FOR three hundred years the immaculate lawn of Hursley Park has hidden a secret.

A secret that dry weather has occasionally revealed, a tantalising glimpse of a lost mansion, once the home of Richard Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.

This summer, an archaeological dig organised by The Winchester Archaeology & Local History Society (WARG), together with archaeologists from the University of Winchester, had an opportunity to uncover that secret. What they found has been a revelation.

Throughout the medieval period Hursley Park was a Deer Park, created by the Bishops of Winchester for hunting. During the Reformation it was taken from the Church and granted by Edward VI to Sir Philip Hobby who in 1552, according to tradition, built a Lodge in the Park.

For over 150 years the Lodge was at the heart of the manor eventually passing to Richard Maijor, a wealthy Southampton merchant whose daughter Dorothy married Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, and it was his daughters who were eventually to sell, a now dilapidated, lodge to William Heathcote in 1718 and who in 1721 demolished it to make way for his new mansion house and gardens.

That was the history, as far as we knew, only a 1588 picture and a later etching hinting at what the lodge may have looked like, yet neither matched the marks on the lawn. So the archaeologists were tasked with discovering what was beneath the surface and what it could tell us about the Lodge and it’s history.

The first job was to decide where to look. Using a geophysical survey, to identify ‘anomalies’ hidden under the lawn, three trenches were carefully selected and the volunteer “diggers” began their work.

What quickly became clear was that this a far more complex story than anyone had expected. Brick walls were raised, taken down, extended and strengthened as the Lodge got bigger and grander (probably gaining an extra floor in the process).

In one of the trenches a stairwell led to a network of underground passages, rooms and vaulted cellar. In another, the hearths and scorch marks of fireplaces, an oven and a round ‘copper’ suggested that the kitchen range had been found. In the third trench the front wall of the house, complete with stone doorstep, cobbled courtyard and an impressive porch, was revealed. 

Amid the buildings, glimpses of daily life: fragments of decorated tiles imported from the Low Countries and window glass all hinting at the high quality and status of the building. Alongside these the pottery, glass, ironwork & bones of daily life.

More remarkable still, beneath the kitchen a flint-faced stone wall, possibly from a medieval hall, emerged reusing even older fine building stones. Before the dig the earliest known building in the park was thought to be a small lodge built by a carpenter in 1413. Now we have a medieval hall and a lot of research to do.

One of the last finds, a set of keys, was found close to the Lodge’s entrance. Could these be the keys to Ricard Cromwell’s Lodge? No longer of any use and thrown into the now demolished building as it disappeared beneath the lawn? It would be nice to think so.

Today Hursley Park is owned by IBM. Following the completion of the dig, members of the team hosted some of the volunteers and IBM staff together with their families on a tour of the dig. In just two weeks WARG have opened a remarkable window into an almost forgotten part of Hursley Park’s remarkable history.

As Location Leader Nyree Spencer remarked: “While we continue to develop the technology of the future, we are also building on the foundations of history. With over 60 years of IBM developing software at Hursley, we have a site with a remarkable heritage. Our Grade II* listed building welcomes clients to our Hursley Briefing Centre where together they innovate with our technical experts, solving critical business challenges. Sitting under portraits of the 18th Century owners and looking out across the south lawn, they’ve been intrigued by the foundations of the Tudor Great Lodge, visible in dry seasons.

I was delighted to welcome Winchester Archaeology and Winchester University on site this summer, to discover what lay under our lawn. It’s been truly exciting watching the careful peeling back of layers of the past, and some of our IBMers were able to help with the dig as volunteers.”

The lawn is being returned to its original state and the Lodge again disappearing beneath it. What follows is a lot of hard work documenting and analysing what was found and what it can tell us about ‘The Great Lodge’.

If you would like to know more about the team involved and read their day by day account of the excavation please go http://www.warg.org.uk

David Key

Volunteer Historian for Hursley Park