Caldies Big Dig Blog – Day 1: Breaking Ground

Ok, ok… we know we said we’d start on 27^th… but we’ve been too excited, and so have our volunteers!

After a huge response from the local community a small team of early-bird volunteers and the archaeologists from the Museum of Liverpool set about de-turfing and removing the layers of top soil in front of the Mansion House.

De-turfing at the front of the Mansion

Under the expert eye of Jeff Speakman the work began by hoeing the ground to remove the loose soil. This revealed an area of compacted earth and nearby an area of more disturbed ground. It was in this disturbed layer that we found most of our pieces today.

Hoeing the ground

Within a few minutes we’d had our first finds, numerous crisp packets (the remains of picnics gone by?) and bits of glass. More interestingly we discovered some 19^th Century dark-glazed ware and some red-slip ware which may be from the 18^th Century!

Mike from the Museum of Liverpool displays our early finds.

One particular highlight was our first (and only) coin of the dig so far found by volunteer Peter - a pre-1998 10p piece!

Peter and his 10p coin!

After a busy morning and a relaxing lunch it was back to trenching this time with trowels to ‘clean’ the site in preparation for photographs to record the layer that we’d removed today.

There is now a lovely clean trench ready for the volunteers to come back tomorrow and really get stuck into the archaeology!

Martyn and Arthur enjoying a well earned tea-break!

We'll aim to update this page evey day as we progress through the dig.  For up-to-the-minute news see our twitter feed @Caldiesmansion !