Chester Amphitheatre Project Blog

We have now excavated sections across both of the ditches uncovered in Trench III. The ditches are both aligned north-south and the most easterly ditch is definitely Roman in date (probably dating to the 2nd century AD). We think this ditch was found further to the north more than 100 hundred years ago when the public baths were built in 1899. The western ditch is more complicated as it appears to have been partly re-excavated in the medieval period and a stone pavement was set into the bottom at this time; possibly so that it could function as a track way?

Beneath the stone pavement are preserved the lower fills of the earlier ditch which we now believe to be Roman; we are still excavating this ditch to see how large it was. It would appear that the westerly ditch is the same one which contained the skeleton of a Roman woman that was uncovered to the north in 1994!