The pace of work slowed a little today, as we reached the halfway point of our two week dig on the site of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Tudor palace, but we nevertheless managed to get some good work done including finally discovering the missing fourth wall of our cellar room in Trench 1.

We've been slogging away all week in Trench 1, removing the vast deposit of demolition rubble that filled the room which dominates most of the trench.

By the early afternoon we had reached the maximum safe depth of excavation across most of the trench - the very sandy mortar matrix of the rubble makes the sections of this trench extremely unstable so we won't be able to get to the bottom of the cellar room at least this year, and suspect it could still be at least a metre or two away.

On the bright side, we did manage to locate the missing wall that would have formed the fourth side of the room - see today's schematic diagram - the wall springs, as expected, from the wall in the corner of Trench 2 and although we were only able to uncover a short length of it, it follows the expected alignment across the north side of Trench 1.

Interestingly, the wall is a T-junction rather than a corner, and continues to run north from Trench 1, so late in the afternoon we laid out Trench 5, which we hope will pick up the wall further north, and will hopefully be able to see more of this wall without having to wade though tons of brick rubble to get to it!

At the same time we laid out Trench 4, which is located nearby hoping to pick up another wall line, this time from 2024 (see above diagram). Trench 2 in theory came close to the line and maybe picked up tentative evidence of a nearby wall at its east end, but hopefully Trench 4 will be better placed to find it.

If you are wondering what happened to Trench 3, we opened it a few days ago some distance away to the north east, to test a tentative hypothesis about the location of some trenches the EAS cut nearby in 1963-65. It has drawn a complete blank, meaning that the 60s trenches must have been located further away than suspected, and so will be backfilled early next week.

We're taking a day off tomorrow to catch up on site records and gather our energy for one last push to finish trenches 4 and 5 and record Trench 1, before beginning the daunting task of returning all the rubble to where it came from!

Please Note

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