UCLan Masterplan is stalled due to major archaeological find

Contractors were working when they made the culinary discovery

Work on major new buildings on the university campus in Preston has ground to a halt.

The University of Central Lancashire has made a groundbreaking discovery that could shed new light on our ancient ancestors’ foodie preferences.

Adelphi Square is a £50m part of the £200m campus Masterplan and includes a new layout for the roundabout and a new student centre facing into where the Adelphi roundabout is.

Contractors had to stop work earlier this week when performing some exploratory drilling when they came across what turned out to be a perfectly preserved prehistoric pie.

A spokesperson for the contractors said: “We weren’t sure what it was at first, the site manager spotted it sticking out of the earth and we thought it might have been a small WW2 bomb. Then we saw what looked to be a crust. Whatever it was we knew we had something pretty unusual on our hands so we called in University’s archaeological specialists.”

This is what the new public square will look like on what was the Adelphi roundabout

After closer inspection in the University’s labs the ancient pie find was confirmed. It represents an important link to Preston’s heritage and archaeologists at the university are hoping that it will provide valuable insight into our ancestors’ pie preferences.

Senior lecturer in archaeology Rick Peterson said: “The UCLan pie is potentially a really important piece of evidence for past diets and lifeways. We already know from isotopic bone-chemistry studies of the Preston Dock skulls that prehistoric and early medieval people in the area had a diet rich in protein and carbohydrates.

“A find like this, of an actual preserved piece of food, tells us so much more about the detail of what people ate. We don’t yet know exactly how old the pie is but once it has been dated, it may turn out to be even as old as the famous 6,000 year old barm-cake from Yarnton in Oxfordshire.”

A cordon has been placed around where the UCLan pie was discovered as further excavation is to take place as the archaeologists keep digging deeper.

This was obviously an April Fool’s Day joke, we hope it brightened a damp morning in Preston! The UCLan Masterplan remains on track.