York Historic Environment Record

An Archaeological evaluation was undertaken by On-Site Archaeology Ltd on land to the rear of 95 Front Street, Acomb. The evaluation comprised the excavation of three trenches and was carried out between the 19th and 23rd March 2007. All of the trenches revealed natural deposits, consisting of soft pale yellow sand, into which features of varying date and character were cut. Trench 1, contained four linear features, presumably boundary ditches. Three of these were aligned approximately parallel to Front Street, and were dated to the later 15th and later 16th centuries, while the fourth feature was perpendicular to the other three and clearly cut them. It was dated to the late 18th century or later. The features were sealed by 0.80m thickness of recent garden soil. Trench 2 contained a number of oval pits cutting into the natural sand. These were all dated to the late 18th or 19th centuries. Modern rubble dumps and garden soil, totalling between 0.50m and 0.75m thick, sealed these late features. Within Trench 3 much of the natural had been cut away by a series of substantial, deep cut features that are likely to have been excavated to quarry the natural sand as a building material. The earliest of these features contained only a single sherd of 11th century pottery. However, all of the others were dated to the early modern period and contained a range of residual pottery, including Roman, medieval and early post-medieval material. It is likely, therefore, that all of these sand quarries are broadly contemporary, dating from the later 18th and 19th centuries. A number of these features extended for more than 2m below the modern ground surface and the bases were not reached at this depth.