26th April 1957
profitable results

Another week of excavation at the Priory of St. John at Pontefract has had profitable results. The work is necessarily very slow and painstaking, but in consequence the cloister area has been almost fully surveyed and much of the cloister walk has been proved. The coffin mentioned in the report in ‘The Express’ last week was discovered in the cloister walk and on Tuesday a second more or less complete skeleton was found it what may have been a spiral staircase near the Chapter House - which has proved to be 10-sided instead of eight as anticipated. It was not a stone coffin, but signs of a wooden coffin and coffin nails were found. The skeleton has been sent to the Leeds City Museum for examination.

The discovery was not of major interest to the diggers, who are more concerned with the layout of the monastery. They have gained more satisfaction from the tracing of the cloister and from proving that the site of the monastery’s great church is in the hilly ground adjoining the present excavations. Other discoveries are of a small area of four or five large tiles near the church site and of three steps of another spiral staircase. Some drainage has also been found.

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