Day 11: Monday 17th June 2013

Excavations at Prehen House are well underway again this week with plenty of volunteers to help out; all arrived bright and early onto site despite previous expectations of delayed travel times due to the presidential visit.

Trench 1 progressing nicely

Investigation of features in Trench 1 continues; a cutting is being made into what appears to be natural subsoil outside of the flanker wall. This cutting will hopefully tell us more about the nature of the wall; whether it was built directly onto the natural subsoil or bedrock, or whether foundations were first cut into the subsoil to add stability. Removal of tumble layers outside the flanker wall is revealing more of its outer face around its eastern side and, inside the flanker, more of the inner circular wall has been uncovered through final removal of the overlying brick-rich deposit. Careful excavation of the disturbed southern side of the flanker appears to be showing that the two parallel lines of brick found running into the southern side of the flanker, do in fact continue through this disturbed portion of wall, beneath the brick-rick deposit from which further finds of animal bone and many fragments of green glass bottles have emerged; these will receive specialist analysis at a later date but the bottles appear to be from the late 18th or early 19th century; perhaps a little merriment was underway at this exact spot many years ago! 

Might not look like it but we are working! The parallel lines of brick can be seen in the foreground

The written and drawn records for Trench 2 have been updated and further investigation is implying that the drain truncates the wall and runs directly through it. This will be looked at further tomorrow and we plan to extend the trench a further 1m to the southwest in order to expose the far side of the wall. 

Trench 3 continues to be cleared back of stone rubble material by our volunteers and hopefully they will be soon coming down onto a lower course of a robbed out stone wall, thereby providing further evidence of a 17th century bawn existing at the site.

Trench 3; still looking for walls

As always, many thanks to all our volunteers today; John, Damien, Clare, René, Janice, Li and Jordan. Also, many thanks to @DerrySketcher for her visit and illustrations. Well worth a follow on twitter!