A great deal of activity today and a few visits, planned and unexpected. We made a great deal of progress with excavating sections through the undisturbed northern area of the ring ditch. Our first section reached the bottom of the ditch, showing it had a symmetrical, but unusual profile (photo update tomorrow).
However, the northern section proved less easy to interpret and it may be we have evidence that the ditch had possibly been re-cut around the circuit of the ditch, or had been cut by a later linear ditch.The features and their relationships are not clear yet and more work needs to be done in the next few days. The recut may explain why the significant finds from the upper fill of what should be a Bronze Age feature were a medieval jug handle and a peg tile pierced with a hole for hanging the tile on a roof.
We also carried on with a series of small sections to explore the later features cut into the southern side of the barrow. These may be a series of pits or perhaps a larger feature. There’s more to be done in this area and we really appreciated the help of two of our regular volunteers who joined our University of Kent student excavators for the day.
Later in the afternoon we were visited by the team from the Powell-Cotton Museum, where many of the finds from the earlier excavations on the site are stored. A good opportunity to match the finds in the Museum with their context in the landscape; and a chance to discuss how we can work with our local Museum in the future.