But the archaeology beneath and around those remnants tells a densely layered story, one in which kitchen rubbish, stable drainage, a poorly judged doorway, and a handful of medieval coins each contribute a chapter. The site is a forework, the fortified enclosure built to protect the entrance of a castle keep, and its excavation has produced a remarkably precise account of how a single patch of ground was adapted, repaired, subdivided, and eventually buried over the course of several centuries.

The story begins with a ring-work, an early form of fortification consisting of a bank and surrounding ditch, or fosse, constructed here in 1172. That fosse was kept open for over a century before being filled in with boulder clay and domestic refuse sometime between 1280 and 1300, probably when a new masonry forework was built to replace an earlier timber arrangement around the keep entrance. The rectangular enclosure that replaced it measured roughly 17.5 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, with circular towers at its corners and a causeway crossing the remnant of the old fosse. Coin evidence suggests the forework was built under Roger Mortimer, who became the first Earl of March after succeeding to the de Geneville liberty in 1308, though an earlier great hall and the subdivision of the keep's upper level were likely the work of his predecessor Geoffrey de Geneville. Embedded within the forework's eastern wall, which at 2.2 metres was noticeably thicker than the others, was a stable, with post-holes, hitching posts, and a drainage gully still legible in the excavated ground plan. Later, probably in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, a washhouse was inserted into the complex, reached by a doorway cut through the north tower of the keep. That alteration was consequential: weakening the tower's structure in this way may have contributed directly to its eventual collapse, which coin evidence places in the early eighteenth century, with late seventeenth-century coins found beneath the fallen stonework and eighteenth-century material accumulating on top of it. Before that collapse, a later building had already used the forework's west wall as its own east wall, blocking the original entrance and leaving the stable derelict. By the time the tower came down, it sealed the entire forework area beneath its rubble, preserving the sequence of surfaces, drains, and post-settings that excavation would eventually uncover.