Historic Properties
4.16.5 South West
This year efforts have focused on procuring good quality preliminary reports arising from archaeological supervision of works. A good example of this is the report resulting from the supervision of the installation of a new electrical main at Pendennis Castle. The new main was designed to follow the least intrusive route and to leave in place as much of the earlier, historic services as possible. The brief required that a record should be made of all aspects of the earlier cabling and infrastructure encountered and, after work had begun, the brief was further refined to ensure that wherever possible the type and purpose of existing cables was also recorded.
Post-excavation work for the region was funded partly from income derived from the lease of Bowhill in Exeter and this enabled funds to be found for the principle backlog projects, in particular Ludgershall, Uffington, Halangy, Launceston, Blackfriars, Bowhill, and Sherborne. Phase I of Professor Morris's Tintagel excavations (Lower Terrace, Site C, Tintagel Island 1990-94) were published by the Society of Antiquaries, Ernest Greenfield's 1960-73 Great Witcombe excavations were published by Peter Leach in the British Archaeological Reports series, and the long-awaited monograph on Berry Pomeroy Castle, by Stewart Brown, was finally published by the Devon Archaeological Society (and is for sale on site).
Last year's educational event at Cleeve Abbey - to build a kiln, make tiles, and fire them was accompanied by a successful temporary exhibition that demonstrated the correlation between the test firing and the historic tiles and some of the (pre-publication) results of the ongoing Cleeve Tile Research Project. The joint English Heritage Somerset County Council tile-making exercise was held as an educational event at Cleeve Abbey. It involved not only making the tiles but the building and firing of a kiln, based on the evidence of sixteenth-century Flemish manuscripts and building on experience from the annual applied research project at Bickley near Bristol. The objectives were to show children how a study of broken tiles could lead to a better understanding of the techniques of manufacture transforming raw clay to patterned pavement. The research aim was to establish a technology for manufacturing authentic replica tiles. One practical spin-off is that we now have a better understanding of the stacking and firing of medieval tiles in their kilns. Another pre-publication event was the display in the Society of Antiquaries of a vault key in fifteenth-century style from the Gloucester Blackfriars. This was put on display after some preliminary conservation by the Ancient Monuments Laboratory.
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