13th Century house and well found underneath Weymouth Bowl car park
What could be one of Melcombe Regis' first homes has got historians very excited.
Digging at the former MFA Weymouth Bowl site has uncovered the remains of a 13th century home that may have been one of the first in Melcombe Regis.
Archaeologists are very excited over the find which gives us a glimpse into a historic dark zone.
Next to the remains are the ruins of an old 13th century well. The foundations of an old chapel-turned-theatre have been found in a separate part of the car park.
But the finds could cause delays to future developments at the site, which is due to see 59 new flats and four non-residential units on the found floor.
It could be decided further archaeological investigations are needed before development on the site can begin.
Melcombe Regis was founded by Edward I in the 1280s who was a keen town planner. St Nicholas Street, where the MFA Weymouth Bowl building is, was already there when the town was built and a lot of the town layout was probably grafted onto it.
But there's still very little known about the time period in Weymouth's history.
Richard McConnell is leading the dig. He said:
"It does help us to confirm a picture because there was some really good historical information in the latter centuries and obviously the nearer to the present day, the better the information that we have.
"If we go back to the 13th Century for example and the genesis of Melcombe Regis we know really very, very little. There's as you can imagine very little opportunity to investigate in an urban environment, and this is one of the very few investigations as far as we know that have investigated those medieval remains."
"We'd like to dig everything up if we got the opportunity, that's rarely the case. But we've seen a little bit of a keyhole of the medieval period here. If we had to aggregate all of that value and significance of what we've been finding, I think the very earliest evidence on the street frontage is probably the most significant in terms of an understanding of how Weymouth really started to what we see today.
"It's a bit of a black hole in terms of our knowledge of that period in Weymouth."