The Trench: An exercise in back garden archaeology.

Is this the World’s narrowest evaluation trench? No. Its a cut I made across our garden for ducting to carry electricity to a new garage. But every time I dig holes in our garden, which has been many times over the last 15 years, I have learned a little more about the history of our house. I just can’t help doing a watching brief on myself.

Background

The main part of our house (HER PRN 24289) was built in 1861 as the manse of the Bryn Chapel (HER PRN 16724; NPRN 6456), itself built in 1856 . The house is in the typical vernacular style for a double fronted farmhouse, constructed with traditional stonefaced, rubble fill walls, using the local pennant sandstone (with flues, door and window openings of brick). The walls are around 60-80cm thick. The building has been progressively extended and altered. A pantry was added at the back of the kitchen c.a.1885. This involved turning the window opening into a door and relaying the kitchen floor. In 1897 a two storey, two room extension was added to the south-east end of the house, with doorways punched through the existing end wall. This extension was built for the Rev. John Evans, universally known as Evans y Bryn, a formidable character who had 6 children. The ground floor room was a study with, originally, a separate door to the front, presumably so that visitors could see the Minister without disturbing the household.

Front and rear porches were added later, possibly in the 1920s. The back porch overlies the paving of the back yard. When mains drainage arrived in the village (1920s?), the north-east first floor room was subdivided into a bathroom and toilet, and an outside toilet built to the rear of the pantry. Previously the house was served by an earth closet or “Ty Bach” in the east corner of the garden (shown on early OS maps).

The local bedrock is, as noted above, pennant sandstone, which is interleaved with coal measures. The nearest seam is about 50-100m south of the house. However, the sandstone is overlain with an orange-yellow sandy clay (I don’t have a Munsell chart) to a depth of >1m, with inclusions of large rounded pebbles up to c.a. 15 cm in diameter. I assume that this is a periglacial deposit; the whole area was glaciated during the Würm episode, with a terminal moraine running north to south across the nearby Lougher estuary (Bowen 1970). This deposit seems largely impermeable to water (unlike the bedrock), and until the 1920s there was a spring on the opposite side of the road, which served as the village water supply and fed a stream running south towards the estuary. Hence the original name of our house; Brynffynnon.

The trench

The trench was dug roughly north-east to south west across the garden, to a depth of c.a. 40-50cm, with a deviation to the east at the top end, towards the location of our proposed garage. I dug the trench on the line of our main garden path, formed of large (and often very heavy e.g. >75kg) slabs of sandstone. As I have found previously, the clay-sand subsoil is generally at a depth of about 30cm below the dark garden soil. The trench was extended into the back porch to the house wall adjacent to the back door. A length in total of c.a. 17-20m.

Features

Two interesting features were found. Where the original steps led down from the terraced garden, a large faced slab of sandstone was found under the lower step, aligned with the north-east end of the terraced wall. It did not seem to be a component of the steps that I removed. I believe that, originally, the terracing was a straight line across the back of the house, to accommodate it on the sloping ground of the plot, a cryptic feature on the 1^st edition OS map may represent this terrace. It then seems that part of the terracing was diverted northwards to accommodate the pantry extension, and ultimately the outside toilet (which I have demolished) was cut into this terrace. The large stone may well be a remnant of the original terracing.

This probability is underlined by the second feature; a narrow cut into the subsoil (c.a. 25 cm wide) filled with clean angular fragments of sandstone. The trench bisected this cut at right angles and I identified this feature as a soakaway, which I had previously encountered running parallel to the rear of the house, when lowering an adjacent area of the back yard. Originally, then, this soakaway continued north westward, presumably following the original terrace line. The presence of the angular stone fragments suggests to me that the soakaway may well have been dug at the time the main house was constructed, and filled with left over fragments from the house construction.

A previous excavation at the front of the house (to remove a tree stump) revealed a large deposit of angular stone fragments (it made removing the stump a bugger, as the roots had incorporated some of these fragments). I believe this deposit to be detritus from the original construction of the house, of which the soakaway fill may well be a sub-deposit.

The Finds

Most of the finds came from the upper end of the trench away from the house. These consisted of; i)several small glass bottles, possibly medicine bottles; ii)three sawn fragments of cow femur; iii)a GPO potlid insulator manufactured in 1950. At the lower end of the trench, just above the large faced stone mentioned above, one fragment of blue glazed tile.

The garden path had been edged with an assortment of items, including a number of black and red tiles c.a. 20 cm square and 3cm thick. These are identical to those extant in the utility room opposite the kitchen, and I surmise that they may well have been salvaged when the kitchen floor was relayed at the end of the 19^th century.

Interpretation

The bulk of the finds are consistent with waste dumping. The end of the garden is marked by a decayed clawdd – a stone faced bank topped with a hedge, which is probably medieval or early post-medieval in origin. The OS 1^st edition suggests that this may have been the northern boundary of a single, linear field, presumably purchased by the Chapel and later subdivided between the Manse and the churchyard. Along this bank I have previously found many bottles of various kinds, and assume that before refuse collections began, domestic waste from the house was dumped at the end of the garden. The items found were probably redeposited away from the clawdd when the area was levelled and paved for a shed/garage (?) in the 1960s or 70s when the garden was extensively relandscaped. The origin of the GPO insulator, used on telephone lines, is obscure, since all the telephone polls etc. are in the street at the front of the house. The blue ceramic tile is also a mystery since it doesn’t match any of the original tiles that are still extant in the house.

Conclusion

Back garden archaeology is worth it, even if I didn’t find a fragment of the true cross. Although we have found bones buried under the floor before now…

Sources

Bowen, D.Q., 1970. South-east and central South Wales. In: Lewis, C.A. (Ed.), The glaciations of Wales and adjoining regions. Longman, London, pp. 197– 228.

The Rev. Dewi Evans – retired minister of the Bryn Chapel, and other elderly neighbours.