Monument record MDO18010 - St George's Road Building 01009

A rectangular building terraced into the slope. Heavily robbed, probably originally timber framed on low stone walls and with a chalk and stone floor.

Found during the excavations at St George's Road, undertaken by Wessex Archaeology in 1987 in advance of the Dorchester By-pass construction. The following description is abstracted from the final published report on the site (1). The numbers in square brackets refer to context numbers quoted in the report.

Building [01009] was a rectangular building situated in the northwest part of the excavation trench and was only partly within the excavated area. It was constructed over the ditches of the NE-SW linear field system. It was constructed into a shallow terrace and was 6.4m wide and over 8.4m long. The east wall consisted of a square-cut foundation trench 0.3m deep with faced chalk blocks along the north side but otherwise it had been completely robbed. The south wall line comprised partially a robbed-out footing where it crossed the earlier ditches and a line of flint nodules in a soil matrix. There was no evidence of a footing for the north wall. A quantity of stone rubble within this building suggested that at least the lowest levels of the walls were constructed of stone. The building was floored with redeposited chalk with large limestone paving slabs set in grey mortar above. The majority of the stone flags had been robbed.
Outside the building to the north was an erosion hollow.

The lack of settlement debris associated with this building suggests an agricultural function. No datable material was recovered from this structure but stratigraphically it post-dates the NE-SW linear field system which probably had silted up by the end of the 14th century.

National Record of the Historic Environment, 983963 (Digital archive). SDO14739.

Wessex Archaeology, 1987, Dorchester By-pass (Excavation archive). SDO9385.

Woodward, P J and Smith, R J C, 1987, Survey and excavation along the route of the Southern Dorchester By-pass, 1986-1987 – an interim note (Article in serial). SDO9381.

Miller, Andrew, 1993, RCHME: AP Primary Recording Project (Unpublished document). SWX1708.

<1> Smith, R J C et al, 1997, Excavations along the Route of the Dorchester By-pass, Dorset, 1986-8, 23-27 (Monograph). SDO9379.

Record last edited

Dec 6 2023 1:29PM