Excavations at Lion Court, Church Stretton, 2002

Excavations at Lion Court, Church Stretton, in 2001-2

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 largest of the pits proved to be a corn-drying kiln. The kiln comprised a horseshoe-shaped stone-lined chamber cut into the natural gravel subsoil, with a rectangular bay, also stone-lined, at its eastern end. The internal face of the stone lining was smooth and 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.

None of the fills of the horseshoe-shaped end of the kiln 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 kiln 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 kiln 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.

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