York Historic Environment Record

A series of six small trenches were dug against the City Wall in the vicinity of Lord Mayor’s Walk (chainage 2100 – 2240) during March 2010 in order to investigate the footings of the wall prior to remedial work on this section of the wall. It was also hoped that this archaeological work would resolve a number of issues such as the location of the now lost Tower 29, the location of the Roman Fortress gateway (the portus decumana) and the reason for a number of unusual offsets and construction patterns in the wall in this area. This evaluation did not provide any evidence for the location of the Roman gateway but did show that there was a clear vertical gap of at least 0.5m between the base of the medieval wall and any surviving Roman structures in the area. This confirms the findings of Miller in the 1920s on the inside of the wall in the vicinity. Little light was shed on the offsets investigated although the offset under examination in Trench 2 proved to line up perfectly with a stub of buried masonry. Although possibly part of a buttress examination of the wall in this spot indicates that this masonry is more likely to be part of Tower 29 which is believed to have been dismantled prior to 1822.