Watching Brief during repairs to the boundary wall at Tewkesbury Abbey. Sections of the wall may have to be dismantled and re-built. Avon Archaeology Limited was commissioned by Tewkesbury Borough Council to undertake a programme of Archaeological Monitoring (Watching Brief) at the eastern side of Victoria Gardens, on a stretch of the 'Abbey Wall'. It became apparent that the wall had never been designed to act as a revetment - except in a section much further to the north of the collapsed section, it was almost certainly built as a relatively insubstantial, free-standing boundary wall. The wall is entirely unsupported on its western side, and it had been the weight of the deposits on its eastern side that had led ultimately to the collapse, and indeed to the serious issues of instability in a stretch of the wall immediately to the north of the collapsed section. Finds identified from low down in the deposits behind the collapsed section, indicated very strongly that these deposits were of modern origin. In addition, the fabric of the wall itself indicated that it is very unlikely that any original, in situ medieval masonry survives above ground, and that it is highly probable that the wall has been rebuilt and repaired on multiple occasions; in the post-medieval period, masonry reused from the dissolution of the nearby abbey may well have played a role in this work. It is questionable whether this structure actually is a part of the precinct boundary of the former abbey, for which belief there appears to be little or no concrete historical or archaeological evidence; and indeed the full circuit of the abbey precinct has never been satisfactorily elucidated. In the light of these findings, no further archaeological mitigation will be required for this project.
NickCorcos (Wed,) studied this question.