| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| NEWS |
Hundreds of listed buildings across England are in danger of irreparable decay, in spite of the announcement by English Heritage in May of £5 million in new grants for urgent repairs to Grade I and II* buildings.
Some 94 per cent of England's listed buildings are Grade II, and of these only buildings in conservation areas are eligible for English Heritage repair grants. The rest have to rely on the typically small sums available from district councils. Several hundred Grade II buildings are in peril with no public funds to grant-aid necessary repairs.
Kathryn Baird of North Shropshire District Council said: `English Heritage are saying they have solved everyone's problems, but they are doing nothing for areas like ours with large numbers of Grade II buildings at risk outside conservation areas.'
North Shropshire's annual budget for repair grants is £22,000, to cover 900 listed buildings, 37 per cent of which are at risk (as defined by a standard formula). Over two-thirds of these buildings at risk lie outside conservation areas and must rely for grants on district funds. `Last year, our entire budget was spent on weather-proofing just one 16th century barn,' Ms Baird said.
Grade II buildings at risk in the district include Dairy Farmhouse at Sutton, a 16th century timber-framed farmhouse `marooned and disintegrating' in the middle of a farmyard; and Ash House at Ash Parva, a grand 18th century farmhouse owned by a down-at-heel family living in a caravan at the back of the house.
Other rural areas are equally hard-pressed. Noel Knight, Conservation Officer in Herefordshire, said that his authority had a budget of £40,000 to cover repair grants for 6,500 listed buildings. Examples of Grade II buildings at risk, and ineligible for national grants, include Pentre Coed and Little Pentre Coed in Brilley, a cruckframed and a timber-framed cottage with remnants of stone roof tiles, both in `a very poor' state of repair.
`This is a rural area, and with the present state of agriculture a lot of farmers do not have spare pennies to deal with these splendid buildings,' he said.
David Edleston, Conservation Officer in South Norfolk, described a similar situation. His budget of £40,000 had to cover 3,500 listed buildings, of which 49 are known to be at risk. Of these, 46 are listed Grade II.
Mr Edleston added that his council offered a maximum grant of £3,000 for repairs to any one building at risk - hardly enough to cover even superficial weather-proofing.
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The oldest metalled road yet found in Britain has been excavated at Yarnton near Oxford. Previously, the oldest metalled roads in Britain were thought to be Roman, but the limestone-surfaced road at Yarnton is thought to date from the Bronze Age.
The road formed a causeway, or ford, some 35m long and 5m across, across a channel in the Thames floodplain, wide enough to allow two small carts to pass. The limestone pieces were carefully laid with small quartzite pebbles to form a fairly smooth road surface. Timber posts running along both sides, together with fallen horizontal pieces, suggest a collapsed hand-rail. The road linked two areas in which Bronze Age settlements, as well as a large Neolithic building, have been found over recent years (see BA, November 1996).
According to the excavator, Gill Hey of the Oxford Archaeological Unit, the nearest source of limestone is some five miles away, suggesting a major investment of effort. `It's a lot of cartloads of stone to bring that distance on poor roads,' she said.
The Yarnton road has provisionally been dated by stratigraphy. It underlies a sand and gravel causeway similar to others found on the site, which are thought to date from the late Bronze Age or Iron Age, which in turn underlies an organic layer beneath deposits of Roman date. According to Ms Hey, the causeway may even be Neolithic. Tree-ring dating will eventually be possible from the wooden rail.
The road has come to light, soon after the discovery, also last month, of a Bronze Age log-boat still containing part of its cargo of quarried sandstone in the Trent Valley, at Shardlow near Derby. The two finds suggest that quarrying for building material may have been more widespread in the Bronze Age than has been thought.
Traces of the 12th century royal palace of Beaumont, birthplace of both Richard I and King John, may have been found in Oxford. The remains lie, ironically, in the grounds of Oxford's Institute of Archaeology, and came to light in advance of work to build the Ashmolean Museum's new archaeology library.
The foundation trench of a massive, buttressed medieval stone wall, running some 40m before turning a right angle, were found on the site - known to have been the location of the palace. Medieval stained glass and glazed floor tiles indicate a building of high status. The palace was replaced by a Carmelite Friary in the 14th century. The building may be the remains of the church, but the excavator, David Wilkinson of the Oxford Archaeological Unit, believes it was more likely part of the royal hall.
The medieval wall was built across the ditch of a Bronze Age barrow, raising the intriguing possibility that Henry II damaged a prehistoric monument in order to build his new palace.
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New evidence for the opulent diet of some medieval monks - even the supposedly ascetic Cistercians - has come to light at two religious houses in London.
The cemeteries at the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Stratford Langthorne in East London, founded in 1135, and at Merton Priory in South London, both contained a high number of skeletons with a bone condition known as DISH, thought to be caused by a rich diet and associated today with obese men. DISH, or diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, is a condition in which the vertebrae of the spine fuse together and can resemble dripping wax.
Skeletons from Stratford showed little evidence of dietary deficiency. Lack of iron, for example, is seen as pitting in the skull, and of vitamin D as osteomalacia - two conditions commonly found in lay cemeteries but virtually absent here, suggesting a relaxation of the strict Cistercian dietary rules. The cemeteries were used for both lay and monastic burials, but the high numbers of adult males suggest the majority may have been monks.
The two projects, conducted by the Museum of London Archaeology Service (and its predecessors) and now approaching publication, also shed light on the buildings themselves. A timber abbey at Stratford is thought to have been rebuilt in stone in the late 12th/early 13th centuries. The size of the excavated eastern arm of the church suggests it was comparable in scale to Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, founded three years earlier.
Excavations at Merton centred on the infirmary which saw a major rebuilding programme in the mid-13th century. The priory was visited frequently by Henry III in the 1240s, 1250s, and early 1270s, and it is thought that the rebuilding may have been instigated by him.
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A hoard of late Iron Age and Roman coins and other items found by a metal detectorist on the Isle of Wight may suggest that the island was politically independent of tribes on the mainland for a period shortly before the Roman invasion.
Some of the Iron Age coins are of a previously unknown type, and are thought to have been minted on the island. According to David Tomalin, the Isle of Wight county archaeologist, an eagle on the back of the coins hints at trade with the Romans in Gaul, while the initials CRAB may refer to an independent chieftain on the island, which the Romans called Vectis. The thin silver coins suggest only modest economic prosperity. The hoard contained 557 coins and 131 other items including 33 brooches embellished with enamel depicting warriors' shields, a hare, a sandal, leaping dogs and other motifs.
Excavations at Shapwick in Somerset directed by Prof Mick Aston of Bristol University and Channel 4's Time Team will be reported live on the internet until 21 July, with photo-graphs and text updated by the excavators daily (address: http://www.wkac.ac.uk/shapwick/).
THE VARIED fortunes of London Bridge through the Roman and medieval periods have been documented by the Museum of London Archaeology Service in a project approaching publication.
The main phase of the Roman bridge has now been located slightly downstream of the medieval bridge, based on evidence such as Roman coin hoards in the river and the arrangement of roads on either bank. The bridge is thought to have had stone piers, a timber superstructure, and perhaps a drawbridge, as much of the Roman harbour lay upstream.
The earliest medieval timber bridge abutments were found on the south bank and date from c 987-1032. A number of timber bridges appear to have been washed away by floods before the first stone bridge was built c 1176-1209. This was more durable but twice partly collapsed, in 1281-2 when five arches fell, and in 1437 when two arches collapsed, resulting in a rebuilding programme lasting half a century.
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1998