Our investigations at Albrighton have resumed after the hiatus caused
by the pandemic and in some style! We were trying to find evidence of
the possible medieval market site, along with traces of the ancient road
- later a turnpiked coach road - and a roadside building dating from at
least the 18th century.
While no direct evidence to locate the market was found, we did
discover the old road and a quantity of quite early medieval pottery on
the site of the aforementioned building. Arrows on the photo above show
the line of the cobbled road.
The turnpike through Albrighton came into existence around 1750 but
the sharply curved section we were trying to locate fell out of use
around 1840, when the road was finally straightened. This short section
of road has been hidden by 20th century landscaping and was found to be
almost a metre underground! It seems to have consisted of various sizes
of cobbles, probably set in a clay matrix. Some toll roads in this
'pre-Tarmacadam' era were covered with a layer of gravel but we found no
obvious evidence for this. Being somewhat distant from Wolverhampton,
and knowing that local people had free use of the road in exchange for
maintaining it, it's possible that there was little change in the
overall structure of the road; what we found could even represent a much
earlier construction.
Being unable to find any evidence for a building which is known to
have stood beside the road we were somewhat disappointed... until our
finds were properly cleaned, at which point it became clear that we had a
almost 20 sherds of (possibly locally made) 'sandyware' and other
cooking pots, some of which could be as early as the 1200s! The photo
below shows one of these fragments; most of them are very coarse and
gritty with varying degrees of blackening from the cooking fire.
A full report from the dig will be published and made available here in our reports section in the near future.