Cousland Big Dig : day 7

Working in a COusland going down and down…  working in a Cousland.. 

The tune whistles through my head!  Fortuantely not the Chris Rea tune that somebody has now tried to place there! 

 

Trench 4 does indeed strike lucky (ish)  and finds the robber trench of the rear wall of the House ( a later addition to the castle)  where Mary Queen of Scots is taken after the Battle of Carberry!)  however, it is becoming clear that the entire area is covered in a thick layer of redeposited natural and clay…  and that what was once a rocky out crop has been turned into a quarry for the walls of the walled garden. 

In teh image below you can see the mass of white…  whcih is indeed ( in technical terms) a bleeding great big hole!  Somebody stole our castle!

More interesting though is the material in the dump…  it contains early 18th C pottery and some Kiln furniture…  which suggests it comes from the pottery site we investigated in November..   More signs of a massive industrial scale piece of work!

So that means the geofizz is correct..

The HLF turn up as well…  and we should be proud that they saw this as a model for Our Heritage Grants…  impressed by the commitment…  impressed by the range of skills people learn, from drawing to survey, from photography to research…  and the range of people involved…   it has been shown to be a great success…  and tommorrow is out BIG open day!    Pray for sun! 

 

Cousland Big Dig : day 6

Right…  where are we!

Oh yes…  scraping down and down onto an orangy clayey silt!

Trenches 1 and 3 and now returfed - though why oh why does the turf not fit!  we end up with enough left over to turf another trench!

Trench 2 (the castle trench) continues down, with a plaintive cry of, the castle wall, must be here somewhere!  A mound of rubble fragments seems to come from a later collapse.  Hard Hats on everyone!

Trenches 4 and 5 are opened to cope with the numbers of people now on site..  aged 4 - 82… 

We are starting to get a feeling that the 1700s saw a MASSIVE bit of demolition and even the removal of all teh bedrock that the castle sat on!  …  This is what its all about!