Watching Brief at Rochester Castle

Keevill Heritage Ltd carried out an archaeological watching brief during excavations to widen and subtly reconfigure the modern gateway into the grounds of Rochester Castle during September 2023, with a few minor visits subsequently into 2024. This followed our investigations of the north and south gate piers in 2021 and 2022 respectively. The work was carried out under a Scheduled Monument Consent granted on 8 November 2022 (ref S00243389) for the project to reconfigure the gateway. Two 1.3m-square pits were dug for the new foundations to support the gate piers. That for the southern one was in exactly the position of the previous foundations, whereas the northern one was 0.8m north of the previous pier location. This meant that the excavation was largely confined to the area of the 2021 Test Pit 1 - the only 'new' area was wholly within the foundations of the castle's modern boundary wall on the north side of the gate, and this excavation therefore did not add any new information to the 2021 archaeological results. The foundation pit for the south pier exposed almost all of the brick footing belonging to the previous arrangement on this side of the gate, as well as a modern concrete retaining structure for the banked ground immediately to the south of the roadway through the gates. The foundations of the successive gate piers occupied almost all of the excavation area, but a small amount of in situ stratigraphy was present on the extreme south edge of the pit. This included two layers which may have belonged to a medieval or later rampart on the south side of the gateway: these were recorded in section. Shallow excavation to re-form the road surface and kerbs through the widened gateway revealed three/four small patches of ragstone in lime: these comprised surviving fragments of the medieval gatehouse, although the very extensive service trenches through the area and modern made ground for the tarmac road meant that little or nothing could be deduced with regard to the layout of the medieval structure.