TEST PITS
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEST PITS IN BINGHAM
List of Test Pits
CB06
12, CHURCH STREET
SUMMARY
- Documentary evidence suggests the possibility that there has been a cottage on this site at least since 1586. The tithe map shows a complex of cottages and outbuildings on the site, but it is not known if they have the same footprint as the earlier buildings.
- Archaeological evidence suggests that after the late 13th C there as a house near here, but there is nothing to suggest any earlier activity. The four medieval sherds are not enough to make any assumptions about the exact date or the nature of the medieval activity. In particular, their date ranges do not give any indication if this was another of the many sites around here where activity stopped during the Black Death.
- A medieval stone wall feature was encountered at 55 cm depth. It is now a ruin and its original size and function are not known. The best estimate is that it was made in the 14th C. It shed some of the top stones, covering a Shelly Ware sherd and fell into disuse in the same century.
- The stone wall was built using red-brown clay for mortar and as a foundation layer, which is a methodology that has been found to apply in this area from the 13th to the 20th centuries.
- The wall was definitely standing during the 16th and 17th centuries when a small assemblage of large pieces of post-medieval pottery were dumped alongside it. The disposition of this dump of sherds presents difficulties in that it is below a 10 cm-thick layer of sandy clay that covers the whole test pit and which contains a sherd of 14th C pottery. This layer is coincident with the lower course of stones in the wall. Either the post-medieval pottery was dumped in a pit dug through the sandy clay or the clay layer was put down in the 16th or 17th C.
- There is little evidence of any activity here after the 17th C. Most of the 18th C pottery was found in the topsoil, which is known to have been imported into the present site, though it may not have come from far away.
- The current house was built in 1897. There is a sharp base to the topsoil at 45 cm marked by a layer of builder’s sand that suggests that there was a late 19th C ground surface beneath the topsoil, which was spread here after building finished.
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