Day 5: Thursday brought more rain but we power through…

David and the A team had another day of rain and trowelling… The A team persevered through the horrible weather and substantial mud to clean up the trench. This was difficult as the mud was close to making us fall over due to the substantial weight it added to our shoes. We successfully cleaned back around 3/4 of trench 8 however it is to be seen if the continued unfortunate weather will ruin the hard work we put in today. Hopefully, the weather will improve before tomorrow.

Lucy’s group makes some discoveries… Powering through this less than pleasant weather, my group and I were focusing on removing the backfill still remaining in the north east corner of the site. Under the backfill lay a Roman pit (shown in the photo below), which has been cut by a gully. Exciting finds were uncovered during the excavation work today, such as a clay tobacco pipe bowl and some pottery dating to the post medieval period. Hopefully we’ll have some clearer skies tomorrow along with more discoveries and finds.

Difficult conditions but the archaeology is almost all revealed ready for more excavation

Kimberley’s team make good progress… Today team D continued to clear the majority of the remaining backfill from the trench. The day mostly consisted of using shovels and spades and emptying the soil into buckets to be taken to the spoil heap. As it was raining (no surprise there), we took "bucketing" in turns due to the trench being so slippy and muddy. Even though it was bad weather we still managed to make good progress and expose most of the terram that we were working on.

Amazing work to clear the remaining (soggy) spoil from the terram layer sealing the site.