Archaeology at Stanley Bank
by Peter Keen

The SCARS Tow Path Trail booklet and Tow Path leaflets make reference to the Blackbrook Valley as an area of early industrialisation, describing how the sailing flats loaded up the coal from local collieries to carry downstream to the salt boilers of Cheshire and the hearths and industries of Liverpool. Mention was also made of the nearby copper works and the adjacent iron slitting mill. What follows is an account of the history of archaeological activity carried out at the site over the past quarter century. The short canal above the Sankey featured on the previous pages served the site, as the map opposite shows.

1982/3

In 1982/3 one of our Society members, Dave Knowles, was appointed leader of a small team whose task was to explore the site of the slitting mill which, according to the documentary records, once occupied the site on the east bank of the Sankey Canal. Working over the winter months Dave and his team cleared an enormous amount of top soil from the site and revealed a host of building remains, artefacts and questions.

Two large rectangular pits were excavated which were assumed to be water wheel pits, especially since what seemed to be a wheel bearing was also found, along with assorted metalwork. This made sense in that they were close to the dam which would have stored the water to turn the wheels. Large quantities of pottery were found, along with glass fragments, coins, a couple of medallions and assorted carved stonework.

Sketch-plan of the site produced after the early digs. The work carried out since has challenged the conclusions drawn then.

The excavators were working under the guidance of a local archaeologist and his task was to record the site and all the archaeological materials which were revealed. He was not on site on a regular basis so Dave was responsible for supervising the work in his absence.

During the course of the excavations the site was visited by the then curator of St. Helens Museum who took away all the coins, medallions and other artefacts which were considered worth saving, and put them into storage. Large pieces of stonework and other large objects were taken off site and stored for safe keeping at a local authority compound.

When the money ran out the project finished. Unfortunately no attempts were made to protect what had been revealed. As a result, over the years, it suffered tremendously from vandalism and theft. Floors of stone were removed piecemeal and probably now form a feature in someone's garden. Brick walls were kicked over and smashed, stonework was destroyed and nature took over, covering the site with vegetation.

2004

In 2004, interest in the site was revived and the local authority obtained a grant to run a community archaeology project, seeking the sites of Copper House Row, the cottages once occupied by the workers from the copper works, along with those of the slitting mill and copper works.

Volunteers were first trained in field walking techniques by surveying some fields adjacent to the proposed Blackbrook By-Pass. All finds were recorded, washed and stored for later analysis. There was a vast array of pottery fragments, glass shards and ceramic pipe stems and some small interesting metal remains but nothing of major importance. This is exactly what was expected with a piece of farm land which had never been settled but had had "night soil" from the towns spread across it to improve the soil quality.

The target was then changed to the site of Copper House Row, a set of cottages well illustrated on various Ordnance Survey maps over the decades. Another SCARS member Bill Highcock surveyed the site with his dowsing rods and marked out the shapes of the cottages on the ground, complete with inner dividing walls. Volunteers laboured away fully expecting to find walls or at least foundations of walls. Despite the maps and the dowsing evidence there were no walls. What did survive however was the compacted earth which the walls had been built on, showing up as shading in the soil with fragments of mortar and brick to indicate that there had indeed been a wall there in the past. Yet another SCARS member, Mary Presland had been investigating the history of the site, with her History Research Group, and had located a diary extract written by a worker on the Gerard estate who was paid for carting off the slates and bricks in the early 1900s. Recycling is not a new concept.

The next site to be tackled was that of the slitting mill, and it was suggested that the records of the 1982/3 excavations and the artefacts and stonework revealed during the excavations could be useful. Unfortunately efforts to find these met with no success. Since those early excavations the archaeologist has sadly died and the records he kept and photographs he took have disappeared. St. Helens Museum could find no trace of the small artefacts which it had taken for safe keeping, possibly because the museum had been relocated in the meantime. Investigations at the council's storage facility produced the same result, the items from the slitting mill had disappeared and nobody knew where to.

Despite the lack of success digging took place and information was added to the new records. Undergrowth was removed, making it possible for accurate ground plans to be drawn up. Paths, floor surfaces and room boundaries were found and duly recorded, whilst a number of interesting questions were raised by new discoveries: What was the purpose of the large diameter ceramic pipe sunk into the ground leading away from the dam? A set of stone and brick plinths must have supported something but what? Was this perhaps a timber channel to yet another water wheel?

At the end of this project the features were carefully covered up again to protect them from wind, weather and vandalism so that, funding permitting, the project could be carried forward at some future date.

Blackbrook Basin, near the first terminus of the Sankey. Its position may be seen from the map on the previous page, near the bottom, with two tram-roads running down to it from Haydock collieries. Other tracks run to staithes of the Black Brook Quay upstream.

Pictures from the 2004 dig show, left , the breached wall which held back Stanley Mill Dam (see map ,farther up the page), and right, the site of twin water wheels, separated by the centre wall, run by the mill stream, which would have been directed to the wheels by water chutes.

2006

The future date was July 2006 when another Community Archaeology Project swung into action, commanded by a long term supporter of SCARS, Rick Rogers. This year saw the commencement of the building of the long anticipated but never really believed Blackbrook By-pass. As part of the project, a large area of land between the Black Brook, the East Lancashire Road and West End Road was to be improved as a public amenity. Woodland was to be extended, paths improved, bridleways created, wildlife habitats built and access improved. An important part of the overall project was the involvement of the community in deciding how the area was to be developed.

In order to plan this properly a number of small working parties were set up, each concentrating on one aspect of the larger project. One group looked into how best to improve access to the area without opening it up to abuse by the more antisocial elements of the community. Another set out to investigate the type of people who use the area and to seek their ideas as to how it should be sympathetically developed. Yet another was assigned the task of producing a conservation plan for the slitting mill site to make it more available and intelligible to the public. This is where the archaeology came in.

During two sweltering weekends in July volunteers (left… with a grinning Rick Rogers in the forefront) began digging again at the site of the slitting mill. Having looked at documents, it seems that slitting mills usually had two water wheels, not side by side as was the case here but one at each end of the building. The search was on for the other wheel pit. Trial pits were also opened up to find out what was under the floor areas of the buildings, was there any dating evidence, were there any artefacts, were there any remains of the industrial process carried out in the buildings? After much hard work it was decided that there was no wheel pit. A slitting mill with only one water wheel? Perhaps it wasn't a slitting mill after all.

Despite the evidence of the photographs, it must be emphasised that the term "digging" does not mean pick and shovel work. Once the topsoil has been removed with such tools, excavation is slow and painstaking, with many pauses to discuss what has been turned up, to take photographs, to measure and to add the findings to the record. (Below right: Your correspondent getting stuck into the heavy work at the dig.)

All the excavations had produced a similar soil layer pattern in that there seemed to be a thick layer of clay across the whole site, interspersed with building debris, brick and mortar. On the last day of the July dig a test pit went through this clay layer and dropped onto the top of a wall which was on a completely different alignment to the walls which survived on the surface. After due consideration and much discussion it was decided that the present building remains are most likely to be the corn mill, mentioned in documentary evidence, built on the in-filled site following the demolition of the slitting mill, whose remains probably lie beneath the present structures. It was at this stage in the project that the site was closed down since the next digs were scheduled for September and the trenches could not be left open for health and safety reasons.

September saw a very different weather pattern and the first day was cancelled as the rain came pouring down. It wasn't that the volunteers were not prepared to work but rather that the nature of the site, grass covering a layer of slippery clay, made it dangerous underfoot. The following day saw an improvement in the weather and work went ahead. The idea of a third wheel pit having been abandoned efforts were concentrated on the ceramic pipes, some walls and floor areas and a new trench in a location never tried before, on the northern section of the site.

Since there is a considerable embankment at the new trench it meant that a lot of earth had to be moved but, as has been explained above, this had to be done slowly and carefully. As finishing time approached the diggers discovered the remains of a wall, with the base of a path or floor surface running alongside it, partially paved with stone blocks on a mortar bed. Alongside this was a layer of mortar on top of a thick deposit of cindery material. Was this the position of another wall which had been demolished and the materials removed from the site? Again the findings bore no relationship to the surface structures, forming a distinct curve where all the other features were in straight lines.

Two more weekends of work remain so watch this space to see what turns up. The records reveal that the copper works were built "adjacent to the slitting mill". Is this why here are two water wheel pits side by side to use the same water supply? Are they wheel pits at all? Has the idea of this site being a slitting mill to be discarded as a result of new evidence or will the story change yet again? Only time and effort will tell, maybe.

The continuation of this dig will be recorded in the next issue of CUTTINGS.

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