It is that time of year again where I dust off my wellies, pack the car with equipment and head off down the narrow country lanes to our dig site at Colemore. Our lovely landowner, Rem, had kindly agreed to allow us on site a day earlier than usual to set up the site grid and mark out the trenches so that we could get the mini-digger started as soon as possible on Friday.
We started at 1.00pm and sadly it started raining almost straight away. However, there were quite a few of us and we were able to re-find the grid post locations quite quickly, thanks to a metal detector and the lead weights that Carl had previously buried 30 metres apart along the north-south baseline.
I took no photos because the drizzle turned into a downpour but we soldiered on with lots of tape measures, plastic canes and metal pegs. By 4.00pm we were drenched and tired but well pleased, because the canes were all in place and the trench outlines marked out ready with pegs and strings.
Juliet has decided this time to have one long trench measuring 20m x 3m (Trench 'U'), one 'evaluation trench (4m x 4m) called Eval Trench 55, and two test pits numbered 56 and 57. One of the latter will be for the Scouts, and the other for those people having a go at archaeology for the first time on Taster Days.