Dr M sums up the first week

We've decided on a much deserved day off tomorrow so we are all relaxing tonight. Although the students seem to mostly already have gone to bed - perhaps they aren't that used to hard labour.

The weather hasn't been too bad for the past few days although we have had to change tactics.  Instead of continuing with planning and cleaning, we have been excavating some of the key features on site.  This has started to tell us some new informtion about how the structures were built on site.  Whatever these structures were, several of them were built with plank walls. 

Today Ewan finished excavating part of the palisade that formed the outer enclosure of the site.  Here we could see very clearly the impressions of individual planks that formed the fence.  Liam was also working on another seciton of the palisade and he is credited with our finds of the day - TWO pieces of Late Roman amphora which actually fit together. 

There are also clearly plank built walls in our 'beam slots' or at least some of them.

This evening at the dig house there was a massive amount of cottage pie devoured and some Angel Delight (butterscotch flavour, of course!).  Now we've moved on to the odd whiskey and bottle of ale in front of a roaring fire.