Friends enjoy interesting talk

ON MONDAY February 17, Peter Liddle, the former county archaeologist, gave a talk to the Friends of the Charnwood Forest about Bradgate Park, and in particular Bradgate House.

Using old documents and numerous photographic illustrations he was able to reconstruct at least some of the history of that estate, starting with mesolithic occupants some 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, up to the present day.

His main subject, however, was centred around the house itself in which digs have taken place over the last five years.

The first site was what was probably an old lodge or keeper’s house. Here he expressed surprise at how near the surface the actual archaeology lay.

As much of his work previously had been concentrated on sites in the city, where the interesting levels could be several feet below the present-day surface, it is not surprising that he was a little astonished.

The next year’s dig was in the courtyard of the old house, where foundations were found of an older building. As the oldest document had termed the ‘house’ as a ‘lodge’, it could be that the present ruin was of a later date.

Did Lady Jane Grey live in that ‘lodge’ or was the brick constuction we know her home? Evidence is at present a little ambiguous.

The ‘new’ house was abandoned in the mid nineteenth century, and the gable wall of the Great Hall collapsed in a gale in 1895.

In the 1930s, when the park passed into public ownership, the council had the ruin ‘improved’, including the ruin of a tower which had not been there before.

The digging then moved to the stables, where various interesting finds on its layout were made, including a dump of old horse leg bones – these may be the left-overs from dogs’ dinners.

The building itself was still in use after the house was left to decay; its materials may have been taken finally to be used in other building works.

They went back to the house for the final year of the dig. Here there were restrictions as to how far down they could dig, for they were not able to move any floors they came across because the building is a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

In one place they did find a pit which was full of old pottery sherds. In another they followed the foundations of an older building up to a modern wall. They also found numerous drains, one of which contained a plastic glove, and gave a clue to the work of the restorers in the 1920s. .

One thing that was evident in the old documents which may have deserved a mention – in the first document it was titled Brodgate park; in the second Broadgate park, and as we call it, Bradgate park. It does now look, however, both from the archaeology and from recently discovered documents, as if Lady Jane probably inhabited the stone house found in the excavations and that brick house mostly predates her short life.

The next meeting of the Friends will be on March 16, at 7.30pm, when Richard Bailey will give a talk entitled Not Just Field on a Farm; Diversification in Charnwood Forest, showing how he has supplemented the income from an arable farm by organising a varied series of events This will follow the short A.G.M.