What a diference a day makes!

Day eight, sand blasted and frayed lips! My last day on site as I pass the baton on to Martin to finish all the drawing and pondering about the site 🙂

The day started with a welcome to new volunteers Alison and Vaughn and the return of Fay. Rob hoped his plants in his garden would survive without watering, as he decided to stay another day. We sectioned off an area we were going to leave unexcavated and concentrated on digging the layers down to the, hopefully, flagged floor along the back of the wall and down the sides.

The start of the day

Lots of different phases of walls at the east end of the site

As the day went on there was an amazing transformation as new levels of floors and small rooms appeared, not many finds, apart from a few small pieces of pottery on the very top of the floor.

Excalibur! sadly just a large door hinge

I managed to do a bit of digging and found Excalibur!  well it’s  probably a large hinge, I have done a long stint on site and I may have got carried away!

As the remains of the plaster and reed partition is lifted we can hope for a few sealed finds underneath, there is always hope!

So much to work out and so little time!

East end of the site with different levels of floor and small partitioned rooms

West end of the site, with half the floor cleaned off and the fallen plaster and reed wall covering the rest. Some of the plaster is still in place.

The recording and scale drawing gathers pace 🙂

Scale drawing of the uncovered walls

Crazy paving

Day six on the beach, sunny and hot, the start of the Bank holiday weekend and half term. The holiday makers were out on the beach, lots of ice creams and wind breaks.

View across the site, everyone hard at work in the sunshine

Maisy with her yummy cake, it did not last   long.

Meanwhile on the dig we welcomed Maisy and Kate to the dig team, Maisy had baked us a cake! very yummy 🙂

maisy with a handle from a WWII mug

The WWII rubbish pit carried on producing more bottles, brushes and rusty iron, Maisy found part of a badge, the letters RA in bronze.

A Brylcream bottle, brushes and probably a Brilliantine bottle.

The remains of the 18th century building expanded, with boundary walls appearing and best of all, what we hoped for, a well paved area behind the back wall. There also seems to be another building in the ‘yard’, it may even be part of a lean-to, we need to reveal more to get the whole picture. Rob found a large fragment of salt glazed stoneware pottery right on top of the ‘yard’ stones, so good dating when we research it a bit more.

Boundary wall appearing in the section

The paved ‘yard’ at the back of the building

Dolphins you say?

The approach to Godoplphin

No, I said Godolphin! That’s where I have been for two days, working through a collection of ‘things’ found around the estate. Just the kind of job I like, lots of boxes with bags, ice-cream cartons, and objects wrapped in newspaper and tissue paper, we could find anything in this lot. It’s like an excavation only without all the hard work digging tons of soil :-)Volunteers and property staff are being trained by working with me so I can leave them to continue the work, when I am unable to work with them.  Roger, a volunteer photographer will be taking record shots of each find or group of finds. These photographs will be used on a database so we know what we have, what stories we have and what we can use for events and in handling collections.

Siobhan, visitor services manager working on re- packing late medieval floor tiles

The long table in the Kings Room was ideal for laying out what was in each box. We then could sort finds out into types, like glass, tile, iron and pottery, clean and pack into archival bags and boxes. Once this job is done we can take each find type in turn and fill out our record forms,  including detailed information on present condition, dimensions, and any information we found that says  where on the property they came from.

Worked bone yum!

In one bag we came across this lovely very fine tooth bone comb, it is clogged with soil and will need careful cleaning. I got my magnifying loop out just in case there were a few head lice stuck in the prongs! 🙂 There were also complete bottles, thankfully the one with the brown gloop in it still had an intact stopper! It’s always a health and safety problem when we find intact bottles with strange brews inside, even when they still have labels, as you can never be sure what the contents are. I will tell you the story of a very special bottle found in Purbeck later in this blog so keep looking 🙂

Bone comb