Survey of St Mary-in-Arden: 13-14^th November 2004

Over the weekend of the 13th-14th November the team made an important start in creating a complete and accurate survey of the churchyard of St Mary-in-Arden. A large area to the North, West and East of the church building was surveyed using a resistivity sensor and a metal detector. The results will be posted here as soon as possible.

It was a long weekend and we were all working hard pretty much from dawn till dusk! The massive task of laying out an accurate grid of 10m by 10m squares for the survey had to be completed first before any survey work could seriously begin. A plucky team of volunteers were on site from 8 o'clock in the morning to get a start on this. By the time most of the rest of us showed up they had successfully laid out the main 'datum' lines from the south wall of the curchyard right the way up the site to the top. Over 100m away! Then the task of laying out the squares of the grid began while the rest of the team erected the gazebo we used as a base and got the equipment set up.

The first grid square was begun to be metal-detected just before lunchtime and the resistivity survey began shortly afterwards. It took a little while for us to get used to the machine but we got there eventually! It's not quite as easy as they make it look on Time Team. In all over the two days we surveyed 17 grid squares, or around about 150m² (not all the squares could be completely surveyed because the road or the church itself were in the way.)

Meanwhile, the remains of the church were accurately measured and planned and several detailed photographs were taken and will be used in our further analysis off-site. We intend to produce a standing building survey and attempt to eastablish which parts of the building remain from the Medieval structure which collapsed in the mid-seventeenth century.

Our resistivity data was taken back to Leicester University for analysis. We hope it will show some evidence for the foundations of the Medieval building which we know must have been larger than the current structure. The VCH tells us it had a south aisle, nave and chancel and a tower with steeple. Nichols tells us that the current building is faced with ashlar blocks originally used to build the tower which suggests it might have looked something like St Dionysius in the centre of Market Harborough.

Results

We've finally managed to get the results of out geo-physical survey of the northern half of the churchyard back (see image on the right - click for larger image). It looks like we've found a few graves but we might also have found a couple of walls. Looks like a return trip to survey the area to the south and southwest of the church will be in order!.

North is at the top and the big white rectangular area at the bottom is where the church itself is. The large triangular area of white in the top left is Great Bowden Road. The darkest areas show the driest readings where possible building remains may be present. The lighter areas are possibly graves and the pure white squares indicated dummy readings where there were gravestones or trees preventing us from taking a reading. We have been advised that the dark area to the west of the church does not indicate the presence of the tower, as we had hoped, but is most likely caused by the compaction of the ground in the area of a large number of standing gravestones.

However, there are other areas where walls of a possible building may be indicated. To the north is a strong line of dark readings and on the eastern extent of the survey another line may be starting to appear. We wondered if Henry Dormer built the present church over the south aisle of the older church. The presence of the older porch must indicate that this was the most southerly extent of the church that was demolished. If the present church does cover the area of the south aisle then the distance to the possible wall line of the north wall is twice the width of the south aisle(?)/present church. Could this be the nave? We have no information about the existence of a north aisle in the old church.

During the open day we held at the church in April 2005 (which you visited) we also had a brief visit from a member of the Archaeology team at Northants. County Council. He had a look at the geo-phys. results and thought that the dark masses in the middle of the possible church area were probably masonry of some sort, maybe evidence of a crypt.