Age Concern Dorchester - Dorset's Living Memories

Wollaston House excavations

Susanne Armstrong writes...

I moved to Dorchester from Stamford in Lincolnshire – where I had been working for the South Lincolnshire Archaeological Unit, drawing mediaeval pottery – in October 1977. I did some supply teaching at Broadwey School for a few weeks then got the job of classifying the pottery that would come from the Wollaston House excavations, due to start later that year.

 The grounds of Wollaston House were being excavated because the site was due to be made into a car park. At the time the government had a ‘rapid response’ excavation team called the Central Excavation Unit, based in London and Portsmouth, which could be sent in to threatened archaeological sites to excavate ahead of the bulldozers. In theory the Central Excavation Unit would excavate and publish immediately, but this did not happen.

For those who do not recognise the name, Wollaston House is the large Georgian building on the corner of Acland Road and Church Street and its grounds are now the Acland Road car park. It has had various reincarnations since its use as our site offices and is now a branch of the NFU.

It was the time of the Job Creation Scheme and the dig was financed partly by the Central Excavation Unit and partly by the Job Creation Scheme. The supervisors and directors were paid by the Central Excavation Unit and were for the most part permanently employed by them. Others, like me, were taken on only for that project and several local people were employed via the Job Creation Scheme as volunteers on the site itself, both digging and sorting finds. This also meant that a ready-made social circle was formed for me on my arrival in Dorchester and I am still in touch with many people from that time.

What was to be uncovered at Wollaston House was the remains of an extensive Roman bath house complex, large enough when standing to have rivalled that of Bath. As the site was due to become a car park, when the excavations were completed the foundations of the bath house were covered in sand and the car park built over them. They were covered in sand so that if anyone should re-excavate the site in future they would be able to tell the extent of the previous excavations.

At the time there was a lot of public interest in the site and there was talk of its being preserved but either the will or the finance – or possibly both – was lacking and the development went ahead as planned. 

I did not spend much time out on the site. I had a small room inside Wollaston House itself and the finds (the pottery shards, tiles, metals etc) were dealt with in the finds room, a larger room at the front of the building. The finds were washed and provisionally sorted and then only the pottery would be brought to me. My job was to classify it according to the composition of its clay.

This sounds more scientific than it actually was. In fact I would snip a corner off the potsherd and examine it through a strong magnifying glass. This enabled me to see what the clay had been mixed with – for example sand, feldspars, quartz, grog (fired and ground clay). It would then be compared with other similar samples and given a code number. This data would be transferred to computer and would later be magically transformed by someone – not me – into a pottery report.

Some of the pottery was just fragments but there were some almost complete vessels. Some were instantly recognisable, such as the fine red Roman Samian ware and the poppy seedhead-shaped New Forest jars. Occasionally specialists in different areas of pottery would come in to examine the finds, for example Jo Chaplin who is still writing on local history in Dorchester. John Walker, a teacher of pottery at Hardye’s School when it was still a boys’ school and now a local artist, also gave me valuable insights into how particular pots might have been made and fired.

The heavy snow fall of February 1978, when Dorchester was cut off by snow, meant a period when the excavations had to be halted. For us it meant an unexpected (although unpaid) holiday from work. I lived at that time at 31A Glyde Path Road, a three-storey Georgian house. Because there is a narrow alley alongside the house the wind had funnelled the snow along it and made a perfect wall about a meter high along the front of the building.

The excavations ended as far as I can remember in the summer of 1978. The Central Excavation Unit moved all the finds to its star-shaped Napoleonic fort in Portsmouth and I moved there to continue work on the pottery for a couple of months then came back to Dorchester to work from home. At that period I had I think three part-time jobs – continuing to work freelance on the pottery, working in the bar at the Junction pub, and also drawing electrical circuit plans for a firm in Weymouth. I was then offered a supply teaching post at the Convent of the Sacred Hearts School in Weymouth and eventually remained there as a permanent staff member for fifteen years until I left for London in 1991, just a term before the school finally closed.

I taught in London for five years, moved to Suffolk for five years and then in 2002 I moved back to Dorchester. Since I first arrived here Dorchester has gained a by-pass and the vast Poundbury housing estate amongst other things and it is not only the Wollaston House Excavation site but most of the fields where I used to walk my dog are that are now built over. Dorchester has changed considerably since 1977 and large parts of its history have now been destroyed or hidden.