HI there,
2 days for the price of one. Excellent weather so far. Threatened with rain, but only a very light sprinkling on Friday afternoon. So what's been happening?
In Trench 1, the possible wall and stone dumps were photographed, a quick plan, and then we started to dig through the stone dumps - carefully - to see if any more wall features were coming through. It looks like there was a couple of possible wall suspects (not sure what is going on yet) but there is definetely an east-west aligned wall of some sort. Looked like Masterman left some of his discovered castle wall foundations in. We are just at the point where we are finishing the clean-up of the stone dumps to expose the features below - oh, and also getting rid of some very large tree roots!
Terry and Hazel do a plan of Trench 1 - note tree going through middle of trench!
Trench 1 at the end of Day 5 - you can clearly see in the far (north) side of the trench some wall alignments. The foundations for a tower? Or later Victorian remodelling to make a folly from the remains?
Trench 2. Well! After digging down almost half a metre, a spread of roof tile throughout the whole of the trench was discovered (archaeology at last!). Such was the eagerness depth of the archaeology, Dale had to be brought in with the mattock. We even saw site boss Chris with a shovel in his hand (sorry, no photos of that, shutter speed wasn't fast enough).
Dave and Vicky expose the roof tile spread 
All spanky and clean - and right across the trench.
Action man.
The tiles themselves are a greenish stone, not local, probably from Hereford (must get more specific info on this from Rollo) and are sort of coffin-shaped, some with holes in the top where nails would have held the tiles in place and chamfered edges where the tiles would have lain across one another.
Close-up of one of the tiles from Trench 2.
The tile spread has all been taken away now, and all the tiles retained - especially the pieces with the holes in them - and Rod from the Society is going to quantify the finds. The tiles at the moment seem to be going down onto an orange sandy surface, although a sporadic cobbled surface has just appeared in the north side of the trench. More to explore on Monday.
So there we are. Simon from Archaeological Investigations dropped into site today with his wonderful Trimble GPS to put up a couple of grid pegs and trench positions to ensure our survey was located within the existing survey and the Ordnance Survey co-ordinates and OD heights.
Oh - and I have been playing with the Society's new camcorder and have lots of footage - and as soon as I work out how you tube works will put something up. A project for Sunday perhaps.
I am on site on Saturday, in case any interested parties turn up. Will maybe do a bit of trowelling, but also some finds washing in the gazebo if the weather turns a bit rainy as I have been told it will! Core diggers return on Bank Holiday Monday, where I expect we will get some more visitors.
Toodlepip.
Yes they have got me on my knees for the week. My trousers are capable of standing up by themselves when I get home! The bulk of the building stones are Triassic, Sherwood Sandstone Group/Bromsgrove Sandstone Formation/Finstall Member. Formerly the Building Stones Member. I have some stratigraphic reasons for this, because we have two sites with dessication cracks in the woods. The lower member (Burcot Member) is more clastic (gritty) and only at the top does it contain any dessication horizons. And also we have plant material signs which is also scarce in the Burcot. To be strictly fair,it is difficult to make a really positive identification of the member, with no reference to where the base is. As for the tiles, we had a few fragments in the upper layers which I commented were not local, and we couldn't know we were going to find the tile scatter. These are a fine grained greenish to red, very fine sandstone and with small proportions of muscovite mica, more on parting surfaces. They are definitely of river origin. I have identified these as being Lower Devonian, St Maughans Formation. These lie from Bromyard to far west Herefordshire/Welsh Border/Black Mountain. At the beginning I commented too, on the lack of cobbles present on the surface, since we are on the 35,000 year old 3rd Severn Terrace/Holt Heath Member. Hitting the cobbled surface in Trench 2 seems to support the idea that the gravels have been sifted through and that there are probably extensive areas of cobbled yard buried in the remains of the castle.
The blog owner changed this comment on 2008-05-24 22:21:54