restoration HUB: Digging Deeper
Waterways talks to Ralph Mills, leader of the WRG Canal Camps that uncovered a lost lock cottage at Ty Coch
ALL PICTURES BY RALPH MILLS
There’s just one known photograph of the cottage at Shop Lock.
Work is mostly focussed on restoring navigation and maintaining locks or buildings but we should also be looking at them as sources of knowledge about the past, not just as places of leisure and pleasure for the present.” Everything on an archaeological site must be carefully recorded.
Shop Lock
The restoration of the Ty Coch flight on the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal in Wales is an ongoing project supported by IWA’s Waterway Recovery Group. Volunteers have been assisting with the reconstruction of the locks as part of the Waterworks programme, a Heritage Lottery-funded partnership between Torfean County Borough Council and the Monmouthshire, Brecon & Abergavenny Canal Trust, since 2014 on WRG Canal Camps. But the discovery of a large amount of pottery fragments near Shop Lock led to WRG undertaking an archaeological dig – the first of its kind on the canal network – that spanned six weeks over three summers starting in 2017.
ARCHAEOLOGY ON THE CANALS Heading up the team was Ralph Mills, an archaeologist with 30 years’ experience in the field. He first became involved with Canal Camps in 2008 while walking along the Grand Western Canal and reading a plaque about WRG’s involvement in the discovery of the remains of a boat-lift. His interest was piqued and he joined the next available Canal Camp. With expert knowledge in the significance of artefacts buried beneath the topsoil, Ralph has been at the forefront of a handful of specialist WRG digs that have sought to investigate lost canalside structures. These have mainly been on the Stover Canal where the remains of a boat and granite tramway were excavated at Ventiford Basin, and on the Mon & Brec Canal at Ty Coch. “The canals are a 2,500-mile long archaeological site,” explains Ralph. “But there hasn’t been much practical archaeology on them to date. There are a few recently opened waterways but most canals are at least 100, if not 200, years old. The first archaeological dig at Shop Lock took place in 2017.
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When working on the Ty Coch flight in 2016, objects discovered just south of Shop Lock drew Ralph’s attention: an unusually large number of pottery pieces, mostly featuring blue-and-white designs, and other domestic rubbish. “It seemed to me that there was more of this stuff than there should have been. Ty Coch isn’t actually next door to anywhere; there’s a hamlet about 1km up the canal, there’s what used to be a cider mill about 0.5km in the other direction, but there’s nothing to explain why there should be this amount of material scattered here.” Beside the lock was once a workshop with a saw pit, uncovered by a previous excavation by the Ancient Cwmbran Society in 2013. It was likely to have been used for building and maintaining lock gates (hence the name Shop Lock), and was located close to the foundations of a further building, marked on an 1890s Ordnance Survey map and thought to be a lock cottage. Demolished in the late 1950s, nobody in the local area seemed to know anything about the cottage but Ralph persuaded WRG that it was worth investigating.
Uncovering the cottage The first dig took place in 2017 over two week-long Canal Camps. Among the 100 or so volunteers involved
WRG volunteers have been helping to restore the Ty Coch flight on the Mon & Brec since 2014.
Autumn 2020 23/07/2020 15:24
