Newport
High Street Cellars: Interim Note. August 2007 Bob Trett
As
part of a continuing investigation into the possibility
of there having been a town wall around Newport I inspected
a number of cellars surviving under buildings between High
Street and Cambrian Road, Newport.
On
6th August 1997 I had inspected the cellars of the former
Tredegar Arms Inn (ST 3098 8832), at that time being converted
into Yates Wine Bar. The Tredegar Arms/Yates Wine Bar building
stands on the corner of High Street and Station Approach
and incorporates a former bank building. The cellars covered
the whole of the area under the ground floor of the original
Tredegar Arms section of the building and part of these
were being converted to toilets. During this work three
stone plaques were noticed in the partition wall separating
the cellars from the adjacent Murrenger House Inn. The stone
plaques were positioned in the wall and appear to have been
reset in the wall from somewhere else.
Two
plaques were at "waist height". One depicted a
heraldic shield with two or three chevrons (possibly the
arms of the Clare family, once lords of the lordship of
Newport. The chevrons had been painted red were not inverted
- as on the arms for the Borough of Newport). Another plaque
consisted of an armorial stag's head, the crest used by
the Morgans of Tredegar House, and with an obvious relationship
to the Tredegar Arms Inn. Some gold and red paint survived
on the stag's head. The third plaque was at "head height"
and had on it the date "1685" in gothic script.
The
wall consisted mainly of irregular blocks of stone, mortared
together. The cellar floor consisted of stone flags. There
was some indication of more possible heraldic plaques at
floor level in the cellar. Other stone walls were at that
time visible in the maze of small rooms, and particularly
in recesses adjacent to the road in Station Approach, and
a substantial stone wall running parallel with High Street.
On
8th August 2007 I visited two more properties in the company
of Richard Frame and Mike Buckingham. We inspected the cellars
of Spec Savers at 38b High Street (ST 3102 8821). The cellars
were accessed through a trap door in a small store room
and by a ladder. They consisted of two older cellars, at
the front of the building, approximately 5.5 metres wide,
with a total length of 12 metres, and of a smaller, more
modern looking cellar at the rear. The floors of the two
older cellars were stone slabs, and the walls mainly of
stone rubble mortared together. There was some dressed stone
(sand stone?) and on the northern end of the front cellar
there was a vertical line of dressed stones, possibly the
side of a filled in door. The north side also had a rotten
wooden lintel inserted in the wall. There also appeared
to have been a filled-in small opening in the wall of the
middle cellar.
We
then visited a café called Tracks at 36 Cambrian
Road (ST 3097 8826) Access to the cellars was through a
trap door in the café, but steps led down to a room
that had been decorated with stone cladding in fairly recent
times, and had presumably been used as an underground bar.
From this room doorways led to a whole series of cellars
of different shapes and sizes (possibly 30 plus rooms),
which appear to stretch under a number of different properties
between High Street and Cambrian Road. None of these cellars
had been used in recent times except in places for fitting
pipes for the rooms above. The cellars mainly had stone
flagged floors, with stone rubble mortared walls, but with
some dressed stone in places, and also brickwork. Time and
the conditions did not allow more than a preliminary look,
but there was evidence of early light fittings (1930s?),
there were some brick roofed barrel vaults, wine-cellar
type storage shelves, an iron grill across one door, and
also a blocked-in stone staircase going up.
The
cellar to the south of the "bar cellar", presumably
under 34 Cambrian Road (ST 3097 8825), had lines of dressed
stone blocks, near the floor, facing the street. If there
was a medieval town wall along the line of Cambrian Road
these would be in the right position to be part of this
wall.
We
would like to thank the proprietors of Spec Savers and Tracks
for giving us access to their cellars.
Bob
Trett
©
Bob Trett August 2007
