Watching Brief

Date 11 May 1998 - 14 May 1998

Event ID 589451

Category Recording

Type Watching Brief

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/589451

NS 0862 6367

A watching brief was carried out between the 11th and 14th May 1998 in and around St. Mary’s chapel in Rothesay while a shallow clearance excavation was undertaken. The purpose of the work was to remove late levelling from within the chapel while at the same time deturfing an area outside the chapel to permit the laying of a paved foot path linking the N entrance of the chapel to an existing roadway within the graveyard.

No original floor level survived, the first authentic layer of any antiquity to be seen in the chapel being the main burial material, which had no visible grave cuts but did contain skeletal debris. Removal of all layers above the main grave fill reduced the existing levels within the chapel to the depth of the buried but intact threshold masonry in the N doorway. Removal of the late infill layers proved that few of the gravestones to be found in the chapel were early in situ graves.

The excavations outside the chapel were restricted to the removal of two stretches of turf in order to put in place a paved footpath. Nineteenth-century levelling soil and, in deeper areas, the 18th-century church construction debris were exposed.

Sponsor: Historic Scotland

D Stewart 1998