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

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