We got off to a good start today, on the first day of our two week summer dig on the site of Elsyng Palace in the woods of Forty Hall.

As explained in yesterday's post The main objective of this year's dig is to re-locate the exact locations of the complex of trenches dug by the EAS in the early 1960s.

Thus, after setting up the site fencing early this morning, we laid out Trench 1 in the approximate location where we believe the north end of the 60s work took place, with the aim of identifying the 60s trench and hopefully to uncover some of the then-shallowly buried walls that the 60s dig encountered.

It is very early days, and work is fairly slow in the hot weather, not least because the ground has been baked absolutely solid by several weeks of record-breaking temperatures, but we did quickly come down onto deposits that were rich in modern small finds, including late 19th and early 20th century pottery, modern brick fragments and lots of modern glass.

This amount of modern material is slightly surprising, as it must clearly have been imported onto the site to be dumped, and that is not really what we would expect in the backfill of an archaeological trench. It is maybe more likely that this kind of dumping may have come about during the chaotic work to install the nearby gas main in 1967.

The east end of Trench 1 contains much less rubble and if we do have the backfill to a 60s trench we may also in time be able to identify a trench edge.

The most tantalising find of the day, amongst the milk bottle and porcelain fragments, was a small sherd of a South Herts Greyware vessel, likely dating to the second half of the 13th century - a rare clue that the site of Elsyng Palace was occupied probably at least two centuries before Henry VIII was even born!