You know it's going to be an interesting day weather wise when the Met Office issues a forecast including the words 'torrential rain, thunder, lightning, large hail, flash floods & disruption'. Still, started out OK, dry and muggy, and we took advantage of the calm before the storm to put a small sondage along the edge of our new trench in the area closest to the Kaland longhouse, where we thought the likely continuation might run.
Sure enough we started coming down onto substantial stonework below the plough soil, at just about the depth which might survive if the area had been lightly improved for agriculture in the 19th century.
There's quite a few gaps with lots of smaller broken up stones, which looks like places where stonework has been removed, but it's certainly chunky enough to be our longhouse. Of course it then all had to be cleaned up very quickly for a photograph, as we could see the storm clouds massing and the wind was starting to pick up, so much so that Steve needed steadying to get his pics.
It did look much better cleaned up (apologies that you've just got my not very good and slightly lopsided pic, not the official photo, which is trillions of megabytes and so would take forever to upload on my steam powered internet connection, which is a mile long bit of copper wire that has never been the same since the snow plough went through the junction box):
Anyway we got finished just before the heavens opened and the thunder and lightning started, prompting a swift chorus of a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody with lots of 'Galileos' at full volume 'cos that's the only words most folk can remember, following which we headed off site early, over roads that now resembled streams, and it's not stopped raining since. Tomorrow we're expanding into the rest of the trench, probably after a fair bit of baling out. Hopefully not too much since it's been so dry for so long there'll be lots of places for the water to fill before we get flooded out, but that might just be famous last words!
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