The 'Big Garden Dig'

Last weekend we worked with the Charmouth History Society to undertake the 'Big Garden Dig'. Several garden owners volunteered their gardens to have a 1m square test pit dug, which they either did themselves or allowed other village volunteers to do so. 

This test pit uncovered a stone drain running at the front of the property. 

Charmouth

This is a 13th century wall that runs behind the original garden plots. Although much rebuilding has been done, it still has a good percentage of original material. This trench was looking for the foundation. A 1:10 scale drawing will be made to record the exposed fabric.

Exposing the foundation.

This test pit was producing lots of finds.

This is the village hall HQ for processing the finds. 

All the finds were put into bags with the house details written on them. After analysis all finds will go back to the property owners.

It was a busy weekend and despite the heavy rain on Saturday afternoon a lot was done in the morning. Sunday was cloudy but warm and the work progressed very well. All who took part enjoyed themselves. This weekend we will be digging at several more gardens. 

 

Birds Eye View

Last weekend DDCAG undertook a geophysical survey at a site in north Dorset. As you can see, it was a large area, but the team did a great job. Roman pottery had been picked up in this field by the landowner, also metal objects using a detector.

A steady progress up and down the lanes

Logging the results

Keep going lads!

The results showed some possible features and these will be looked at in due course. 

 

 

Wool Fair

We had a very nice day at the Wool Charter Fair last weekend. Several membership sheets were taken away and we had an approach from a local photographer and drone flyer volunteering to work with us on sites!   

 

Corfe 2.0

 

Back to the garden near Corfe Castle on a lovely sunny day. We backfilled Test Pit #1 after recording and then carried on with Test Pit #2, which reached a depth of 1m, so the feature detected at that depth had to remain unexcavated. The stratigraphy being sandy, it was decided that H&S kicked in. Very frustrating. We had several more pieces of pottery come up, again looking like BBW, but this could have been redeposited from higher up the slope from the crown of the hill to the west, as the finds did not come from a secure context.     

So, we decided to open up Trench #3. This was 2m x 3m in size and we hoped that we would find some sort of feature running N-S across the lawn, according to the geophysics results. However, we only found very deep deposits and modern finds. Having dug a sondage (a small trench in one corner to inspect the stratigraphy) and finding nothing resembling a feature, or even interesting stratigraphy, we gave up and backfilled.  

Corfe Blimey!

Dorset Diggers members worked on digging test pits in a garden near Corfe Castle last week. several archaeological finds have been found in the area in the past and we now have several more!

One of the test pits.

A decorated piece of pottery, probably Romano-British.

A nice rim of similar date.

We will be returning soon to open up a 2m x 3m trench and hope to find more artefacts and features too.