Town council to spend almost £1,000 to find out age of building

Committee votes in favour of using dendrodating technique

NEWBURY Town Council will spend nearly £1,000 to establish the age of an historic building.

The council’s planning and highways committee approved the funds for the dendrodating of Weavers Cottages at a meeting on Monday night.

The technique, which uses dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, to ascertain when a building was built, will allow historians to accurately date the grade II-listed building in West Mills.

A total of £990 will be spent on the procedure and will be funded from the council’s heritage working group reserves.

Speaking at the meeting, Adrian Edwards said: “I think this will be money well spent.

“The whole area is steeped in history, particularly these cottages, which are being somewhat changed around a bit for their use over the years.

“But certainly they have been there a long, long time and that £990 is well worth spending on this.”

The canalside building is thought to have been built circa the 17th century.

According to Historic England, it was formerly a terrace of seven cottages known as The Old Weaver’s House, before they were converted into two residences in the 1960s.

Chairman of the planning and highways committee Anthony Pick told the Newbury Weekly News that the dendrodating will provide invaluable data helping to form a more comprehensive history of Newbury.

“It builds it all up,” he said.

“One of the greatest mysteries of Newbury is what it looked like and how it operated in the middle-ages with much of it destroyed and rebuilt.

“When we have done dendrodating in the past, we have found that the buildings are much older than anyone thought – some of them mid-Tudor, or early-Tudor, or in some cases even the medieval and I think the public like to know that.”