Badlesmere Bottom 2019 - Day 9

What a difference day makes - 24 little hours later and we start the day with rain showers. Plenty of volunteers today for training day on the Lees Court Estate. We had volunteers and members from 5 different groups today including Maidstone and Lympne as well as Folkestone, Faversham and Shorne.

Work continued on the mysterious prehistoric features in trench 3, there was some progress on the middle ditch which turns out to be much wider than we originally thought and we finished excavating and photographed a large chalk deposit for the record. We will close this trench down tomorrow and record it on Friday but we will have to return to this feature and plot other trenches around it at some point in the future to really understand the significance.

We have made progress into the two ditches in trench 2 which form either side of our ring ditch. Still getting lots of worked flint out another piece of pot and will be able to finish excavating and record those on Thursday and Friday.

South-East facing section.

Training today was mostly centred around understanding the way features dictate our excavation strategy such as their shape, whether they are truncated and there is a need to find the relationship and how to excavate them faithfully. We also spent time with the volunteers talking about contexts, what they are and why they're important. We filled out some cut and fill record sheets and went through terminology that is used as well as how to fill them in with the post-ex in mind. There was also time to have an introduction to recording and surveying explaining the importance of the whole site plan.

We are pretty sure it was helpful but, as usual, we had a good time anyway.

Final push over the next three days should see us answering a few questions about the ditches surrounding the church area. We should be able to match up the ditches in newly opened trench 5 with those in trench 2.

More info tomorrow.