Just for a bit of variety we were moving blue sandbags today, and they were mostly filled with beach pebbles not sand as they were in the top of our strange and very wet subterranean feature first found in 2019.
We can't really dig it as it's below the current water table so we were intending to leave it filled in this year, but the blue bags were spoiling Steve's site photos so we've had to take at least some of them out. If you want to know more about the weird underground feature you can see the original blog posts from the 3rd August and 4th August 2019.
Most people try to hide when they see me taking photos for the dig diary, but not Michal who always makes sure I get his best side if he sees me coming. I caught him unawares the other day and mostly had his behind in the photo so hopefully this one will make up for it:
Meanwhile Alice, Gavin and Julie were taking advantage of the support of our sandbag viewing platform while they sorted out the site databases, by the wonders of modern technology we have a really good 4G signal on site so it's easy to upload records to the cloud.
Unfortunately as you can see from the splatter on the left, the black headed gulls also like to perch there when we're off site.
Then it was back to real work removing some more large slabs of stone down the planks
When this particular slab was turned over it was found to have a slightly odd but definitly man-made groove running across the bottom, so it was off to the finds hut in a wheelbarrow to be handed over to Talia as a small find. Talia did at least see the funny side of having to small find a massive rock:
Just in case I've now confused you, small finds don't have to be physically small, it's just a handy term for a find that's a bit more special than the usual bone and shell e.g. pottery, worked bone, or, as in this case, whacking great big rocks with a groove in them. These finds are given a separate record number and then their find spot is recorded in 3-D so we know exactly where they were found.
High tide at the end of the day brought one of the seals in so close we thought they might be going to haul out for a closer look, not sure if it's the same ones but we always have three seals every year who pop round to keep any eye on us:
Off for a bit of a rest now, looks like tomorrow might be a bit of a damp day but not as bad as originally forecast.