19 Jul 2013

Forty Hall - Festival Of Archaeology - Day 3


neil drawing the walls
The external wall of the 'barn' (centre) continues north and meets a T junction

Today we began to move from the known to the unknown, as we followed the pair of walls (re)located yesterday.

The two walls, with the crude mortar surface between them first discovered last year, continue some distance north just beneath the turf of the lime tree avenue. As expected, the smaller (external) wall turns west, forming the north side of the building. What we did not expect is that the wall also turns east, forming a T junction, and runs east towards the palace courtyard for at least two metres.

Further complicating matters is a line of tiles set into the top of a stretch of the north/south part of the wall (pictured). This may be a door threshold and the eastern stretch of the wall may be part of a porch, although by the end of the day this was beginning to look less likely.

The possibility has been raised that this tangle of walls may be related to some sort of (probably late) palace structure -- our first priority tomorrow will be to continue to follow this wall and hopefully find out more, as well as some elusive dating evidence.


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