Excavation of an early eighteenth-century garden pond: the West Pond, Castle Bromwich Hall, West Midlands

Abstract

This paper deals with the excavation of an 18th-century ornamental garden pond sited on a principal vista of a large walled garden belonging to Castle Bromwich Hall, the ancestral home of the Bridgeman family. The pond was made with substantial clay walls and a clay base to enable it to hold water on a sandy hill-top site. It contained an early example of a sophisticated exit sluice that enabled the pond to be drained down for maintenance. The pond was thought to have been constructed about 1745 but had been backfilled by 1802, ensuring its almost perfect survival as a rare unaltered example of its type.