Day 14 - Thursday 20th June 2013

Many hands make light work! We had loads of volunteers today and we are making great progress. The trenches are beginning to get resolved, and in Trench 1, the end is in sight.  The rubble layer within the inner circular wall has been removed to reveal the natural subsoil underneath.  The inner wall appears to be built directly on to the subsoil.  Similarly, on the outside of the flanker the natural subsoil has been revealed, and the parallel lines of brick are mortared directly on to this surface.  Between the flanker wall and the inner wall (on the western side of the trench), a loamy deposit which runs under the flanker wall to the north is being excavated and is yielding lots of bottle glass and ceramics.  With little digging left to be done in this trench, the final recording was started today, and will be our main focus tomorrow and Saturday.

Trench 1 - Very busy today! A hive of activity

In Trench 2, excavation to expose this new stony layer continued. While it is not perfectly even, it does look much more deliberately placed than the rubble which was taken off above it. This perhaps suggests that this layer was put in to level up the ground level. Seeing as it ends at the wall and did not extend to the other side of it, that tells us that it is likely to have been contemporary with the wall. This new layer was then planned, and will be removed tomorrow morning.

 

In Trench 3, the remainder of the fill of the “gully” feature was excavated. The cut was quite shallow, and runs into the section, so we unfortunately cannot be sure just how wide this cut is. As for its purpose, Cormac suggested this afternoon that it could be a foundation cut for a wall. Although most of the other walls on the site appear to be built directly onto subsoil with no foundations, chimneys at this time always had foundations, due to the extra weight of masonry that needed to be supported at these parts of buildings. That would explain the L-shaped nature of the cut, as the wall would step out for the chimney and then step back in. After this fill was removed, the trench was planned and the sections are being cleaned in preparation to be drawn tomorrow.

René and Damien planning in trench 3

All in all, we have a very busy day on site today! Many thanks again to our great volunteers - René, Damien, Claire, Pearl, Li, Conall, Eilis, Jan, Olcan, Shannon and Anna.

View from the spoil heap showing trenches 2 and 3