Jeremy Bradley

In 1991 and 2007, development-led excavations close to Preston’s historic centre revealed significant medieval remains. Although badly damaged, these included the foundations of a substantial stone building with cobbled footings and corner buttresses. Several east/west-aligned burials, some with oak coffins, lay inside and around the structure; their presence, together with finds of painted window glass and line-impressed floor tiles, indicated an ecclesiastical origin to the building. Post-excavation analysis, funded by Historic England, included scientific dating of the human remains and organic materials, which suggested that burial took place between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. This matched the occupation of the Franciscan friary of St Clare, founded in the locale in c 1260, dissolved in 1539, and subsequently lost to Preston’s industrial development. The intramural burials comprised men, women, and children, and are likely to represent members of benefactory families interred within a chapel on the north side of the friary church. Palaeoenvironmental evidence from a ditch that skirted the chapel implied that the area was rather damp, and it is possible that subsidence related to these conditions necessitated alteration of the building: a wall and buttress were expanded over an earlier extramural burial. The same area saw the addition of at least one wall tomb. Traces of other parts of the church and conventual areas were identified from the investigations in 1991, and, coupled with comparative analysis, allow tentative reconstruction of the wider precinct. The friaries of the North West have seen little detailed study, and this rare discovery of once-lost remains has greatly enhanced an understanding of the organisation of mendicant houses and the lives of their communities in the region.

The Bay Gateway, opened in 2016, is a new road linking the M6 motorway, north of Lancaster, to the port of Heysham. Its construction has provided an important opportunity to investigate the little-studied early landscape of Lancashire’s rural lower Lune Valley. The archaeological investigation was focused on seven areas that had been defined by almost a decade of preliminary works. The earliest remains included evidence of prehistoric settlement, at a location that had seen repeated activity in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, and during the Bronze Age. The findings make a significant contribution to the understanding of several millennia of human activity that are otherwise poorly understood in Lancashire. The most extensive remains, dating from the twelfth to the mid-fifteenth century AD, were found on either side of the Howgill Brook. Several buildings, in both timber and stone, as well as kilns and channels, are thought to represent the remains of one or more water mills associated with Beaumont Grange, an estate belonging to Furness Abbey. This volume arises from the multi-disciplinary approach to the archaeological sites, with the emphasis placed on the integration of a wide range of data. It comprises the work of several authors from Oxford Archaeology, as well as external specialists.