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New Malton is old–very old. The heart of the North Yorkshire market town, plain Malton to most, might seem to be a Georgian and Victorian creation, but local researchers are revealing a startling truth about their home : that it’s still medieval (if you go underground). Conservation stonemason and research worker Nigel Copsey reports on recent findings


Down a bit, and back centuries


70 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 2 2011


T


o scratch the surface of most Georgian façades in NewMalton is to find earth plasters and stonewalls of a very un-Georgian dimension, laid up in earth


mortars,with vaulted or stone-walled cellars beneath. There are early Victorian cellars in town, beneath wholly 19th-century structures that occupy groundwhichwas once the yards of adjacent burgage plots – but these are built of brick throughout, and are the exception not the rule. Themedieval borough boundary, laid


out in 1150–makingNewMalton one of the earliest planned towns in England– remains remarkably legible and well-defined,with themajority of its original burgage plots intact. There are a number of stone-vaulted


undercroftswithin themedieval boundary of the borough ofNew Malton, and their number is still being assessed. In addition, there are asmany cellarswhich are not vaulted, butwhich may be considered to have been possibly vaulted in the past . These have stone vaults very similar in character to those cellarswhich retain their original configuration. There are vaultswithout the historic town boundary – inOld


Malton, associated immediatelywith theGilbertine Priory – and justwithout the townwall in Yorkersgate, beneath the TalbotHotel. The pattern of the older undercrofts


is of twomain types: the first type are the simple barrel vaultswith groined cross vaults at intervalswhere there are – orwere –windows, the vastmajority of these nowbelowground. The second type are themore complex, groined cross vaultswhichmainly have pilasters (somewith central columns) or responds seated in thewallswithout pilasters, aswell aswindows and doorways, also nowbelowground. The construction of the vaulted


spaces is generally similar: the floor of the undercroft is of naked bed-rock or of earth, stone, brick or tile laid directly upon bedrock; the same bed-rock forms the foundation of the building ofwhich the vault is a part. Thewalls aremostly of rudely (but expertly) dressed limestone –most often ofMalton oolitic limestone, but also ofHildenley limestone. Some of the undercrofts havewalls of large blocks ofHildenley limestone, aswell as pilasters and columns of the same (the north-west undercroft beneath the TalbotHotel, for example).Others have pilasters of


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