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Founded 1955
Forty Hall Watching Brief, 2003
The Enfield Archaeological Society has for many years been researching into the history of Forty Hall, a manor house of the 1620s which is now the borough's main museum and a venue for heritage events. In 1997 one of our most senior members, Geoffrey Gillam, published a study of the history and archaeology of the hall and its grounds (Gillam, G. (1997) Forty Hall Enfield – available from the society at meetings or from Forty Hall itself).
In 2003 remodelling of the walled garden attached to the house and then cable laying for CCTV in front of the house necessitated watching briefs as the site is scheduled and we undertook them on behalf of the London Borough of Enfield who own the property.
In the garden we found paths and foundations of walls that formerly (probably in the nineteenth century) divided up the garden in a quite different fashion to its present plan. The photographs here show two sections of one of the walls (Forty Hall watching brief 2 and 3) including the base for a decorative pillar at its end and the remains of a probable raised bed (Forty Hall watching brief 1).
In front of the house. ...watch this space for forthcoming photographs ... we found parts of a terrace including decorative brick and pebble work and the main path across the terrace to the front of the house.
This adds to what we know from excavations in 1993 about the area between the house and what is now a lake and allows us to begin to reconstruct a probable series of ?seventeenth century terraces that would have led down to an earlier water feature.