Exciting discoveries at Sheffield Castle excavations link up city’s past and future

Where shoppers once hunted for bargains at Castle Market or Victorian steelworkers laboured in the heat, archaeologists are now uncovering the ruins of the castle where Mary, Queen of Scots was held prisoner and which was besieged during the English Civil War.

It was well worth getting wetter than Rishi Sunak to see it all and Sheffielders have snapped up the chance of a tour or volunteered to join in with the excavation.

A team from Wessex Archaeology are working to uncover the story of the castle, dating back to medieval times. At the same time, workers from specialist construction firm Keltbray are clearing what remains of the concrete structure of the market.

By 2026, the fruits of their collective labours will be on display as the castle gatehouse, which is now emerging after centuries of being buried, will form the centrepiece of the Castlegate project that will celebrate and tell the story of Sheffield’s origins.

The castle was built at the confluence of the Rivers Sheaf and Don – Sheffield gets its name from the ‘Sheaf Field’ here. In two years’ time, a new park at Castlegate will put the castle remains on display for the first time. Visitors will be able to walk there alongside a deculverted part of the Sheaf that has also been long underground.

Gateway

The project, which will include an events space believed to be on the site of a 17th-century bowling green, has been brought together by Sheffield City Council, using government Levelling Up Fund money to create a new gateway to the city.

The regeneration plans for the area will also see Canada House on Commercial Street becoming a major music teaching and performance space for young people and a new art project led by S1 Artspace.

Ashley Tuck, the archaeologist leading the dig on behalf of Wessex Archaeology, looks forward to Sheffielders being able to eat their lunchtime sandwiches surrounded by the city’s early history.

Their work is just beginning to give a size of the scale of the castle that once dominated the area – the defensive earthwork like an artificial hill that the castle once stood on stretched all the way to Fitzalan Square, said Ashley.

The team were delighted to uncover the remains of huge internal walls measuring 1.5 metres wide in places that they did not know still existed.

The steelworks and later the concrete base of Castle Market have obliterated much of what had survived after the castle found itself on the losing side in the English Civil War and was destroyed by the Parliamentarians in the 17th century.

Guesswork

Ashley said that the gatehouse is a key part of the project: “We are absolutely over the moon to be able to investigate that further to be able to confirm what we think we know from observations in the 1920s and 1950s and be able to reveal new material never seen before.”

He said that it’s more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – it’s actually a once-only event.

What the archaeologists are discovering gives a picture of what the castle layout would have been – previous attempts to show what it would have looked like were based on guesswork as no drawings remain.

In the next week or so, the archaeologists will be able to link up the extent of that part of the wall to see how it relates to the opposite corner that was revealed by their early exploratory work.

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As well as part of the gatehouse, the excavation has uncovered for the first time the stone-built pier of the castle drawbridge that would have housed the mechanism to move it.

The castle well still reaches 12.5 metres down to the Sheaf. The team lowered a camera into the well.

“We got quite an exciting video,” said Ashley. “It shows the stone coping. At some point, it cuts through the bedrock and at the bottom there is still water.

Imprisoned

“You can peer down through cracks in the coping and if the sun’s in the right place you can still see water at the bottom. It was capped off in the 19th century with pieces of stone and iron bars.

“On top of that they installed one of the walls of the steelworks and somehow they got away with that.”

The initial site investigations in 2018 found that the steelworks had both a sanitation and a crucible furnace that were used in different parts of the steelmaking process.

The moat around the castle was more than six metres deep. Excavations into it have uncovered some of the tiniest objects, such as pieces of pottery, that bring the story of the vast building to life.

A 16th-century jetton, a coin-like token that was used to make calculations on a board used like an abacus, came from Nuremberg in Germany. “They were making jettons much closer than Nuremberg,” said Ashley. “It’s really good evidence of international trade and movement.

“It’s from the mid-16th century so it’s contemporary with the period when Mary, Queen of Scots would have been imprisoned in the castle. It’s our most spectacular find, the most eye-grabbing.”

Slaughter

Intriguingly, a single large post-hole found on top of the earthwork may hold clues to an earlier timber castle believed to have been on the site, said Ashley. Burned charcoal found in the hole will be sent off for radiocarbon dating to determine its age.

Other scientific tests will determine what plants grew nearby.

There is also an unexpected later glimpse into life in the area – a Victorian cobbled gennel has been uncovered. It runs alongside some tiny workers’ houses that were cheek by jowl with the city abattoirs, where blood from the slaughter of animals flowed into the river.

It must have been a grim place to live, with the ever-present noise and smells of livestock slaughter as a background to daily life.

The team found a beautiful Victorian florin in one of the houses. It’s called a gothic florin because of the gothic-style lettering on it.

Ashley said: “It’s a large lump of silver and would have been a significant loss to the low-status workers that were inhabiting those terrible houses.”

Identity

The gennel is shown on a map of 1853, said Ashley, and it follows exactly the line of the edge of the old castle moat, so it shows that the castle directly influenced the layout of the city for hundreds of years.

Ashley, who lives in Sheffield, summed up his feelings about the project: “Sheffield is famous for steel and cutlery, and rightly so, but in this post-industrial period we find ourselves in, a lot’s changed since the 1980s. It can be hard for people to know what Sheffield means.

“We’ve got an opportunity to revisit Sheffield’s identity and to be able to put back on public display part of that history and fill that hole in the story. That will have an impact on people’s sense of being – what does it mean for people to live and work in Sheffield?

“It’s not just exposing some stones that are a bit interesting, it’s making a real contribution to place, wellbeing and mental health.”

He added: “It’s an honour to dig here – there are many competent archaeologists in the region. To be the people here with our trowels in the ground, investigating these structures and deposits, is a thrill of a lifetime.

“When the machines stop and I’ve stood on top on my own, it’s a really nice place to be.”

To keep up to date with the dig, visit www.wessexarch.co.uk or follow @wessexarch on social media (hashtag #SheffieldCastle).