drain (which had undergone several episodes of failure and repair), but there was no sign of natural substrate rising up towards the path. This strongly suggests the rather unexpected conclusion that the path’s height has been raised. If so, then this probably occurred during the landscaping works after demolition of the bathing house.
The post-demolition landscaping layers were certainly present, and in considerable depth. We will need to plan a broad trench in August if we want to dig deeply down through these layers (which we will want to).
But the rest of the deposits we saw will need a lot more thinking about. The amount of building material – including brick, tile, slate, paving stones, floor tile, and decorative wall plaster – present, strongly suggests we are in the right location. By the end of the day on Sunday, Nicky, Justin and I were reasonably open to the possibility that the major deposit of rubble seen in the floor of the trench was perhaps filling a foundation trench at greater depth. On reflection, it was about in the position where we’d predicted the location of masonry when we’d picked the trench location in the first place.
The water-logged, smelly, clays at the same depth remain a bit of a mystery. As speculated yesterday, they might be something to do with a sub lining below the pool, but this isn’t incredibly convincing. That would only really work if all of the deposits we saw were filling a large pit, cut – perhaps - for the pool. We can test that quite easily by further trenching (at 90 degrees to the first trench) in August. On the other hand these soils could have formed under a pond fed by the spring, predating the bath house. If the ground continued to stay wet and smelly during the building’s life, then that might have contributed to its demise. It might even have been the cause for greatly raising the level of the ground surface, which we now seem to have evidence took place.
But it has to be admitted that, for the moment, the lost Bathing house remains lost. We have clear clues to follow up in August. There’s every chance that the main rubble layer in the trench floor is in a foundation, just as we predicted, and that the back of the building lies further north than we trenched. The unpredicted depths of deposits certainly raise the likelihood of extant masonry, if we can get down to the previous ground level. On the other hand the nature of the rubble we’ve seen so far suggests that building materials were carefully gathered for reuse, perhaps encouraging thorough reuse..
That drain at the southern edge of the site provided one last clue. Although it obviously postdated the re-landscaping and included lC19/eC20 building materials, it didn’t just run parallel with the path. In the west section of the trench we could see the drain spurred, with a branch heading off to the north-west away from the path and towards the suspected site of the west wing of the building. It’s hard to see what this could have been intended to drain…. except perhaps the outflow from the former plunge pool?
SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House- Day one in the sun-are we having fun?
Mark Newman 20th July 2013
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.
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.
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