Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Eleventh - 1121 Revisited - Chapter VI - What Lies Beneath - A Dirt-Nerd Special

First up: a bit of mosaic porn for Katie.

This is a section of the Boardman mosaic floor around six-by-six feet containing the Norwich coat of arms which has been carefully lifted by the mosaic restoration specialists ready to sit in its new location in the main entrance.

The area under the mosaics (the Victorian museum entrance hall, lobby and reception area) has never been dug and so - with our much longer lockdown timescale the archæologists and the Norfolk Museums folk extended the scope of the archæological dig to include this.

In our last post we saw a happy archæologist pointing at a shovel …

All 3D scans courtesy Oxford Archæology, bless their cotton socks.

Well, that whole area has now been excavated and the lovely folk at Oxford Archæology sent us their 3D scan of the dig. Yay!

The stair and bricked-up dungeon doorway are on the right with the old dungeons beyond. So you can orient yourself, the castle keep is just off to the left and we're looking north, into the museum, from the new entrance.

We don't really know what most of this stuff is yet. That's why the detailed archæological reports usually take at least a couple of years after the dig to be published. Lots of guesswork and forensic fun to come!

For Dirt-Nerds such as Petrea and Old Dive, this is all tremendously exciting. For most folk it is a hole in the ground and a bit of a mess.

With the 3D scan we can even look at the dig from underneath, as if we were deep inside Herbert the Ditcher's original motte from 1068 (see Part the First - Chapter II).

We've found no Norman work as yet and we don't really expect to find any as this area is outside the keep and when Soane desecrated the Bigod Tower staircase for his ugly county gaol we know he destroyed it down to the foundations. Wilkins then demolished Soane's work and built the panopticon gaol in it's place. All this mess is from the two main prison builds.

The remains of a possible bendy brick corridor may be pre-prison-era as it appears to be of a kind with the original dungeon (the basement of the guard tower built by Roger Bigod after the city was sacked by King Louis during the first Barons' War). For now, however, that's all just speculation.

There's a trench running north-south which seems similar to the hypocaust heating trenches of Wilkins' panopticon, but what it's doing over here is anybody's guess as the known hypocaust is way off to the north.

So … lots of dirt-sifting, archive-delving, head-scratching and fun to come over the next couple of years as this lot gets sorted out.

Next time, a man holds a piece of plywood and another man stands in a hole. That should get you drooling in anticipation …