Day 3 – The First Full Day

Day 3 began with a desperate search for Day 2.

Sometime during the weekend a days worth of photos and writing seems to have gone and despite our efforts hasn’t yet come back.

Hey ho! Onto Day 3!

Day 3 was our first day with a full volunteer compliment, 12 locals joined us for some digging in another beautiful spring day.

We did our usual briefing for the volunteers before peeling off to the three trenches that we currently have open.

Trench 1 is right in front of the Mansion and is aimed to try and find some unusual features picked out by the geophysics we carried out.

Trench 2 is behind the mansion and is looking for garden features. We hadn’t yet had any volunteers in this trench so today was the first day of digging here.

Trench 3 is right across the park and is on the site of Harthill House. We might find the remains of the Ha Ha and perhaps even the Neolithic Pikelooo Hill!

Today was livened up by a visit from the BBC. Diane Oxberry from BBC North West visited with a camera crew and did some interviews with the volunteers and Connor who discovered the bird below!

They visited all three trenches including traveling right across the park to Trench 3 only to arrive and find all the diggers had wandered off to lunch - they’d walked right past each other!

Trench 3 had been a bit of a headache as the soil there was heavy dark and claggy but eventually, half an hour before the end of the day archaeologist Claire declared that we’d hit subsoil. It had only taken over 1 foot (35 cm) of top-soil to get there but it was a great feeling for all the volunteers Trench 3.

Trench 2, newly opened today turned up masses of broken flower-pot and a few pits of pottery. It took one of the gardeners to explain that they used to dump waste there to explain why there was a concentration of flowerpot.

Trench 1 threw up perhaps the most intriguing find of the day where an unusual pebble feature came to light.

Tomorrow we’ll have a go at seeing what it is, until then.

Good night!