Day 30: Friday 30th July

After 6 weeks of digging, trowelling, planning and blogging, the Manor Lodge exacavations have come to an end. It has been a brilliant 6 weeks. Lots has been learnt, many friendships have been made, and there has been a whole lot of fun had.

Weather: Grey

Word of the day: Goodbye

Find of the day: Fragments of what could be an early cup/drinking vessel. (Pictured below)

The drain pipe has been taken out of trench 16.

Philippa and Gregg on finds.

Eleanor and Kate spent some time today digging a sondage. They then planned it and photographed it. Eleanor's try before you buy course fees has gone really well. She is almost 87% certain she wants to study Archaeology at university.

Rachel and Caitlin were digging for bedrock today and kept finding loads of charcoal. You can see the colour difference in the soil sample buckets. These samples will be sent off for sampling.

If you look really closely, at the bottom of the wall where Lily and Cherubin are digging a much older part of the wall has been found.

Hutch with his mattock.

Charlie's Beard 1.

Charlie's Beard 2.

Team trench 16. Lily, Hutch, Buttery Jonathan, Kanani and Cherubin.

We also asked a few of the group who had been here for the full six weeks what they had enjoyed most:

Alvaro: When the sun was shining and lots of good working and conscientious people.

Buttery Jonathan: Seeing a squirrel fall out of tree, Learning loads, meeting everyone and working with them.

Hutch: Finding the hoard of saggars.

Cherubin: The amount I've learnt and the friends I've made.

Lily: Finding the drain pipe.

Lauren: Imparting my wisdom to training archaeologists.

Day 29: Thursday 29th July

Weather: Some sun.

Word of the day: Saggar

Find of the day: Around 7 buckets of pieces of saggars were removed from trench 16. (Pictured below are a number of pieces that fit together.)

Buttery Jonathan and Hutch were on saggar duty. Here they are with full circular bases found in the trench.

Shannon was collecting soil samples today to be send for floatation.

Lily and Cherubim spent the day clearing the area around the drain pipe. They had their work cut out for them because the soil was mainly all clay. To conquer this problem they used spades rather than shovels (spades are flat) so they could cut into the clay in order to remove it.

Our brilliant and dedicated tea lady, Charlotte was trowelling in trench 17 today to see if, where they are trowelling is actually a feature.

Blake was sieveing the soil taken from trench 17 to see if there were any finds in it.

Gregg and Charlotte (pictured) , as well as Philippa, Margret and Kanani were on Extreme Finds Processing today. We have one day left of the dig and more finds were coming out of trench 16 today then have been found in trench 18 over the whole dig! They were washing outside in the sun and moved inside later on when the cold winds came.

Kate and Eleanor were planning trench 18 today.

Yesterday, Trench 15 reached bedrock, so today Rachel and Caitlin were also planning.

Charlie's Beard is a digestive.

Day 18th: Wednesday 14th July

Weather: Dull and grey

Word of the Day: Cellar

Find of the Day: A 18th/19th century cellar was found in trench 16. This brilliant find is pictured below. The camera was literally placed inside the opening to the cellar and 'take' was pressed with no idea as to what we were seeing.

A handle and a fragment of ceramic found in Trench 16. It has been suggested that this could maybe be dated back to the 17th century.

A stone floor in trench 16.


Students decided to make the act of filling up buckets of soil more enjoyable so started to make soil castles.

BreeAnn and Samantha have been collecting soil samples from trench 18 for environmental archeaology. The feature that they are collecting the samples from is thought to have been vegetation. Hedges could have potentially been planted here and this process will enable us to know exactly what was planted. Trench 15 will also be collecting soil samples to see if there is any correlation between the vegetation grown there with trench 18.

Charlie was on a research day today so we had to think of a way to represent Charlie's Beard. Toby Martin a PhD Archaeology student was Charlie's Beard model today. We managed to coax him into doing it with the promise of the fame.

Introducing...

Name: Charlotte. A MA Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations and Archaeology student from Edinburgh University.
Likes: Music, shopping and history.

Dislikes: Baked beans and snakes.
Favourite Songs: Johnny B Goode- Chuck Berry and Baker Street-Jerry Rafertty.
Ideal Dinner Party Guests: Nelson Mandela, Johnny Wilkinson, Robert Pattinson, Robert Plant and Julius Caesar.
If I could be involved in any archaeological excavation, I'd like to excavate: Maritime. eg Mary Rose

http://www.maryrose.org/