Monument record 1080/9 - Roman Middlewich - Salt working site, Gasworks Yard, west of King Street

<1> Oxford Archaeology North, 2022, Gasworks Yard, King Street, Middlewich, Cheshire: Post-excavation Assessment Report, R4712 (Client Report). SCH9478.

A programme of archaeological strip, map, and record undertaken in 2021 at Gasworks Yard, ahead of an extension to a waste-water pumping station, identified the remains of a salt working site of Roman date. The area investigated was subdivided into three rectilinear plots (Plots 1-3), defined by shallow ditches aligned north-east to south-west, perhaps in the late first or early second century AD. The features were broadly perpendicular to the probable line of the Roman road beneath King Street, which seems to have been the settlement’s principal thoroughfare. The most intensive activity appears to have occurred in the central plot (Plot 2), which contained two timber-lined brine wells and a probable rectilinear timber building, in addition to several large pits and many smaller features. The most notable features of Plot 3, to the east, were a large, clay and timber-lined brine-settling tank, and several other large pits, including another probable brine-storage pit, lined with wattlework and timber. Most of the Roman-period activity can be assigned to a single broad phase of occupation (Phase 1a), followed by a less intensive phase (Phase 1b).

Ceramic evidence provides a strong indication that most on-site activity occurred from the late first century AD to the mid-second century. Only very small quantities of pottery were deposited after c AD 150, the latest being from the second half of the third century (mostly from a single pit), and it seems that the site had been largely abandoned by the late second century at the latest.