Monument record 11510 - Excavated Stone Quarry Site, The Old Bishop's Palace

<1> Earthworks Archaeological Services, 2019, The Old Palace, The Groves, Chester, Cheshire: An Archaeological Watching Brief, R4441 (Client Report). SCH8887.

The eastern edge of a probable stone quarry of post-medieval date was recorded during a watching brief, in 2018-2019, monitoring groundworks associated with the extension and refurbishment of the Old Bishop's Palace.

The feature (Area 3, Feature 6) consisted of a linear, north–south aligned, intrusion, cut almost vertically into the natural red sandstone bedrock. At this location the bedrock was encountered at a depth of no more than 0.4m below current ground level. The partial excavation of deposits located to the west of this feature, where the bedrock had evidently been quarried away to a depth in excess of 1.0m, revealed the face to the east edge of the postulated quarry onto which tool marks resulting from the extraction process could be seen clearly. The deposits encountered to the west of the exposed face, and therefore forming backfill material within the quarry, consisted mostly of layers of crushed sandstone – probable quarry waste – interleaved with thin layers of grey-brown clay-sand containing occasional lumps of re-deposited clay and rare, small fragments of charcoal. The lines of deposition observed within these deposits were generally sloping from north to south and east to west. The backfill deposits were investigated to a maximum depth of 2.5m below current ground level at which depth excavation was terminated with no evidence for the base of the quarry being encountered. Finds within the backfill deposits were few, but ceramics of post-medieval date were encountered