Excavation of Sections along Walls 46 and 160 at Roystone Grange, Derbyshire

In January 1997 ARCUS was contracted to carry out the excavation of two 4 metre sections of dry-stone walling at Roystone Grange in Derbyshire. The investigation was required by the Peak Park Joint Planning Board following a request by the tenant farmer to rebuild the walls. All the walls on Peak Park land at Roystone have a covenant placed on them which allows the Peak Park to request archaeological excavation prior to rebuilding. The excavations have documented something of the complex history of rebuilding exhibited by the walls of the Roystone Grange area. The two walls which were investigated during this project are thought to share approximate location and alignments with wall lengths integral to the network through which the local landscape was exploited in the Romano-British period. The excavations revealed only incidental evidence to support this view, but given the length of time over which it is implied that the alignments constituted active boundaries (more than eighteen centuries) it is hardly surprising that the walls themselves have been heavily reworked. It has been possible to make a number of interpretations regarding the sequence and chronology of development of each wall. The earliest structurally intact portion of wall 46 is that of its twelfth/thirteenth century foundations. These foundations were added to provide a wider, more stable, base for a more substantial wall; this episode of building is tentatively ascribed to the fifteenth century. The final major phase of rebuilding occurred sometime after the mid sixteenth century, although intermittent refurbishment has taken place since the late eighteenth century into modern times. As it stands, wall no. 160 is the result of a single episode of construction sometime during the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. However, there are indications of a much earlier wall on the same alignment.