Test Pits 9 and 11 - 14 High Street

These pits were dug in a garden close to the High Street, at the southern end of Allerton Terrace. Allerton Terrace is a block of six terraced cottages. The cottages were built in 1910/11 on land purchased by the Great Northern Railway Company (GNR) in 1890. Having hit natural after only three contexts of test pit 9, the family team digging the pit were having so much fun that they dug a second pit very close to the first.

The Finds

The two pits, although very close together, tell a slightly different story. Most of the pottery from Test Pit 9 is Victorian. However, there were three sherds of medieval pottery. These suggest that the site may have had a marginal use between the 12th and 14th centuries, and was then abandoned until the 19th century. All of the pottery from Test Pit 11 is Victorian.

Other finds from Test Pit 9 included glass, fragments of clay pipes, brick, stone, coal and charcoal, slate, metal objects, winkle and oyster shells. Two buttons were also found. The faunal assemblage included a single rabbit bone and four other unidentifiable remains.

In Test Pit 11, other finds included glass, metal, stone and brick, coal and charcoal, fragments of clay pipe, a red bead, a china doll’s head, an LNER railway button, a battery core, slate and cinder. The faunal assemblage included a range of unidentifiable remains of mostly sheep-sized animals.

For an overview of the site and finds, please click on the image of the exhibition poster which is the first image in the gallery below.

For detailed analysis of the finds, please see the results sheet for this pit, which is available as a download at the bottom of this page.

For reports and maps relating to all of the test pits, please see the documents available on our results page.