Site Event/Activity record ECH3616 - An Archaeological Excavation at Shotwick Deer Park

Excavation and survey in 1996 of a section of the medieval bank and ditch boundary of the deer park at Shotwick as part of a programme of improvements to the A550 trunk road between Deeside Park and Ledsham Three trenches were excavated across the line of the deer park boundary. In each trench traces of the medieval earth bank were identified, but later recutting of the park ditch, probably for use as a drainage channel, had resulted in the removal of early evidence for the mediaeval boundary ditch. The excavation did indicate that the scale of the park boundary was not great, but with dimensions perhaps in the region of 6m across and 2m deep from top of bank to ditch bottom, the feature, particularly with the addition of a timber fence on top of the bank, would have still offered an impenetrable barrier to the park deer. At the southern end of Woodbank Lane, the results of the excavation suggested that a natural slope may have been adapted to form the park boundary. After the late seventeenth century, when the deer park boundary had fallen out of use, a trackway of cobbles and pebbles was laid along the bottom of the ditch; an early nineteenth century map suggests that this trackway may have extended along the entire length of the park boundary. The remains of another trackway, on a different line and running between parallel ridges and gullies, were also revealed. The finds from these trackways, together with the evidence from early maps, indicate that they probably formed part of the network of tracks in use in this area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.