We thought that this trench, located to the east of the northern entrance to the amphitheatre, would be over the cellar of St John’s House, where some of the earliest excavation had taken place in the spring of 1960. The top half metre or so confirmed this suspicion, then suddenly everything changed.
We hit a wall. Not just any wall, but a huge brick wall, four courses thick. At that point, the character of the deposits changed. From being a uniform orange sandy matrix, the soil became rubbly and full of what was clearly demolition débris, including bits of mortar, some plaster and so on. Demolition of St John’s House took place late in 1960 or early in 1961, before the excavation of the rest of the site, so if we had intact demolition deposits, it meant that any archaeology beneath them would also be intact!
After a quick telephone call to English Heritage (from whom permission to dig had been obtained through a Scheduled Monument Consent application), we got permission to dig into the ‘real’ archaeology. We removed the demolition deposits (there were two of them: the top layer, consisting of what was probably a bulldozed mix of topsoil and demolition rubble, and a lower layer, consisting of more ‘pure’ demolition material, such as plaster and pieces of wood). Beneath these, we found the foundation trenches of the house.
Miraculously – because these things never happen, except in Hollywood – the backfill of the foundation trench produced a coin. It was heavily corroded, but of the right size to be a halfpenny of George I or George II (in other words, between 1714 and 1760). We know that St John’s House was a mid-eighteenth-century building, so this was too good to be true. When the coin is cleaned, it ought to give us a good date for the foundations.
We then set about removing the wall foundations. They were very solid, which is hardly surprising, given the size and imposing façade of the house, and the bottom course held a further surprise. The bottom layer consisted of sandstone blocks, which is quite common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings in Chester. Most of the time, these blocks are only roughly dressed as they were never intended to be seen again. One of the blocks used in this way, though, had a moulding along one edge. St John’s house itself was a fine neo-classical building with all sorts of decorative stonework, including a moulded plinth, a cornice and quoins. However, none of it looked like this. The style is quite clearly classical (or neo-classical), but what was it doing apparently re-used in the foundations? The classical revival was barely under way when St John’s House was built, so it is difficult to explain how a neo-classical piece was incorporated into a new building which was subsequently demolished and scavenged for rubble within so short a time. An expert on neo-classical architecture believes that it ‘debased’ and therefore late, which is impossible unless... |
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Might we be dealing with a Roman cornice (or other decorative moulding)? It is too small to have come from the fortress wall, so could it have come from a nearby building, or the amphitheatre itself? The report has no mention of decorative stone from the amphitheatre, other than re-used in the third-century paving. However, in Hugh Thompson’s notebooks, there is a drawing of a stone identical to this, also from the foundations of St John’s House.
This leaves us with a bit of a puzzle. Are these blocks from the building on the site before St John’s House, a building which was probably built in 1664, if the date-stone found on the site in the 1960s is from that building? If so, how do we explain the classical style? On the other hand, if it belonged to the amphitheatre, why have the only two pieces both come from the foundations of St John’s House? And why do neither of them show signs of weathering? Is it possible that they are indeed Roman, but that they belonged to some internal feature of the amphitheatre, such as a corridor? We need to find more examples to be certain of this.
Excavation then came to an abrupt halt. Once the sandstone slabs had been lifted from the foundation trench, a void appeared. A quick probe revealed that it was potentially half a metre deep and almost two metres in diameter. It was the top of a circular stone-lined feature that had been capped (none too effectively) with a mixture of clay, mortar and sandstone lumps. It had not collapsed previously because of the presence of the substantial foundations, which had neatly bridged the void. I was unwilling to let people work in a confined space with the danger of imminent collapse, so reluctantly, we abandoned this trench.
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But what was the feature? It might have been a well, similar to one found in 1969 and seen again in our Trench IV, but I suspect not. The feature pre-dated St John’s House as it lay beneath its footings. We know that the well in Trench IV was sealed around the year 1700, while another, found under the cellar floor in 1960, was filled in around the middle of the eighteenth century. They are not far apart, and this feature lies in between them. |
In fact, with its clay, mortar and sandstone capping, it looks much more like a sealed cess pit, of which large numbers were found across the site in the 1960s, although the method of excavation meant that none was found with its capping intact.
This trench lies in an area that has not previously been excavated. Looking through the notes from the 1960s excavations in September 2000, I found that there is potentially quite a large area here waiting to be excavated. This could provide a very interesting project for the future!