Friday brings resolution to some of our questions and raises more problems for our team of University of Kent students, our stalwart volunteers and the Trust team. When I mentioned that we had finished a segment through the ring ditch yesterday I meant that we thought we had finished.

In our second segment through the ring ditch, a heavy day of digging revealed two distinct cuts on the eastern and western sides. The western cut had  a symmetrical profile, with steeply sloping upper edges breaking to a deep straight sided cut and breaking sharply at the bottom  at the flat base. This cut is much more like the typical section of a well preserved ring ditch in Thanet.

So why does our first segment which we thought we had completed yesterday (see yesterday’s post) look so different? What are the prospects for the third segment being excavated further along the north eastern edge?

The issue was resolved today when it turned out our first ditch segment, with the strange benched profile and possible recut, was excavated only to the top of a compacted fill of chalk rubble and silt. Having pondered the situation with a fresh pair of eyes on the feature (thanks PCH) the chalk had to go! Two tons of chalk rubble stand no chance against the team armed with finely honed skills with a mattock and considerable progress was made toward matching the ditch profile with its neighbor immediately to the north, solving the problem of why these two segments appeared so different to each other.

The second segment presents a new problem now, with a clear second cut feature, which seems to have been excavated on the inner edge of the ring ditch. Is it discrete pit or evidence for a much more substantial recut ditch? Time and much more excavation will tell.

Further north the third segment excavated through the ring ditch to add more to our understanding of the plan of the ditch circuit , looks as if it will also end up being as deep as the other two segments.

There’s more progress to report on the southern side of the site, where we have been excavating our segments through a later feature, possible a quarry pit, but perhaps a more substantial feature. A section through undisturbed deposits and another emptying a previous section excavated in 1982 have found among some shallower pit cuts. a steep sided cut feature which extends into both areas of excavation. Are these simply random chalk quarries or is this one of the deep cut sunken features, possibly once associated with structures, that we have encountered many times before in Thanet? We have more definition of our targets here now but the questions are not  resolved yet…

Lucky we have another week to go! More updates after a well earned weekend of rest for the team.