Oak House at West Bromwich is a classic 17th century half-timbered house
with an excellent visitor centre and gardens. As part of their annual
archaeology event at the house, the Council invited us to dig a test pit
to search for evidence of earlier occupation and to show members of the
public what hands-on archaeology is like. Although the weather was very
bad on Tuesday, almost 70 visitors braved the torrential rain to see
what we were up to. Over the next two days the rain gradually eased and
many more people came to look and talk about our excavation.
We'd
been told by staff that during landscaping and construction of the
visitor centre, large amounts of rubble had been spread across the site
and covered with grass. A pile of rubble left over after that was was
simply formed into a neat hillock - like a bronze age burial mound! -
and turfed over. The gardeners told us to expect at least half a metre
of rubbish before we got to 'the good stuff' and they weren't wrong.
Finding a screw top jar and a pair of ladies tights below half a metre
was a little disheartening to say the least but we soldiered on in the
hope of finding better. By the time we'd finished, our test pit was well
over a metre deep but on its western side we were still finding modern
and Victorian rubbish right at the bottom.
A dark band representing rubble could still be seen at the bottom of the test pit
It seems the spot we had chosen to dig may have been where rubbish was piled against a bank because the eastern side of the pit gradually became cleaner as we went deeper. This diagram (not to scale) gives an idea of how our pit cut through the layer of rubble and into the bank:
Notable pottery finds included a few sherds of what seems to be Cistercian ware, several fragments of fine vessels made from Midlands purple ware and a couple of tiny pieces of brown-mottled ware. A number of clay pipe stems and some bowl fragments were recovered as we descended, with the earliest examples perhaps as early as the mid-17th century. While we didn't find any incontrovertible proof of occupation earlier than the standing house, some of the pot-sherds could predate it by several centuries.
Pottery fragments and a very substantial pipe stem
We hope to be digging more test pits at Oak House in the near future, possibly a little closer to the building where we just might find traces of an earlier house.
Our test pit was just over the wall from the formal garden