Little information as to the above ground appearance of the 17th-century structure was forthcoming, partly because it had almost certainly stood on piers or blocks, and partly because the excavations were restricted by limitations of time, labor, and the desire of the owners to retain at least something of their garden. Neither extensive probing nor a soil resistivity survey revealed evidence of a second chimney, nor did they give any clues as to the total length or breadth of the cellar hole. The back wall of the chimney had been deliberately dismantled and only a thin skin of brickbats and mortar on the bottom of the robber trench survived to mark its position. It is therefore quite possible that another chimney was dismantled with sufficient completeness to elude discovery by either of the exploratory methods used. [Illustration: Figure 4.--THE CHIMNEY and underhearth foundation.] The jambs of the partially surviving chimney (fig. 4) were laid in English bond and were 1 foot 7 inches thick and 4 feet 4 inches long.[13] The interior width of the fireplace measured 7 feet, which was large by 18th-century domestic standards, but not uncommon in the 17th century before separate kitchens became the rule.[14] Both jambs were built into the side of the cellar hole and were seated on a bed of small rocks, but the robbed back-wall had rested only on the natural sandy clay at a depth of 2 feet 3 inches below the modern grade. In front of the chimney, and rising from the cellar floor, was a massive brick-walled underhearth 7 feet 6 inches wide and projecting out from the fireplace to a distance of 5 feet. A curious and still unexplained feature of the underhearth was a 4-by 3-inch channel running across the top of the surviving foundation for a distance of 6 feet 9 inches, starting at the south face and terminating 9 inches short of the north. This channel had been bricked over and the remaining bricks had dropped into it (fig. 5) presumably after a wooden beam, which once occupied the space, had rotted or burned out. Traces of burned or carbonized wood lay on the clay bottom of the channel, but the bricks over it displayed no evidence of fire. The only conceivable explanation for the presence of the wood must be that it was part of a frame used to hold the block of natural sandy clay together while the underhearth wall was being erected around it. As the underhearth foundation would have originally risen at least another 2 feet 6 inches above the timber to the floor level of the house, the wood would not have been in danger of igniting from the heat of the domestic fire. But if the house ultimately burned, it is possible that the exposed end of the timber might have caught fire and slowly been consumed along its entire length.