This was the area where we expected to get lots of finds but little else. As far as we knew, it consisted partly of material that had been bulldozed off the top of the site before excavating the Roman deposits and partly of the remains of those deposits themselves. In places, this was true. Part of the material removed from Trench VI was 1960s backfill; all the material from Trench VII was backfill; but only the top 0.6 m of Trench VIII and the top 0.4 m of Trench IX consisted of this material. In other words, there was in situ archaeology that had never been touched in at least three of the trenches (and possibly also in Trench VII: see below).
This trench was located over the edge of one of the outer walls, where the concrete markers in the modern grass bank indicated that there ought to be a buttress. On the published plan, this buttress is shown as surviving in situ, so we hoped to find traces of it. Furthermore, the plan of the surviving masonry shows it as suspiciously square: it looks as if the plan shows what was found in a small trench, only a couple of metres square. |
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Our trench confirmed this suspicion: we found the western edge of the 1967 trench immediately below the topsoil (see the photograph, right). However, we had been expecting the opposite (in other words, eastern) edge of the earlier trench. We had used the concrete markers laid out in the early 1970s by the Ministry of Works to locate our trench, but it looks as if the markers are about a metre off in an anti-clockwise direction here.
It proved impossible to dig down to the bottom of the 1967 trench, as it had been backfilled with large concrete blocks, some of which had originally been associated with drain (fragments of which we also found). Nevertheless, we found a stretch of stone walling in the southeast corner of our trench (visible in the photograph below), which sloped slightly into the trench from top to bottom.
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This is not the amphitheatre wall! For a start, it was far too high up (immediately below the modern topsoil) and at completely the wrong angle While I’m prepared to accept that the position of the concrete markers may be slightly out, they are unlikely to run in the wrong direction. Also, the fact that it sloped into the trench from top to bottom makes it look much more like the stone lining of a cess pit. Pits of this sort are found throughout Chester and date from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The 1960s excavations found numerous examples across the entire site, although this one does not seem to have been recorded. Because we were restricted to excavating only the recent deposits, we were not able to date it directly from the stratigraphic sequence. If it is a cess pit, then it must have been about two metres across at the top: large, but not impossibly so. |
The 1967 trench had been cut through a very rubbly deposit, containing bricks and fragments of ceramic drain pipe. This looked like demolition débris, probably deriving from the terraced cottages that stood here. They seem to have been demolished either in the 1930s or 1950s, something that needs to be checked on maps.