Digital Archive from an Open Area Excavation at The Pippin, Calne 2021
Worcestershire Archaeology, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5284/1116196. How to cite using this DOI
Data copyright © Worcestershire Archaeology unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 5708
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1116196
- How to cite using this DOI
Introduction
This collection comprises images, spreadsheets, GIS data and a matrix from an excavation and a watching brief at a plot of land (NGR ST 99792 71108) between the High Street and The Pippin in Calne. Work was carried out by Worcestershire Archaeology between October and December 2021 and was commissioned by Orion Heritage, on behalf of Churchill Retirement Living who had obtained permission for the development of the site into a residential home. Excavation of the site was required by Wiltshire Council as a condition of the planning permission.
The site lies to close to the historic core of Calne which is focussed on the area around the church and River Marden, and, prior to development, it comprised three broadly east-west narrow plots: waste ground, a hardware shop and car parks to the rear of the former Barclays Bank, fronting the High Street. An archaeological evaluation of the site, in 2016, had established that archaeological remains survived within the site, and that these had the potential to contribute important information about the development of the town.
The site was stripped of overburden and of several thick layers of soil, prior to, and during the excavation, using a mechanical excavator. Stratigraphically the earliest features comprised a ditch and two parallel gullies which were orientated at a different angle to the later burgage plots. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that these features were likely to be either late Saxon, or very early medieval, in origin.
Following the imposition of long (medieval) burgage plots, these plots eventually became subdivided to front and rear. To the rear (ie east), there were the well-preserved remains of a lime kiln, including substantial walls and a stoke-hole. Large irregular cuts in its vicinity are interpreted as quarry pits, excavated to recover the lime-rich bed rock to burn in the kiln. The product of such a kiln would have been in demand, especially at a time when new building was happening on the High Street. After a period of possible later medieval decline, several new stone walls divided the plots from north to south in the post-medieval period, which defined their northern and southern edges. Bonded with the walls was a substantial two-room stone-built, probably domestic/workshop, building with a fireplace at one end. The latter was associated with two stone-lined cisterns, one of which was fed from a stone lined gully running from higher ground.
Thereafter, Victorian and 20th-century garden features were established, before this area finally became waste ground.
