Scaplen’s Court
Here the investigation had focused more upon features within the building than elsewhere within the complex, such as the position and style of later windows and doors (etc), and any associated disturbance to the walls.
He was cross-referencing finds and features with Ian Horsey’s archive of his unpublished archaeological dig undertaken in 1985. (Horsey had been appointed the Borough of Poole’s Archaeological Officer in 1976. The dig hadn’t been published due to his sudden death in 1988.)
The building’s complicated history and the Horsey archive made for a more challenging but more professionally rewarding project. The process, he said, was very like completing a jigsaw puzzle, matching observations and finds with Horsey’s archive, and with other written (and photographic) sources.
Most of the floors had been a mixture of stone flags and brick, laid between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Another complication was that the interior had been much changed, with brick-partitions creating three or four rooms on the ground floor.
In the upper layers of test pits, the usual detritus had been uncovered, some of it a little earlier than the late eighteenth century. There were very few Medieval pottery finds. A series of dark soils further down, often with oyster shells mixed into the soil, reflected that centuries earlier many buildings around here had been built upon oyster shell middens, as mentioned above. The land here had been reworked in the eighteenth century.
Below the parlour floor they had uncovered evidence of a small stone-lined pit and a layer of coal dust above a clay floor, indicating an unknown industrial use.