Sorry for the delay in updates. It seems to be the law in archaeology that features appear at the last moment, and time moves so quickly on the last few days!
We had lots of visitors today, the school came back to do some post excavation finds washing and colleagues from our team came to visit and to help. Stephen, one of our curators, was soon mattocking and Mike our gardens advisor was chief bucket emptier along with our line manager Wendy.
Our team from the National Trust came to visit and help on site, Stephen wielding the mattock
Due to the time constraints it was time to reduce the trench size again and target the areas we needed answers from. The eastern end of the mound was not behaving so we need to find where it ended and if the stoney area was related to the mound or something else altogether.
Millie and Carol were giving the mission to sort out the eastern end
Meanwhile down at the western end of the trench Rob was finding a ditch cutting through the end of the mound!
The ditch appearing with the black mound material on the right edge of the smaller trench
Martin recording the ditch with help from Rob who dug it
The mound keeps going down, but has now got small patches of clay within it; hopefully not far to go now until we find the bottom of it.
The black mound
This was the day the kiln/hearth/oven would reveal it’s flue/opening, or was it! As I worked to remove more of the red burnt clay (possibly the collapsed walls of the feature) I found the edge of a piece of pottery. It looked like it may be sat under a lump of clay that may have been one side of the opening of the kiln/hearth/oven.
The edge of a large sherd of pottery
As I dug it got bigger, and bigger.
The pottery got bigger!
Then it was time to remove the clay that seemed to be filling it.
The pottery fully exposed
Sadly it was cracked and small roots had grown through the cracks. As each piece came out we realized it was a base of a pot.
A lovely base
Phew! What a day. We stayed late to get as much done as we could, Martin had been recording and drawing the sections, while we all concentrated on our own small areas of the site. We left for a well-earned end of dig pizza, and a refreshing brew, hoping that in the last day we could manage to finish before Clive back-filled the site, and the porta- cabin disappeared!
Archaeology National Trust SW 