The weather improved just enough for us to get the last tasks of the dig finished and the final trench backfilled as our two week dig on the site of Elsyng Tudor palace drew to an end today.

Yesterday was so wet we had to call an early end before we were able to finish revealing the ever-expanding wall in Trench 3. Ultimately we didn't have enough time to explore this structure as fully as we would have, had we found it earlier in the dig, but we were able to clean up and record a 4-metre stretch of what was evidently a very beefy piece of Tudor masonry indeed.

The wall is so wide that we didn't actually find its back edge, running as it does at an angle across the 1.5 metre wide trench, and it turns a corner at the north end of the trench disappearing into the east section, albeit apparently not quite at 90 degrees.

As far as we can tell, this wall most likely corresponds to the opposite end of the gatehouse building to the stair tower and cellar we spent most of the dig investigating in Trenches 1, 2 and 5, and is quite possibly part of a twin to the stair tower - this would explain the wall's great thickness (i.e. if it was supporting a four storey tower).

If we want to know any more about it, however, that will have to wait for another year (if there IS another year), as by the end of the day we had recorded, backfilled and returned the site once again to a tranquil if slightly soggy woodland by Forty Hall's lime tree avenue.

Full details of the findings of this years dig will as ever feature in upcoming editions of the Society newsletter and a full report will become available (see here for last year's.

We'd like to thank our dedicated, hard working and determined band of diggers whose cheerful hard work made this dig possible through rain and shine, especially those who stuck it out to the bitter end, and most especially those of you who turned up every day to push loaded barrows up and down the hill before the digging had even begun.

We are also once again deeply grateful to Forty Hall Farm and Capel Manor College for lending us tool storage space, not to mention the loan of wheel barrows, without which backfilling would likely have taken twice as long.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

Rain stopped play today as yesterday's weather forecast unfortunately proved accurate, making work impractical.

Our brave diggers soldiered through the early morning torrents and we did manage to backfill Trench 5 (after carefully removing all the frogs!) and finish spreading topsoil on Trench 1, so the only remaining open trench is now Trench 3.

A lull in the downpour late in the morning allowed us to do a little more digging in Trench 3 to reveal more of the very substantial wall in it, and it began to look as if the wall has been truncated at both north and south ends, but the heavens soon opened again making digging very difficult and surveying, photography and drawing out of the question.

We were therefore forced to call an early end to the day in the hope that tomorrow will be a little better; we now have just one day left to clean up, fully record and backfill Trench 3.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

Today we finished most of our main digging and recording jobs, and began to transition to the backfilling phase of our two-week exploration of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Tudor palace, in the woods by Forty Hall's lime tree avenue.

Trench one had started to be backfilled yesterday, and having completed the recording of the wall junction in Trench 2 and drawn its section, backfilling both T1 and T2 began in earnest and continued throughout the day.

Meanwhile we excavated more of the wall section in Trench 5, going down to our maximum safe depth of 1m on its western face to reveal more of the internal rendered face that would have formed the inside of the cellar (see diagram). We also finished digging the small extension to the east of the wall, revealing the line of bricks that we saw yesterday and thought might be a perpendicular wall on the outside of the cellar.

What we found was actually a very disordered but nontheless deliberate mass of large brick fragments mortared together and extending down quite a depth in line with the truncated face of the cellar wall.

In the very easternmost corner of the wedge we eventually uncovered a small section of a proper wall, underlying the rubble and mortar, and therefore predating it.

We think that this is evidence of a previous external doorway into the cellar, which at some point has been modified, and the mass of disordered brick and morter above the older wall is likely the core or foundation to something like a large butress on the outside of the cellar.

Recording is now finished in Trench 5 and backfilling it will begin tomorrow. The adjacent Trench 4 has drawn a blank, producing nothing but a line of disarrayed rubble and will get the same treatment tomorrow.

That only leaves Trench 3. It is something of a tradition that the archaeology of Elsyng always produces an unexpected feature at the 11th hour of any dig and this year is no exception. Trench 3, having been initially written off as containing nothing significant, continued to produce more and more substantial brickwork as we revealed more of the wall that came up in it yesterday.

It is clear that this wall is very thick - at least as beefy as the ones forming the sides of the cellar in T1/2, and late in the afternoon, as we followed it to the north end of the trench, it revealed a T junction, with a spur running off to the west, although 'T' is perhaps a little generous since, like many other features at Elsyng it is not a square junction but runs of at an awkward angle.

The forecast for tomorrow is torrential rain, which is very bad for site recording, so we are braced for one last struggle to finish digging, drawing and photographing this feature before the end of the weekend, not to mention one last backfilling push.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

Not a great deal of change to report today, on day 11 of our two-week dig on the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Tudor palace.

We finished cleaning, photographing and drawing the T-junction of the wall in the removed baulk between trenches 1 and 2 (see yesterday's schematic diagram, which appears to confirm our interpretation of the way it was built into the Trench 1 cellar - see yesterday's other diagram.

Meanwhile we continued to dig around the wall in Trench 5 (see diagram above), hoping to trace it across the width of the trench, but as the afternoon wore on it became apparent that the wall is truncated.

Whether this is due to demolition activity or perhaps the remains of an intentional doorway into the cellar, we can't tell yet and will hopefully have excavated enough by the end of tomorrow to have a better idea. We did dig down the face of the wall far enough to show that it is rendered, as with the rest of the cellar.

Similarly, we're still not sure if the perpendicular line of bricks next to it is structural or not yet, but we did begin to widen the trench slightly there to see more of them and find out.

While this has been going on, work has been continuing in Trench 3, which until a couple of days ago we had written off as not terribly exciting.

Trench 3 was located some way away to the east of the other trenches, to test a hypothesis that it was close to the work done by the EAS in the 1960s.

The locations of the trenches dug from 1963-66 is known only approximately and so Trench 3 was located at a point that we guessed might intersect one of the structures encountered in 1964.

Soon after we opened it, however, we revealed an undisturbed layer of very hard brickearth and gravel covering most of the trench, immediately disproving the hypothesis that archaeologists had been here before, and so interest in and work on the trench slowed considerably.

It did not stop altogether, however, and having identified a line of rubble at the south end of the trench, a hardy band of diggers has been hacking away at the trench all week. Today they were rewarded by an unexpected wall line - not the structure seen in 1964 but something new, possibly the far end of the gatehouse, and maybe even a twin to the cellar in Trenches 1/5.

We're already close to the one metre safe excavation limit in this trench and also running out of time, so we will probably only reveal and record the top of this wall before backfilling the site must begin in earnest.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

Digging went well today in the cooler weather in the shelter of the woods by Forty Hall's lime tree avenue, as the pace of work also begins to slow.

Today we finished recording most of the structural features in Trench 1 and by late afternoon we covered the walls on the south side of the trench in sieved topsoil to protect them, and then made a start at partially backfilling the cellar with some of the vast quantity of brick and tile that we so painstakingly removed from it last week.

The last remaining task in Trench 1 was, with permission of Historic England, who paid us a welcome visit in the late morning, to remove the baulk between Trench 1 and 2, to get a better understanding of the wall in the north east corner of the trench - see today's diagram

What we found was that the wall, forming the cellar's eastern side, was of a slightly complex construction, comprising a single row of bricks (in stretcher bond) on the inside face, followed by a narrow rubble and mortar fill in the middle, and a more substantial wall (in English bond) on the exterior face (supported by the clunch raft foundation we found yesterday which included a recycled stone block).

A possible explanation for this is that the thin interior skin of bricks and rubble core behind it extend to the base of the cellar, while the thicker wall and its clunch foundation were set higher up, to support the building above - see this schematic diagram.

There's more work to do on this wall before we can be sure this is the case; most importantly we don't know yet how deep the clunch foundation on the wall's exterior side extends downwards.

Meanwhile we worked on the related section of wall in Trench 5, which ought to be a continuation of the wall in the join between Trenches 1 and 2 (see diagram).

We've exposed a short stretch of it but haven't got it across the whole trench yet. We don't know yet if that's because it's demolished to a lower level or some other reason. There is also a suspicious collection of horizontally-lying brick fragments perpendicular to the wall line, which may or may not prove to be more structure.

Small finds have continued to be pretty scarce, but while we were removing the T1/2 baulk we did find some rather nice fragments of carved stone, possibly more fireplace fragments similar to those we found last year albeit not nearly as large.

As well as bearing traces of soot blackening, and the always-evocative toolmarks of the Tudor Master Mason, one piece also had a Mason's mark in the form of an arrow (see picture below).

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.