This excavation was carried out in 1999 on the site now occupied by this block of flats designed by Johnson, Blight and Dees for the South Shropshire Housing Association. It is in Harrison Street on the St Owen’s Street end of Bath Street in Hereford. 

The area was first developed in the late 11^th or early 12^th century by the Normans. When the new city defences were built it was left just outside Hereford’s St Owen’s gate. As such, it was vulnerable in times of trouble. history

The whole suburb here was levelled in the Civil War when St Owen’s church, also just outside the gate, was destroyed.

St Owen’s Gate

This view (courtesy of Ron Shoesmith) shows St Owen’s Gate in the later 18th century when it was ruinous.

It was pulled down shortly afterwards.  The pub on the right was The Lamb, now The Barrels.  The city ditch is just in front of it.

The Linden Villas medieval street

This is the surface of a medieval street.

This street seems to have been abandoned after the new defences were built in the 12th century and it was incorporated into the property which later became the Sun Inn. 

The Sun is now Archways Health Club.

The Linden Villas cesspits

This large pitcher was found at the bottom of one of two deep cesspits.

This cesspit, which dated from the 12th century, was originally within a property (a ‘burgage plot’) which was laid out after the Norman Conquest. It probably served several houses. Material in the pit derived from human faeces and included fruit stones and crushed fish bones together with evidence of intestinal worms. This pitcher had been repaired and was used as a chamber pot. It may have been dropped while being emptied. It was judiciously left where it fell.

Linden Villas: post-medieval sanitation

This drain was one of many that were constructed under Hereford in the 18th and 19th centuries.  These were for surface water and slops only – not for sewage, although the less scrupulous did use them for that purpose.

These drains discharged either into the Wye or the old city ditch.

There were no water mains or sewers in Hereford until the 1850s. Until that time all drinking and cooking water came from wells.

The wells, of course, were in the same gardens as the cess-pits.

A wheelwright’s iron disk found at the Linden Villas site

Description of wheelwright’s toolkit at Penpound in the Herefordshire village of Dorstone belonging to the then Wheelwright, Ephraim Pikes – ‘there was also a wheel plate, a six foot diameter, two inch thick, iron disk upon which wheels were fixed to be banded.  Albert Perry, who carried on the wheelwright business at Penpound until 1950, tells how the iron band for a wheel was heated red hot in a bonfire on the side of Mill Lane.  When hot and expanded, the band was driven on to the wooden wheel and then quickly dowsed with water, from the handy millstream, and in cooling, contracted to bind the wheel together.

George Davies's smithy

In the 1891 Kelly’s directory the property, number 10 Portfields, was partly in the occupancy of Michael Williams, a blacksmith. The occupant of Linden Villa itself, also number 10, was listed as Wilkins, Mrs Rose Hannah – apartments. The 1904 directory for 10 Portfields lists 'Williams, Mrs Mary, blacksmith', with James Francis at Linden Villa.

In 1906 the site was bought at auction by George Davies, who used the brick outbuilding at the southern end of the site as a smithy and farrier’s yard. Mr. Davies had previously occupied a smithy opposite the site, which is marked on the 1886 OS 50ins map. Notice to quit Linden Villa was served on the then tenant by George Davies in 1909. The Electoral Register for autumn 1918 lists George and Ethel Davies at Linden Villa.

Linden Villa in the 1960s

Reporting

This site will be published in a volume of Archenfield Archaeology’s Hereford City excavations to be published by Logaston Press

A note on this project appears in the 1999 volume of the transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club

unpublished interim report – Excavations at 16-18 Harrison Street, Hereford: an Interim Statement - Huw Sherlock and P J Pikes, 1999.  A copy of this report is held in the reference section of Hereford City Library