Written by JENNY BAKER
Time Team Crew at Palace House Stables
A television show has unearthed remains of King Charles II’s original stables during excavations at Newmarket’s Palace House – but the roots of the site may extend further into the past.
A 15-strong team of archaeologists from Channel 4’s Time Team descended on Newmarket on Monday and uncovered remains of the stables, which were built in the 1670s.
The find came in the first trench dug in King’s Yard on the Palace House site, which is owned by Forest Heath District Council.
Tony Robinson, presenter of the show, said: “If you can leave Newmarket giving the people of Newmarket more of a sense of their own history than when you arrived, that’s what we are proud of being able to do.”
He told the News that to make such a find so early in the dig hardly ever happened on Time Team, adding it was unwise to arrive at a site with a particular expectation.
He said: “It’s always bad archaeology to expect to find something because if you do that you are not going to have your antennae attuned for the surprises. What we hoped to find was much more of the history of these ancient stables.”
Mr Robinson said the possibility the site was in use before Charles’s time was suggested by a wall absent from the team’s 17th century plans.
Chris Garibaldi, director of the National Horseracing Museum, said King James I may have built his own stables there in the 1620s.
There are plans for the museum to move to the site as part of the multi-million pound Palace House Stables project. The site of the old stables itself would be used as an open-air courtyard.
Mr Garibaldi said if it could be proved Charles’s stables were used for racehorses, the new home of the museum would be established on the remnants of the oldest horseracing stables in the country.
He said the dig had revealed the fashionable red brick used as part of the palace itself was also used for the luxurious stables’ façade.
He said: “The whole idea of understanding how to control a horse was used as a metaphor for how you should rule.”
Paul Blinkhorn, Anglo-Saxon and medieval pottery expert, said: “It’s a very important site, it was Charles II that really put Newmarket on the map.”
The programme will be broadcast in April.
How exciting that at long last they really are doing something with this historic site instead of letting it continue to crumble and decay. Hooray Forest Heath District Council, Newmarket and the National Horseracing Museum.
I never thought I would be homesick for Newmarket. Perhaps I am just waxing nostalgic. Those were good old days. Why did I ever leave England? Oh, yeah. I remember now. Sigh.
In case you are wondering where you heard the name Tony Robinson before, he played Baldrick in the Black Adder series with Rowan Atkinson, among others.
Related Reading:
Historic finds a racing certainty
http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/historic_finds_a_racing_certainty_1_957947
Palace House Stables Project 2010 Update
http://www.nhrm.co.uk/Default.aspx?page=253
