Back to the East End (Toilet Area)

Well, the wheel pit was really hard work so we headed back to the East end of the mill for some light duties!

Our idea was to clear a good area of floor from the whitewashed "toilet" stones South and also South East into what looked like another room. What we thought would happen is that we would pass through a doorway similar to the one we found in the first room. We didn't!

In fact we found no sign of a wall at all that corresponded with the chunky wall adjacent to the midden. Instead the floor deteriorated in quality (more like a cobbled outside area than an indoor floor), started sloping downwards and then ended abruptly.

At this stage we have no idea what this area is. There were however 3 interesting features chiselled into the stone. (In the picture above, not very clear, is marked points A, B and C)

A.

B.

C.

South Side West End - The Wheel Pit?

On the South side of the first room we excavated (the river side) there's a chunky bit of wall sticking out about a metre towards the river so I started digging down at the intersection of this wall and the main building wall. At the same time Sarah started trying to follow the Mill wall as far as she could in a Westerly direction.

After digging down about 600mm I had found more slag than all the other areas put together then this hole appeared!

It's difficult to describe why one gets excited about this but I certainly did (sad I know), it's probably because there's an expectation that something "not natural" is underneath.

So I dug down further and found more slag, and more and then some more. While certainly not exciting, and actually really hard work to excavate, this does show that the pit I was sinking had once been fresh air and had later been filled by someone for some reason with slag!

While I was doing this Sarah was stealing all the glory by finding this!

An 1870 Victorian penny. Found in the top soil, it tells us little, but was really quite a find. 

The following picture gives a good idea of where we are. Photo taken looking East.

And this picture shows the depth to which I have dug so far.

My theory is that we are digging where the original water wheel was housed and that when the process changed from using water powered bellows to using the reverberating cupola, the wheel became redundant and the big hole that was left was simply filled with slag.

What I'm hoping to do is to dig deeper until I find some sort of stone floor on the bottom of the pit, but it's really hard work and I'm not sure how safe the walls of the trench will be if I widen and lengthen it as I will need to if I'm to get deeper. We'll see! 

Further East along the North Wall

Having found the doorway to the mill we decided to move a few feet further East to where we thought the corner of the mill was. Sarah started excavating here. About 15 feet even further East, past what we believed to be a gap, is a corner of another building; this is where I started digging.

If you watch the short video you'll see what we found.

Bower's Mill North wall excavation.

So, the building is one big one rather than the two as we had previously believed.

The one thing we did find here that I forgot to mention in the video is what we think are parts of floor tiles.

Also when a friend visited the site he found, on the spoil heap, some whitewashed wall plaster.

Is it a Cauldron?

The big chunk of metal we found in the hole in the middle of the floor in the "first room" was all crusty and stones had welded themselves to it with rust, so, we took it home and cleaned it up and this is how it looks:

The next picture, though not very clear, shows the profile of the rim.

....and this picture shows what we think is where a leg joined the cauldron before it was broken off.

...and finally, this is what we think it would have looked similar to: