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Steamer Point Excavation
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Coring Exercise at Christchurch Castle
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The Redvers Tombstone in the Priory Church
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Survey Activities 19 - 29 July 2004
 | We have now completed the survey activities we had planned for the period from 19 -23 July. We were pleased to welcome 4 new TCA members who assisted with the survey.
In the first week, we worked primarily in Church Hatch Public Gardens, surveying the predominantly flat area west of the Mill Stream, where last year's GPR results showed evidence of a ditch feature. During our first week's survey we worked to contour surface features in this area. We also tried to correlate these with the layout of the 19th-century garden of Church Hatch, of which we now have a map.
In the second week, we continued mapping the westerly part of the area of the Public Gardens, where old maps and surface features show the foundations of buildings, now demolished. We tried some plane-table surveying to obtain a better map of the current location of the footpaths which even on the most recent version of digital map are not shown accurately.
In order to understand the relationship between water levels in the river and Mill Stream, we carried out measurements of these two levels over an 8-hour period on Friday 23 July.
Unfortunately we were unable to contact the owner of Church Hatch to obtain permission to survey in the rear garden of the house, nor were we able to work in the Bowling Green area. However, we managed to obtain useful data to supplement our knowledge of the Castle environs, and obtained some useful experience in using our recently-purchsed survey equipment.
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TCA Visit to Corfe Castle, 18 August 2004
 | This was a unique opportunity to view the results of the archaeological excavations at Corfe Castle under the leadership of an expert guide. The small number of us attended this visit and were treated to an excellent guided tour by Nancy Grace, a member of the National Trust archaeological team. We were able to see at first hand the sites of the excavations she had described in her talk to TCA at Christchurch.
The Castle site was very atmospheric in the evening light, empty of its daytime visitors. Luckily the rain which had threatened during the day kept off, apart from a light shower.
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Building Stones Survey 17 October 2004
 | Those of us who attended the day school in Dorchester on the 'Recording Historic Buildings' were impressed by the lecture given by Jo Thomas on the building stones of Dorset.
Jo kindly agreed to meet us on site at Christchurch Castle to look at the stones in the Keep and in the Constables House. She has already been involved in a survey of the building stones in Christchurch.
This meeting took place on Sunday 17 October 2004 and we inspected the stones of the Keep and the Constable's House, under Jo's expert guidance.
The general conclusion was that most of the building stones could be related to Purbeck beds. The mix of stones in the Keep and Constable's house are similar, with a rather higher proportion of marbles (limestone with fossilised shells embedded) in the latter.
There was some doubt as to what constituted original construction and what was a late repair. However, some of the obvious constructional features, such as the corbels in the Keep, are formed from Pubeck 'burr'. This was quarried over a considerable period of time in the mediaeval period and so unfortunately offers no further clues as to the date of construction.
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