The excavation and planning teams made a major breakthrough last weekend in Trench 4, where they found 3 walls belonging to a structure shown on the first Ordnance Survey Map of the area in 1850. Two of the walls had been ‘robbed’ of their stone but the foundations of the third wall were still there. They form the end wall of a large building 45 meters long and sections of it can be seen now in three of our trenches.
Image of old roadside water pump Mytton Shropshire More importantly, the planning team have been able to take measurements of this end wall and use them to scale up and accurately plot the structure on the 1850 and 1892 maps which reflect the current site layout. This is great news because we can now locate all three buildings we are searching for as well as the original curving line of Fryston Common Lane. All we have to do now is to work out how to exploit this information to the maximum.
That is the good news; the bad news is that it does challenge some of the ideas and conclusions we made after previous excavations. However, we have to accept that this is the nature of archaeology. New things are discovered almost every time a volunteer puts a mattock, shovel or trowel into the ground. In particular, some of the conclusions we made in 2013 about what we had discovered in Trench 3 have proved incorrect BUT the new discoveries we are making in that trench are very exciting. More about that later.
Right now we are searching for water, specifically a water pump shown on the 1850 Map next to one of the buildings. Why is that important?
The pump was the water supply for whatever was going on when the building was demolished and it will probably sit over a well and as we all know people threw or dropped things into a well either purposely or by accident.
Right now our wish is to find the well!!
That is the good news; the bad news is that it does challenge some of the ideas and conclusions we made after previous excavations. However, we have to accept that this is the nature of archaeology. New things are discovered almost every time a volunteer puts a mattock, shovel or trowel into the ground. In particular, some of the conclusions we made in 2013 about what we had discovered in Trench 3 have proved incorrect BUT the new discoveries we are making in that trench are very exciting. More about that later.
Right now we are searching for water, specifically a water pump shown on the 1850 Map next to one of the buildings. Why is that important?
The pump was the water supply for whatever was going on when the building was demolished and it will probably sit over a well and as we all know people threw or dropped things into a well either purposely or by accident.
Right now our wish is to find the well!!
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