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On
the ground floor inside the western room attached to the western
gable a series of wooden ‘L’ shaped supports survive.
These were probably used to store saddles or other items of
tack. The eastern gable end of the building has a door at
first floor level was reached by a flight of external wooden
steps. The floor of the first floor room had recently been
replaced with new timbers and a hardboard floor.
The brick floor of the former stable was removed by hand.
The bricks were hand made, had no frog and were 220 millimetres
x 110 millimetres by 70 millimetres. The bricks were laid
onto a lime mortar base which was 100 – 150 millimetres
deep. A shallow gully ran north south across the width of
the floor. Once the brick floor had been removed the
underlying ground surface was examined for archaeological
structures or deposits. A layer of mid brown silty clay with
sand, 100 millimetres thick, lay over a deposit of mid red
clay. A brick lined drain running north east –
south west across the floor corresponding with the position
of the gully visible in the brick floor above. This
consisted of two rows of bricks (the same type
as the floor was made from) laid on edge approximately 350
millimetres apart. Two pieces of roughly hewn tree trunk
had been buried to a depth of between 1 metre to 1.5 metres
in the floor, apparently acting as supports for wooden partitions
dividing the stable into separate stalls. The base of
both these supports was very waterlogged. The position of
the wooden supports corresponded with holes in the rear wall
of the stable indicating where the partitions were fixed to
the wall. |
