fairfield dig 2009/10

Thursday 22nd October


Yesterday only Adele and Alan were on site: no students, and I was giving a talk about the Fairfield Project in Minehead. But they'd been extraordinarily busy (with the aid of a JCB digger). When I arrived this morning two new trenches had been opened ....
Alan has reopened and extended Trench 1, which we began in 2005 with our first Kilve Court group. It was carefully positioned to cut across the line of the wall shown on the earliest map of Fairfield, and over a later garden wall shown on one of the paintings. In 2005, we found evidence of a robbed wall, and another 'in situ' wall. There was also some redeposited clay suggesting that a feature had been dug deep into the subsoil, and some of the earliest pottery so far found on the site. This is quite different from the section of wall we are uncovering in Trench 6, so it is time to investigate it further, this time opening up a larger area.




This is the second new trench, placed over the curving corner of the boundary feature as shown on the geophysical survey. Already you can see the curved line of the wall appearing. We now think that the wall was used to hold back the higher level of soil you can see on the right.




Today's Archaeology Degree Course students from Strode College also faced challenging weather, but eventually the rain stopped. Look hard, you can just see a rainbow!



By the afternoon the sun was out. These students are making an accurate stone-by-stone drawing of a blocked opening in one of the garden walls.

Posted by Rachel