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

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