Archaeological Desk-Based Assessment and Trial Trenching at Northowram Hospital, West Yorkshire

In March 2003, ARCUS were commissioned by Persimmon Homes Ltd to undertake an archaeological desk-based assessment and trial trenching on land at Northowram Hospital, Northowram Green, West Yorkshire. The assessment and fieldwork were required as a condition of planning approval (planning application number 02/00439/FUL) prior to residential development at the site. The development would involve the demolition of the existing hospital buildings and the construction of apartment blocks. The old hall buildings, which are grade II listed, would be retained, along with much of the landscaped park. Northowram Hall is thought to have been constructed on the site of the deserted medieval settlement of Whithill, mentioned in the Wakefield Manor Court Rolls from the thirteenth century. Its exact location has not been defined, but it is thought to have occupied the southern half of the proposal area adjacent to the hall. A series of owners of the land were mentioned throughout the medieval and post-medieval period. A mansion was built in the 1690s, rebuilt in the 1730s, with a new wing added in red brick. This rebuild possibly involved the construction of the underground pool, now partly under the road to the hospital. In 1862 the estate was sold to Abraham Briggs Foster, who pulled down the mansion and built a new one on a slightly different site. This is the extant hall, although the interior was remodelled in 1925 following a fire, and later in the 1930s when it was adapted as the hospital administration block. The earliest hospital buildings were constructed in the 1930s, of stone, with the later phases built in the late 1960s to early 1970s, of brick and concrete. The hospital was closed in 2001. The walkover survey and trial trenching revealed several features, many relating to the nineteenth century hall and to the landscaped gardens. Pottery recovered from a ditch within trench 2 was of early medieval date, representing a strap-handled jug. Construction and landscaping at the site may have obscured upstanding features relating to the deserted medieval village within the grounds of the hall. Seventeenth- to nineteenth-century walls were also found within trench 2, probably relating to the dryhouse building shown on the 1854 OS map. There is the potential for the sub- surface survival of archaeological deposits of the medieval period and later within the proposed development area, and also the possibility for earlier remains, given the proximity of previous Roman finds at Northowram and Wall Close Farm.