TWMBARLWM ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG 2021

The Big Dig continued from Monday 2nd till Friday 20th August

Hello again folks

I’m excited to get started on the Dig after so many delays over the past couple of years. Please note that I’m writing this blog from a keen amateur’s standpoint and the society’s involvement – all the technical stuff and information about any findings will come from the professional archaeologists at a later date. Their final report will be made publicly available on this website and other archaeological archive sites.

Tuesday 3rd August 📷

Promises to be a dry, warm, clear day as we arrive at 9:00 – volunteers Rod H, Martin H, Gabriel H, Cameron I and Jessica D.

DAY 2 : TRENCH 1

As yesterday we loaded all the gear into the back of the 4×4 and everyone started the climb up the slope – can’t understand why nobody accepted a lift from me. Met again at the kissing gate at the east end of the monument where we all carried our share of the equipment to the top.

Richard needed to make notes of the nature of the trench before we could continue excavating – he especially needed to make accurate drawings of the size and shape of the stones lying in the base of the trench.

While Richard was doing that, Harri took the volunteers to help with the mapping of the location of the trench. This entailed using an Optical Level – often called a Dumpy – and starting with the trig-point as the base datum point we were able to measure the drop towards the trench and thus give accurate information for the height and position of the trench. All the volunteers had the opportunity to use the equipment – and we calculated the drop from the top of the mountain to the base of the trench was nearly 13m.

When RH had completed his notes we were able to start removing the layer of stones at the bottom end of the trench and gradually the face of a stone wall was discovered – CI and JD helped RH reveal the wall while the others worked on the top end of the trench.

The layer of rubble revealed yesterday was dug through several more centimetres revealing the pile to be fairly consistent in size and appears to be capping off the top of the rampart. An east to west cross section of the rubble also shows it dropping off to the western edge showing that this is probably the end of the rampart rather than an area that has been cut through at a later date.

Trustee Norman L arrived for the afternoon shift and helped us continue to dig deeper with RH and HT doing the mattock work through the layers using their expertise to judge the change of colour of soil to indicate various  stages of the rampart’s construction (I will leave that to the experts to explain at a later date).

It had been a very hot sunny day and the lead archaeologists were satisfied with progress. And again we’re very grateful to our gang of volunteers.

This archaeological investigation is funded by:
Ariennir yr ymchwiliad archeolegol hwn gan: