Monument record 1682/3/5 - Canal Earthwork

{1} The shifting course of the Kirby Brook which can be reconstructed from the maps between 1584 and c. 1700 clearly illustrates the progressive attempts to divert and eventually canalize the stream. In its final form the watercourse followed a broad, straight bed which turned northwards before straightening again to enter the gardens below the end of the West Terrace. At this point it truncated the remains of a stone wall which was on the same line as the outer wall of the West Terrace and its precursor. There was no evidence for the continuation of the wall on the south side of the canal. A separate breach of the foundation to the north could have been caused by the insertion of the drainage system in the southern gardens. If so, the construction of this stretch of the canal might be broadly contemporary with the late-seventeenth-century extension and re-modelling of the gardens.
The canal turned through a right-angled bend at a distanceof 110m to the east, thereafter forming a broad channel which lay in the direct view of the first-floor State Apartments before making another sharply-angled turn to run beside the Privy Garden. The earthworks of a low platform at the first corner could denote the site of an eye-catching feature in the line of gaze from the house.

<1> Dix B.; Soden I.; Hylton T., 1995, Kirby Hall and Its Gardens: Excavations in 1987-1994, p.341 (unchecked) (Report). SNN74020.

Record last edited

Aug 28 2014 5:01PM