9. Thursday 13th September 2012

After a well timed and well needed break yesterday, we were all back with a vengeance today.

This meant backfilling trench 1, where even The Management got stuck in! Surprisingly we had too much soil left over at the end, so went sprinkling more soil onto the other backfilled trenches. 

John and Alison both brought cake, so in our first tea-break we had cake, and then more at the second tea-break. So, stuffed full of cake, we headed up the hill, to trenches 2, 6 and 7. Here, David decided to put in a few test trenches where there had been hot-spots found by the metal detector and gradiometer. 

Digging test pits in F52B
Photo by John Asher

In the first and third trenches were found charcoal and worked chert, but in the other two there was nothing but those dastardly bracken roots and worms!

In trench 6, our friends from Africa, who are visiting us from the Ivory Coast, Sudan and Eritrea, did find some animal bone and teeth, plus a very clear opening into the enclosure around the upper dwelling, concluding part of the puzzle.

From the relatively dry but windy morning, the afternoon brought with it the rain. But still we battled on. This turned out to be a good thing, because eventually in trench 7 we found an iron object under wall tumble, leaving David skipping with the finds bag, despite the pouring rain.

Site supervisor, Darcy, keeps an eye on things
Photo by John Asher

We gave up at our afternoon tea-break and just went home, leaving the trenches to the sheep who had already started to walk all over our newly backfilled trenches.

Jennifer Stearne