Exeter City Walls

 
with Dr Stuart Blaylock on Thursday, 10 April 2025
at 7pm at Leonardo Hotel Exeter [Jurys Inn Exeter Hotel]

It was a welcome return for our speaker with a very interesting talk on the Exeter City Wall. [Stuart gave us a talk and guided tour around Bowhill House, Dunsford Hill on 14 March 2012 (see the report by George Hood on the Society’s website) and a more recent talk about Rougemont Castle on 7 December 2022.] Stuart is an independent scholar and archaeologist based in Devon who has been studying historic buildings since the mid-1970s. He is the author of several books and numerous scholarly articles on archaeology, historic buildings and Near-Eastern archaeology.

Stuart began his talk with aerial photos to put the site and extent of the City Wall in context and explained that it has a circuit of 1.5 miles and covers 92 acres with 70% still standing. He showed antiquarian maps of Hooker (1587), Joseph Coles/Ichabod Fairlove (1709) and John Rocque (1744) and read out what John Leland (c.1503-52) had written about his visit. Stuart showed images of various Exeter Worthies and read a quote by Alexander Jenkins (1737-1825) who had [wrongly] thought that the wall was built by Athelstan and described it and how it was built.

Various archaeology reports had been published by the Excavation Committee which had been formed in 1928 but had been disbanded by 1939. Dr Aileen Fox had been a prominent archaeologist in the 1950s and in 1968, when the City Council wanted to destroy all of the wall at the bottom of South Street for the creation of Western Way was successful in getting part of it preserved. Stuart showed photographs of archaeological work that had been carried out on North Gate (1978), Paul Street/Harlequins (1983), Cricklepit Street (1984), Paul Street (1985) Northernhay Gardens. We also saw slides of Towers around the Wall, Western Way, Post Office Street, Rougemont Gardens, Harlequins, Ramparts, Garden of 14 The Close, diagram of the cut-away, bank, early rampart, and ditches, Magdalen Street (1986), Southgate Hotel, Princesshay, and Roman ditches, mediaeval ditches and Civil War ditches. Stuart detailed expenditure on Monuments and Muniments 1527-28, 1539-40 and 1575-76. Evidence of the building of Watergate in Peamore Stone 1578-79 had been found in the Receivers Account Roll.

Stuart said that more work needs to be done on lobbying the Council for repair work to be carried out and vegetation to be removed safely. A slide showed the many reports and leaflets that have been published over the years, including one already in this author’s possession from which a few facts will be quoted:

“FIELD GUIDE Number Twelve, Devon Archaeological Society, in association with Exeter Archaeology, 1998 [a 3 folded sheet]
  EXETER CITY WALL
The full circuit of the city wall is 2.35km (1.46 miles) in length, and encloses an area of 37ha (92 acres). Despite many losses from the circuit in the last two hundred years, standing masonry can be seen over a total length of 1705m (or 72.5%), and much of this is accessible from public streets and parks. The city wall is of Roman origin, built somewhere about the year A.D.200. Substantial remains of Roman masonry survive around the circuit … but the majority of the visible wall fabric is a mixture of later repairs, alterations and improvements.

There is a little late-Saxon work surviving in Northernhay; a good deal of Norman work associated with the castle; many later Medieval rebuilds and repairs, including a number of surviving towers; and many phases of post-medieval and modern work. It should be emphasised … that the wall is merely the most visible surviving component of a former defensive complex of earth ramparts, stone wall, and exterior ditches. The rampart survives in places inside the wall (unfortunately not in those places which are accessible); but the ditches have disappeared completely and are known only from excavation.”

Two A5 pages within the document describe “The history of the city wall”, “Building materials”, and “The Gates”, and folding out to the full A3 size shows a diagram of the extent of the wall and the streets and principal buildings of the city within. 37 points of interest are labelled with corresponding explanations. The towers and gates are named along with their dates of demolition (where relevant).

There are a number of interesting articles on Wikipedia which include information about the wall, and another on the Historic England website entitled “Roman, Anglo Saxon and medieval defences called collectively Exeter City Walls”. See also various articles on Exeter Memories, which include the history of the City Wall.

Sue Jackson