The Quay

Stand in the garden of Island House at low tide and you are standing on a waterfront. The house sits at the edge of the old town of Laugharne, on the gravelly ground where the little Coran stream once met the tide, just outside the medieval walls and in the shadow of the castle. For centuries this was not a garden at all but a working edge of the sea, a place where the estuary reached in, and where boats could come alongside.

That is no longer a guess. Between the 2020 season and the recent digs, commissioned by Island House Restoration Ltd and supervised by Ken Murphy for Heneb, the Trust for Welsh Archaeology (formerly the Dyfed Archaeological Trust), the trenches beside the house gave up the waterfront itself. The archaeologists found stone quays built in the thirteenth or fourteenth century on burgage plots laid out over a tidal inlet that had been used for dumping since the twelfth (Heneb’s phasing, still provisional), outside the town walls; as that inlet silted, later quays were built further out, so the ground reads as a sequence of shorelines retreating from the house across the medieval centuries. Heneb describes it as the first medieval quay to be excavated in Wales.

The quay did not stand alone. The same ground held a large, high-status medieval hall house, a hall open to its roof, with a central fireplace and the smoke finding its way out high above. In the 2020 season the diggers traced a watercourse that the town and castle had used as a midden from the twelfth century, its layers left undisturbed. And among the finds came the imported pottery, the clearest proof of reach. Ceramics that began life in Bristol, on the French coast, and further south still speak of a household plugged into long-distance trade.

The pottery shows how far this waterfront reached. The continental wares came largely by way of Bristol, the great port across the Bristol Channel, with perhaps a little trade direct with France. Day to day, the creek handled the cargoes of the Taf estuary: grain, oats, coal and stone. Centuries later the same plot was home to the Skyrmes, whose 65-ton sloop, the William Skyrme, appears in Lloyd’s Register. One waterfront, two ages.

What the excavation has proved. The stone quays, the medieval hall house, the undisturbed midden and the imported pottery are all in the excavator’s own record.

What comes next. Heneb’s full report will show how large the quay was and how much traffic it handled. Laugharne had other landings on the estuary too, the Old Wharf by the ferry and Fern Hill’s Old Quay, and the report will help show how this quay fits among them.

Stories the town tells. Mary Curtis wrote in 1880 that ships from Virginia once landed tobacco here, and local lore remembers sea-steps and lost bridges. These are traditions, and this page keeps them as traditions.

The house’s own timbers. Stable-isotope dating for the Royal Commission in 2021 places the felling of the front-range roof oak in the winter of 1656/57, and the rear range in 1668–74. An earlier tree-ring date of 1437 has been withdrawn.