Site Event/Activity record ECH6322 - An Archaeological Watching Brief On The Installation of Railings at Halton Castle, Runcorn, Cheshire

Watching brief on works monitored on the 27th & 28th of June and the 28th of July 2016 by contractors employed by Halton Borough Council, overseen by the archaeologist on-site (as above). This regards the installation of railings along the inside of the north-west curtain wall of the inner bailey. This work is described in item 3 of the Details for SM consent application dated January 2014 (see Appendix B). Both archaeological material (left in situ) and artefacts (retrieved and listed above) were discovered during the watching brief. The archaeological material in the form of sandstone chunks may well be original medieval and/or post-medieval architectural stone from the castle itself, however there is no way of confirming this definitively. The context in which this sandstone was observed (103) looks most probably to date to the broad post-medieval period, which concurs with other parts of the castle where the occupants of the site after the structure’s ruinous decline after the Civil War, the Brookes, utilised the monument as a leisure complex visible from their nearby home of Norton Priory. The artefacts discovered (see Finds section) are indicative of this kind of historic landscaping. Objects deposited such as fragments of clay pipe or small shards of pottery suggest that either direct or indirect deposition occurred, the most likely scenario being loss of possessions during breakages, or intentional discarding whilst the work is being undertaken. This kind of mixture of artefacts are a typical element of heavily truncated and churned layers observed in areas where the ground level has been intentionally modified. Owing to previous excavations it is clear that to reach any truly pre-Victorian layers it is necessary to excavate deeper than the c.0.50m reached during this programme of works.