Bloomery Blog Thursday 12th July 2012

Bloomery Blogger Report 4 - Here comes the rain again...
After Tuesday's floods, there was enough dry weather on Wednesday and Thursday for the team to finish the excavation, back-fill and leave the site in good condition.  The forecast remains poor, so it made sense to close down the excavation at this point rather than explore further.

Wednesday started out with the team drying out trenches. Back-filling Trench 11 was was completed with Trevor bringing in the tractor.
 

Trench 12 was also largely back filled while Trench 12a, a little extension (see yellow bucket above) was taken down to some archaeology. A bit of a structure, possibly the remains of an entrance, was exposed, recorded, and removed (above).

 In Trench 13 at the top of the slope, two hearths were exposed (above, bottom left), either for roasting ore or for cooking.  Trench 13a, another extension (being excavated by two people in the photo above) was opened to fully expose these.  The hearths were about 60mm thick.  Finally, Trenches 13 and 13a were both closed down and back-filled bringing the excavation to a close.

Though the premature end disappoints a little, our heroic diggers had defied the worst weather for a long time, added to their number and successfully extracted the last pieces of information from this site.  The rain brought just one benefit to this happy band...

plenty of time to explain to their Australian member the finer points of cricket!