Week 1 Completed

Matt W. reflects on his first week of digging:

Over the first week there have been many different activities that we have done. Day 1 was the 'day of digging,' which took a while to get used to, for a townie such as myself.  Through the back-breaking shovelling and intense heat the progress was hard, but fulfilling at the same time. Day 2 was mostly pulling up the canvas material from the site which we had dug down to the previous day; in the afternoon my group had a well earned rest. On day three we began the seemingly neverending task of scraping the site clean, which gave birth to the phrase 'there's always more dirt'. Even so, we kept scraping and came up with a few finds such as animal bone and pottery. The most exciting find I discovered was a musketball and a cow or horse's tooth. Ee also did site photography and touched up on our topography, where Mike B had a touching moment with a squirrel. Day 4 we did yet more scraping and learnt how to fill in a context sheet, but soon the site was cleaned and we were assigned some excavating tasks along a linear feature on the site, possibly a wall of the building containing the hearth. In my section of excavating the notable finds were a piece of Cistercian Ware, a large bone, a Roman tegulae roof tile, a late medieval roof tile and lots of mortar which Will Mo. was most captivated with.

Matt W surveys the trench.