Watching Brief

Date 18 August 2005 - 19 August 2005

Event ID 1034203

Category Recording

Type Watching Brief

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1034203

A watching brief was undertaken in Holyrood Park over a period of three days while contractors excavated a trench along the S side of the road between Pollock Halls and Duddingston Village at a point known as Samson’s Ribs (Fig. 1). The purpose of the exercise was to locate and repair a break in a mains electricity cable.

The work would involve digging down to the break and then excavating along the length of the cable for a distance of 10m each side of the repair point, producing a trench not less than 20m in length. Service plans of the area suggest that a total of nine cables may lie below the S footpath of the roadway. At least half of the cables were believed to be 11 kV or 30 kV, which necessitated considerable care and attention in the machine excavation of the trench.

The area under investigation lies over the S end of the Innocent Tunnel with the probability that the deeper deposits in this area are derived from that period of construction work. Additionally the cables in this area of the park are known to have been put in place in 1946 resulting in complete disturbance of the upper levels within the present work zone.

The area of work is the site of massive landscaping work associated with the cutting of the coal yard railway tunnel and the creation of the park road running across it. The site of these excavations was on the edge of this substantial disturbance.

The cable trench opened in the present works simply followed the line of the 1946 cable insertions. All deposits are therefore redeposited Victorian landscaping dumps. The damage to the power cable seemed likely to have been caused by the presence of the concrete slab F107 bending and distorting the cable.

G Ewart 2005

Sponsor: Historic Scotland

Kirkdale Archaeology