I arrived early on site on Monday to refill the petrol containers, only to discover that the temperature difference was so great from Saturday that they had partly collapsed as the air inside them had cooled down. Although cooler today, three of us were still wearing shorts.
We had a good turnout again and during the daily brief Juliet decided to focus efforts on continuing with Trenches V and Y.
Trench V is the most northern (top-left in this drone image) and was starting to show evidence of a ditch at the top end, and possibly a section of flint platform with a linear edge. Trench Y was not yet quite as developed and still needed some clearing back, after having been extended from test pit to trench size over the weekend.
Much to my relief I had also found one of our missing boxes of finds equipment in my garage on Sunday night - the one containing our spare pens, calipers, tape and magnets. I got up to date with processing the finds from the previous day, not that there are many at this stage of a dig. Unusual finds from the first day are seen below, from Trench Y; pieces of what we think are a tractor's front tyre:
We are hoping the magnetic anomaly on which the trench was sited was not another part of the tractor!
Meanwhile Sally had turned up a fragment of glass the previous day in Trench V, which after washing appeared to be a piece of Romano-British window glass - rough on one side and smooth on the other:
After finishing recording the finds Juliet asked me to order some paper towels from Amazon because we were running out, I asked Carl if he could pick up a replacement rubber seal for the generator's fuel cap from his local mower shop, and then I decided it was time to get some drone photos - only to discover that I had charged all the drone batteries but forgotten to charge the remote controller. Fortunately we now have a portable power pack, courtesy of Andy, so I set the remote control to charge for 90 minutes.
Next Carl and I set up two 20m square grids near the pond before Carl disappeared off to collect the resistivity machine which had been borrowed for a survey at Corhampton. I wandered over to the trenches to take some photos of what was going on. This is what was happening in Trench Y:
Meanwhile this was what was happening in Trench V:
As soon as the drone's remote control was sufficiently charged I did a brief flight test, during which I took these photos. The first shows the relative position of three of the trenches to the pond:
The second shows our marquees and tents in their usual location quite a walk away from the trenches:
During the lunch break, when the trenches were empty, I did another flight at various heights between 5 and 120 metres above each trench, and took these vertical images of Trenches V and Y respectively (both north-oriented but to a different scale):
To my untutored eye you could already begin to make out some of the features.
After lunch, when Carl had returned from collecting the res machine, he started a high-resolution survey of the two grid squares we had marked out earlier which doubled as a training session for Kim, Lorna and Megan:
We kept going until 4.30pm and these are some more of my photos of everyone at work during the afternoon session: