Monument record BSE 709 - Remains of 19th century horticultural glasshouses, Staff Compound Abbey Gardens

The monitoring of groundwork excavations within the Abbey Gardens, Bury St Edmunds revealed the remains of some of the horticultural glasshouses that occupied the site from the late 19th century until the mid-20th. The site was in the gardener’s compound, located in the northeast corner of what was once the medieval abbey’s Great Courtyard. Previous archaeological investigations have shown that the surface of the courtyard was 600mm below the current ground levels and the subsequent build-up is best illustrated by the half-buried 13th century door visible in the rear wall of the gardener’s mess room.
The build-up of material over the medieval ground surface is made up of a combination of rubble associated with the destruction of the abbey buildings and deposition of what is thought to be town rubbish; a 200-300mm thick layer of black silt that contains a large quantity of food waste, in the form of oyster and mussel shells and animal bones. This layer covers an extensive part of the Great Courtyard and was encountered again during the current monitoring. The ‘town rubbish layer’ was seemingly deposited during the 17-18th century and has since been buried beneath layers of imported topsoil associated with the creation of the botanical gardens and rubble from the demolition of its 19th century glasshouses; the current excavations occurred entirely within these modern upper layers (S1).