Hunting Hall Archaeology Blog

15th June 2025 : Dig Diary Day 14

Another week is done and we’re now half way through our initial scheduled four week dig period. A very respectable number of volunteers today including three enthusiastic newcomers, all of whom having no previous archaeology experience and all having travelled a significant distance especially to be with us. We are very grateful because every hour of volunteer time is valuable. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the day and that you will come back again soon. In the meantime it’s all happening in trench 8. Apart from yet another wooden stake (that’s about half a dozen of them), the ‘miners’ in T8 found a broken granite quern stone with another possible piece of it close by, some broken wheel spun pottery, all probably Romano-British to early medieval and a curious lump of drilled sandstone, purpose unknown. It seems likely that the Iron Age ditch may have later been used as a dumping ground for broken material, however there’s much more exploration to be done within. As yet we’re still nowhere near the depth we reached last year when we found lots of animal bones. The rest of today’s team focussed on defining the extent of the many stone structures in what is turning out to be a very complex trench 10. Although we’ve investigated a significant part of this trench in previous digs we still have several square meters that we’ve never touched. These lie predominantly within the ‘mysterious 15m circle’. Fingers crossed we’ll make good progress this week. The weather for the next few days looks very settled and so no reason why we shouldn’t be on site every day from 10.00. Hope to see you there sometime.