Historical rubbish proves mine of information in Chippenham (From This Is Wiltshire)

Historical rubbish proves mine of information in Chippenham

7:00am Sunday 21st March 2010 in

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Historians in Chippen-ham are piecing together clues which will give information about 17th- century life in the town.

An architectural discovery in the Market Place has kept volunteers at the Chippenham Museum and Heritage Centre busy as they put together pieces of bowls, plates and pots dating back to between 1680 and 1720.

Curator Mike Stone said: “It is quite a remarkable collection because to have complete wine bottles is unique.

“It tells a story about the people who would have lived at the address.

“The items could be in there because the owners were moving house and had a clear out, they could have had a disastrous collapse of shelves in the kitchen, or they had some money come in and got rid of their old stuff.”

The items were found after developers MJ Church agreed to an architectural watching brief, but museum volunteers were not sure what they would find underneath a derelict outbuilding.

Mr Stone said: “You never know what you might find in a back garden, but there are usually two things you can guarantee.

“One is an outside toilet, which there were traces of, and the other is a rubbish pit.

“We are in the day when there wasn’t much packaging, and if they broke something they had to get rid of it.

“If they were a wealthy family involved in the cloth industry we would expect them to have some more exotic foreign ware.

“We would guess that they were in retail.”

In a pit measuring roughly two metres square and half a metre deep Mr Stone and volunteer Clive Green found kitchen and glassware including three intact late 17th-century wine bottles and pottery.

Mr Stone said: “We are very grateful that they let us go in and excavate the area.

“It appears they have all been dumped in one go, and we can arrive at a rough date by the shape of the bottles and the fact that there is a name on the top of the pipes.

“The most unusual find is the spoon, which is bronze – based on the shape it is from the time of Elizabeth I.”