Groundwell Ridge Dig Diary by Chris Walker

		Wednesday 14th July – Week 6 Day 1 [Day 26] Last week of digging Ok – suitably refreshed from the “weekend” and raring to go on the final week digging. Today myself, Kat and Neil will be concentrating on “deep room” (it all sounds vaguely “Black Ops” or early 1970’s Watergate ), peeling back the soil to expose the plaster in situ. The places on the walls where we expose the wall covering shows that we have a fine, thin skim of plaster underneath a thicker and seemingly more robust covering. Unfortunately I complicate things somewhat by discovering that the plaster on my wall dives back into a splay of a jamb, looking like either a blocked up door or some other recess of the wall such as a niche. This is the last week so it is decided by Pete (quite rightly, even though I’m slightly disappointed – not with Pete but with the time constraint NOT to do too much with this feature, except clean, define, photo record and describe for future excavations. So as it stands it is possible that this “deep room” had two doors probably showing different phases or change of use/access for it. Find of the day was not from where we were (for once) but from another part of trench 6. It was a lead bust. Possibly of a goddess but I’m no expert, probably best to wait for an expert to cast his/her eye over it. It is about 8cm high by 5cm wide, photos duly taken.

P.S. Laura Bullivant, the EH Community Education and Outreach Officer for Groundwell, asked me to show a group of 14-16 year olds around the site, I decided not to show them the uppy-downy game

From the EH website…Week 6 Day 1

We have removed most of the capping stones from our early drain and it is clear that it is stone-lined, very narrow and fully silted-up.
In Room 1 we are removing the soil that we left against the walls to protect the plaster that we know to survive on walls of the cellar. Whilst doing this we received not one, but two surprises. There are two layers of plaster on the west wall and there is an infilled opening in the western wall and possibly one in the south wall –are they doors, windows or niches? – given that we have only four days digging left we may well not find out. However as with the rest of the site they will be safe for future researchers.

We are again carefully excavating and planning the area of Room 2 – the remains are so complex that we need to ensure that the drawings and site records are adequate to the task of reconstructing them on paper and the computer screen back in the office.

It is clear that we are dealing with a bath-suite – a bathing range within a larger building. In the cold range we have removed some of the fill from both the inlet and outlet water channels – the northern one a stone-lined channel, the southern one a gap in the wall of Room 3 which presumably links with either the early stone-lined drain or later ditch. Both channels may have originally contained lead pipes, which like leadwork on many Roman sites would have been removed for reuse.

 

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