Time Team Tiltyard and Bowling Alley, Hampton Court Palace

In March 2009,Oxford Archaeology (OA), in conjunction with Time Team, excavated a series of Archaeological Trenches within the grounds of Hampton Court Palace. The work was commissioned by Videotext in advance of the production of a Time Team Special concerning Henry VIII's Palaces. A total of eight trenches were excavated. These were located through a combination of documentary research and the results of geophysical survey. The first three trenches were targeted on the assumed site of Henry VIII's northern bowling alley. The subsequent five trenches investigated the likely positions of four 'lost' towers within the area of Henry's Tiltyard. The eastern foundation wall of Henry's bowling alley was revealed running through Trenches 1, 2 and 3 with later, additional buttress foundations uncovered in both Trenches 1 and 3. In Trench 1 a possible western wall to the structure was also identified beneath the existing garden wall. Evidence for the demolition and robbing of material from the bowling alley structure prior to re-landscaping of the area was found throughout the three trenches. In the Tiltyard area, the remains of two of the historic Tiltyard Towers were identified. In Trench 4, A north-south aligned foundation wall was recorded on the postulated site of the North-East Tower, the twin to the sole surviving South-East Tower. The foundation had been re-used for the extant garden wall. Trench 6 yielded the north-south alignment of a further Tower foundation, possibly that of the South-West Tower. The facing of this foundation had been removed in a robbing episode and the area re-landscaped.. Trenches 2 and 6 revealed evidence of later, possibly 17th-18th-century garden features in addition to Tudor structural features. Trenches 7 and 8 revealed only evidence of probable 17th-18th-century garden features in the form of planting beds. Trench 5 contained no significant archaeological features or deposits.