The consolidation work at the Peel has been completed!
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Let’s take a closer look at some aspects of the work:
The staircase ·
The Peel Tower features a turnpike stair: it has spiral stairs that wind around a central pole, called a newel. Before consolidation, only two steps of the staircase were still attached to the stonewall, as you can see (in the middle of overgrown vegetation) on the left-hand side picture below. How did we get from the image on the left to the image on the right? · During the project, archaeologists identified and recovered some of the original turnpike steps. In the middle of the rubble outside the tower, they even found a whole unbroken turnpike stone! Other recovered stones were missing their
shaft sections (the narrow part that would have connected them to the newel), or their butts (the wide part, that connects to the stone wall). Pieces of the newel were also recovered in the debris, and more broken turnpikes steps were found elsewhere on the ground in the tower.Once the stones had been identified, the architect proposed plans for reconstruction. These pictures show the fragments of turnpike stones found on site.Once soft sediment and loose stones were removed from the ground, providing a firm base for reconstruction, the staircase could be reconstructed. The aim was to consolidate the structure, using the original stones, not to rebuild a whole staircase with new material: that’s why there are still missing fragments in the completed work.
When removing loose stones and sediment in and around the tower, other dressed stones were recovered. Dressed stones (as opposed to undressed stones) are stones that have been worked to a desired shape, size and finish. Among these were found a rybat (a polished stone piece that forms the side of a window), which was identified as belonging to a first-floor window, a carved lintel (a beam usually placed above a window or door), as well as some roofing slates and pottery sherds.
To see pictures of the completed work and of the items mentioned above, check out our project page.
The walls
Before any work was carried out on the Peel, the building had been described as an “inaccessible masonry structure at risk of local collapse”. The building was overgrown with vegetation and large trees had even taken roots into the walls. The walls were largely buried in a mix of stone debris from previous collapse, soil and vegetation.
The pictures below show a tree stump growing through one of the tower’s walls. ·
However, the vegetation that damaged the Peel would have also helped to prevent any further collapse of the stonewall over the years. For example, the grass growing on top of the walls had acted as a natural protective cover to the stones. That’s why this project involved using soft capping to protect the consolidated structure.
The picture below shows this soft capping (turf) on top of the Peel walls:
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Check out our project page for more information about this project!
