Wednesday 9th June – Day 1
Trench Plan
Plans of this years Trenches overlaying Mark Corney’s earthwork survey of 1997
Conditions for Day 1, heavy rain overnight, cloud cover, very humid.
Hectic early morning start for all on site, first batch of volunteers tip up at 08:30 and are given an induction and initial training, issued with safety equipment i.e. boots and hard hats and are teamed up with their mentors.
Dr Pete Wilson (EH Project Director) and Robert Dickinson (Swindon Borough Council) do the usual media interviews, and finally the Big Yellow Trowel starts de-turfing. Usually this part of a dig can be a little boring, but in the case of the Groundwell site the archaeology is, in places, just under the surface.
I have not spent much time on site today (I’ve been booked for 1 week at the mid-excavation point and the penultimate week!!!). BT can’t put in the EH broadband link to my house until June 14th !!!! So the EH web updates from the site will probably start after then.
So that was the first day, and features can be seen already (there is a raised observation platform where the great unwashed can watch each stage of the dig unfold all day if they want). Outreach tours of the site by EH are at 11am and 3pm.
Day1
The Dig gets started
Day1
Starting to get the wall
Day1
Possible pier in double entrance. Or is it just stand alone masonry?
Day1
Tea break. A wall emerges
Finds tray lunchtime first day.
Official EH update for Week 1 Day 1. (Last Wednesday 9th June 2004)
Technical Note:- the 20m x 25m trench is Trench 6 This is sequentially the 6th trench opened on the scheduled site. Sorry I should have explained that earlier.
GROUNDWELL 2004
Week 1 Day 1
Trench 6 was started using a JCB to strip the topsoil and remove the modern material that had been used to infill the area of the road stripped in 1996 when the Roman buildings were discovered.
The bulk of the Centre for Archaeology Team is on site, along with our first eight local volunteers and three members of the Wyvern Historical and Detector Society, although our four trainees don’t start until Week 2. Although the team had to be patient while we waited for the JCB to move back far enough to allow them on site safely, we still managed to locate our first Roman walls and the trial trench excavated by Bryn Walters and Bernard Phillips in 1997.
We have had lots of press interest, indeed before the excavation started the Swindon Evening Advertiser sent a photographer to take pictures of portakabins being craned on to site last week. As well as the Advertiser returning we had Great Western Radio (GWR), BBC Radio Swindon (twice!), BBC Radio Wiltshire, ITV Local News and Swindon Link magazine. BBC Radio Swindon are intending to do weekly updates.
Although our education programme is still to start we had a group of 12 teachers come to site as part of an INSET day in advance of them bringing their children to be ‘Archaeologists for the day’ during the project. As a group the teachers had an opportunity to work on our ‘mock-excavation’ which has been specially built for the education programme to allow the ‘archaeologists for a day’ to experience excavating, planning a ‘site’ and finding objects – just like the team in Trench 6!
Our viewing platform is open and we had our first visitors, some of whom spent much of the afternoon watching the JCB, mattocks, shovels and trowels extend what we know about Building 2 – our main target for this year.