Voyages to the House of Diversion 
Seventeenth-Century Water Gardens and the Birth of Modern Science

May to July 2017 - A walling we will go....


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The new and splendidly named trench HANK 17 was well underway when the builders moved in. Not on us but back at the sunken garden. here the dividing wall between the two properties was to be rebuilt so we popped over to take a look at the foundation trench and all sorts of things were happening so for the next few months it was basically down tools on the water parterre abandoning the quest for the house of diversion and back to the sunken garden.



    May

The cut for the new foundation trench for the wall revealed part of a brick drain so we started to excavate an area to the north to examine it from above.


May

... and here's the line of the drain cut apparently by the line of the wall we excavated as HANI back in 2015.




   May     May

Peter takes out the fill of the drain whilst an additional feature, possibly the base of a gate pier is excavated further to the west.




May

And now everyone's at it, lost in a sea of stone.




    May     May

The drain had been carefully plugged with a stone 'bung' at one end whilst at the other end it had been disrupted by the construction of the north south wall.



Once the digging was complete Dave Finch, the builder, and his cohorts moved in, finished pouring the concrete foundation and started the block work before building up the rest of the wall from stone recycled from the original tumbled version. We had assumed that these well made dressed stone walls were a feature of the seventeenth century garden but in this case they clearly post-dated the drain which we assumed, in the absence of any other dating evidence, was nineteenth century. Most puzzling. Still, time to return to the rather neglected water parterre. After a quick scrape down and tidy up we concentrated on the fill of the ditch which contained unparalleled quantities of roof tile not to mention large quantities of plaster/mortar and of course plenty of rubble




May     May

Unfortunately a summer gale and down pour trashed the gazebo breaking the frame apart in several places, we were forced to improvise and recycles some of the canvas and struts to create a much less impressive but functional 'lean to' except it wasn't leaning on anything really.




May     May

Sarah ponders some drawing.                                                                                                      Everyone focuses on the debris filled ditch.


May

Now here's a turn up for the book. In the corner of the area we decided to take out a metre test pit to investigate the composition of the mound. It was all looking quite natural until at a depth of around 70cm we find a large but lonely fragment of post-medieval pottery - date to be confirmed.



So everything e was going splendidly and then we got a call from the National Trust regarding an important and urgent piece of work they needed doing over in Fishpool Valley at Croft Castle in Herefordshire. It turned into a five week project working away from home and with the consequent writing up that was it at Hanwell for 2017!