Day 9

We all arrived this morning to find the view of the trench much improved; a mini-excavator had arrived! This has meant that instead of shifting all of the Victorian rubble out of the trench by hand it would clear out the stones for us (with Cadw’s permission of course) and save a lot of time and even more effort. A couple of interesting pieces came out of the rubble, not least a complete glass bottle (along with a glass ball which may have served as a sort of stopper), a large piece of brick and some pot. I spent today round the back of the castle neatening up some of trench 4 before moving down to trench 5. Trench 4 hasn’t yielded very many finds before arriving at bedrock and so the volunteers began recording- no mean feat considering how many stones needed to be drawn! Trench 5, on the other hand, looks like it’s going to go down much deeper before we actually hit any bedrock at all, which could suggest that the theory that there used to be a quarry there is right; hopefully the supervisors won’t expect us to get all the way to the bottom of that!

Jenny Wells