Well wall went well

We are continuing the excavation of the 'well' and after recording lifting the 'cap' stone. 

The deep past?

Trench A: the 'well'

Saturday: the rain kept off, mostly, so we got a lot done on Trench A - the 'well'. Nice worked stone on the outer face and the potential for more under the dump of stone. Hopefully we can open up the next 10m x 10m trench on Wednesday, as the farm manager was not available yesterday. This trench has produced new information about the house, not mentioned in any archive we know about. That adds to the Great Drain as new history for the village.

Not just thrown up, the structure is solid and well made

Spurs lost... and found

This nice George II halfpenny turned up at the Stalbridge excavation yesterday along with a spur buckle of the 17th or 18th century, with 'W' marked on it. It is always useful to have a detectorist on site to go over the spoil heap!

... well.

Today was a mixed bag, with Trench A feature looking more and more like a well. More work needs to be done and all the stones recorded before we venture to lift the capping stone seen here, safely with a small machine.

Trench A

Trench Q3 did not turn up must at all, so we are opening another, F3 next week. Look in for details.

Well, well?

The new season has begun, with good news and not so good. The good news is that the parch mark of last year could turn out to be a possible well, and a well made one at that! Substantial walls and a large circular patch of soft soil, as shown above. We can't go too deep for H&S reason, but it is quite big and so we can dig some of it out and hopefully find out its construction and some nice dateable artefacts. 

The new 10m square trench did not bring up the wall or drain, so we are going to extend it to the left of this picture and backfill the right side, over the water pipe shown by the blue lines. This could mean that the house was not square and open facing the walled garden, or we just hit a space with no wall existing.

This nice 16th century silver coin came up in the 'well' area and could have still been in circulation in the early 17th century. 

This plaster work was probably decoration inside the house. 

Some pottery and glass was also found.  

Project updates

We have set out the next 10m square trench at Stalbridge House today. 

We have also had some good geophysics results at the Medieval hall at Weycroft, Axminster. 

Look in for updates on both projects.

Mosaic mania!

Nancy Grace of the National Trust came to the Dorchester History Centre to give a talk on the Roman villa at Chedworth. Never seen so many mosaics in one location.