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Watching Brief
Date June 2006
Event ID 551506
Category Recording
Type Watching Brief
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/551506
NN 7066 0247 A watching brief was undertaken in June 2006 during repairs to the cemetery wall surrounding St Aedh's Church (Kilmadock Old Parish Church). Most of the work involved repairs to the upper part of the wall, but in two areas the upper courses of the wall had collapsed outwards and the lower courses had to be removed to allow reinstatement. This necessitated cutting back very slightly (c 300 mm) into the cemetery fill and underlying fluvioglacial subsoil.
In one area of the wall on the SW side a 7m long section of wall required reconstruction from foundation level. A quantity of human bone (1.05kg including soil in bone cavities) and three adult molar teeth were recovered from the black soil of the cemetery fill mixed among the stones of the collapsed wall. The bones, all broken and incomplete, comprised: fragments of skull, ribs, vertebrae and long bones. Most of the bones occurred within a 1.50m section of wall collapse. They were clearly not in situ and it is likely that these human remains represent a previous disturbance of a burial, or burials, during an earlier repair to the cemetery wall. Evidence for this earlier repair was provided by modern cement in the matrix of collapsed wall stones and black soil of the cemetery fill. By contrast, the 5m long section of collapsed wall on the NW side yielded only one fragment of human bone. No other features of archaeological interest were encountered.
Sponsor: Kilmadock Heritage Society.
L J Master 2006