Waterloo Road, Old Market, Bristol
If you live locally you may have seen a report about this excavation in the Bristol Evening Post! A journalist and photographer visited us on site soon after we started and we were optimistic about finding remains from the backyards of the Globe Inn, a coaching inn built soon after the Civil War beside the main road to and from London (now West Street).
Unfortunately our optimism was a little misplaced. All we found from the Globe was a deposit of dark brown loam which would have been the topsoil in the inn’s garden, and a late medieval wall which was probably the southern boundary of the yard.
The yard of the Globe, along with the neighbouring property to the east, had contained several outbuildings built during the nineteenth century. Most of these were used as animal pens for the slaughterhouses which operated here at that time.
The site team hard at work (l-r) Faith Cairns, Mandy Summerfield, Chris Reese, Cath Ambrey and Nathan Chinchen
We did find a small quantity of medieval pottery, most of which came from the subsoil layer below the garden topsoil. It suggests that there was gardening or farming in the area during the Middle Ages – small pieces of pottery are often found in these conditions as they would have been swept up with the rubbish used to manure the fields. It’s hard to imagine the area with crops growing on it!
Work in progress in area 2 Chris digging a sondage (left), and the late medieval yard wall (right)
Tags: bristol, medieval, post-medieval
- Categories
- Events
Excavations
Finds
Survey
Partners & Relations
BaRAS is registered as an organisation with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists
All material © copyright BaRAS 2004 – 2016