Site Event/Activity record ECH5071 - Excavations at Grosvenor Park, Chester in 2007 - 2008 (Training)

The Chester Archaeological Service undertook a programme of excavation in Grosvenor Park between 14 May and 6 July 2007. The work was carried out to support a Conservation Management Plan for the park and an application by Chester City Council to the Heritage Lottery Fund initiative ‘Parks for People’. The excavations were also used as a training project for archaeology students from Chester University. Three trenches were excavated on the western side of the park. The principle objective was to locate the remains of a substantial town house known as Cholmondeley’s Mansion, which is clearly illustrated on McGahey’s balloon view of Chester, dated 1852, and which was demolished when the park was laid out in 1867. It is thought that the house occupied the site of earlier medieval buildings attached to the collegiate church of St John (including a chapel dedicated to St Anne and a range of petty canons houses), which had passed to Sir Hugh Cholmondeley after the Dissolution.The chapel of St Anne became the town house of Sir Hugh Cholmondeley, however, it is not clear how much the building was altered by the Cholmondeley family during the latter part of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries. Another objective was to establish what the area was used for during the Roman period. A specific target was a substantial north-south ditch which was found during the building of the Union Street baths in 1899 and more recently during an archaeological evaluation prior to the building of retirement homes on the site of St Augustine’s Convent in 1994. The ditch was recorded in Trench 3; it was 5m wide and more than 2m deep. Roman pottery and animal bone were recovered from the primary silts. Also, a complete brooch dating to between the late-first and mid-second century AD was recovered from the upper fills, implying that the ditch may have become obsolete fairly early in the life of Roman Chester. A parallel but far smaller ditch was detected 5 m to the east of the first, only 3 m wide and 1.1 m deep. The profile of this second ditch was military in character, with what is termed an ‘ankle-breaker’ slot in the base. The upper fill produced a second brooch, this time of second-century date, which again implies the early disappearance of the ditch from the Roman landscape. The two ditches could be contemporary with one another. All three of the excavation trenches produced some evidence of Roman domestic debris dating to the second and third centuries. However, the clearest evidence came from Trench II, where the line of a Roman cobbled street was traced for a length of 10 m. The street was aligned on a roughly east-west axis and its projected route west would have taken it to the eastern entrance of the amphitheatre. The street was about 3 m wide and was built with a central camber which would have allowed rainwater to run off into the drains which marked the sides of the street. Also recorded in Trench II, was part of an earth floor found on the northern side of the street, and to the east of this was a north-south gully which may represent the position of an external timber wall of a building. Beyond the gully was an- other area of cobbling which may indicate a narrow side alley running north off the main street between neighbouring buildings. These features may indicate the presence of ‘strip buildings’ fronting onto the streets. At least four human burials were recorded at the southern end of Trench I. These burials were quite shallow and in fact had narrowly missed being disturbed during construction work associated with Lord Cholmondeley’s house in the late seventeenth century. They lay outside the historical limits of St John’s cemetery and may well have been deliberately buried in unconsecrated ground. Two of these burials were entirely uncovered during the recent work and they were aligned with heads to the west, as one expects in Christian burials. The hands and wrists of one of the skeletons were under the lumbar vertebrae, suggesting that the hands may have been tied behind the back. Furthermore, the alignment of the legs, ankles and feet suggest that the feet were also tied together. This has raised the possibility that this person may have been treated as a criminal prior to death and possibly that this was an area for the burial of the socially marginalised. Also in Trench I, the western end of a full-height stone-built cellar with a flight of steps was recorded. This cellar had been backfilled with demolition debris and domestic rubbish during the latter part of the seventeenth century and seems likely to have belonged to a house described as having been razed to the ground in 1646. (1-2) A second phase of excavations were carried out in 2008 with more evidence for the post-medieval townhouse. The main area excavated was a westward extension of Trench 2 where the line of the Roman road was expected however Roman levels were not reached in this season. (3)