Excavations at Lion Court¸ Church Stretton

Lion Court, Church Stretton
In January 2002 an excavation was carried out by the Archaeology Service, on a residential development site at Lion Court, Church Stretton. The site lay on the east side of High Street to the rear of an area of medieval burgage plots fronting onto the medieval town's main market street. An archaeological evaluation in 2001 had found pits, one of them stone-lined, of possible 11th to 12th century date. The 2002 investigations further examined these features.

The pits proved to be one stone-lined feature, cut into the natural gravel subsoil. This feature comprised a horseshoe-shaped stone-lined pit with a rectangular bay, also stone-lined, at its eastern end. The internal face of the stone lining was smooth and water-worn. At the neck of the horseshoe-shaped end were larger stone blocks that might originally have supported a lintel or arched opening which led into the rectangular section, perhaps a short drain or tank.

None of the fills of the horseshoe-shaped end of the feature produced any finds. However, the fills of the rectangular bay at its open end produced a few fragments of 12th- / 13th-century cooking pot, and a few fragments of decayed animal bone. The stone feature and its fills were sealed by a buried garden or yard soil, which produced medieval and post-medieval pottery of 13th- to early 18th-century date and modern yard surfaces.

The stone-lined feature thus appears to have dated from the 12th-century at least. It had gone out of use and been filled in probably by the late 13th or 14th century.

What this feature was built for is unclear, but perhaps it may have been the surround for a spring-head, with a rectangular trough at its open end. About 75m directly downhill (southeast) of this feature, a stream is shown on 19th-century maps of the area rising on the eastern boundary of the site, and flowing from there in a generally southerly direction into the Marsh Brook. It's possible that the 19th-century head of this stream may have represented the downhill migration of an earlier springhead. The drying up of the spring (or its migration downhill to the southeast) could have been the reason for the abandonment of the stone spring-head in the 13th century.

These excavations, the first archaeological excavations to have been undertaken in Church Stretton, were funded by Morris Properties, Shrewsbury.