9th July

This is a post from yesterday's dig, on account of my having a day off today! I hope everyone's had a lovely day today, and look forward to finding out what's happened tomorrow morning! However, yesterday....

We finally found the sides of the cut of the ditch in Area 2 (above). Hooray! Rog and team had noticed a colour change in the fill on Wednesday and had stopped to record, but yesterday we pushed back another 0.5m to find the original cut to the west of the ditch. It looks like what Rog and co. had found was a fill slumping layer, so we have recorded the new material with a separate context number. To the east of the ditch, first-time digger Glyn has been finding the eastern cut of the ditch, and what looks like a gulley or ditch running into the main ditch. Can't wait to find out what has happened tomorrow!

Yesterday Donna and team also took stock of our finds, bagged up those which have been washed and dried, and worked through a good number of our finds backlog. We've bagged them up by type (Pottery, bone, CBM, shell etc.) so they can go straight to our specialists for identification. It still looks like most of our material is 12th-14th century, but we'd love to find something earlier...

Volunteer Chris Terry has also been teaching other volunteers how to take heights on trenches and features using a dumpy level. This is quite old-school technology, working from benchmarks on the side of churches, then working from a Temporary Bench Mark in the field, and then up to the individual trenches, but for most of our groups who don't have access to state-of-the-art GPSs, this is invaluable.