Twmbarlwm Dig 2022
Day 7

Tuesday 16th August 2022

Managed to get up to the car park first today – a bit cooler today than it has been – but the volunteers soon started to turn up and we ended up with 8 all together. Had a good chat with them and the archaeologists in the car park about how the dig is progressing and everyone seems very upbeat about it and it’s good to see how much the volunteers are enjoying their time here – until I shooed them all off up the mountain again.

Again I didn’t go up to the site myself – so I’m grateful to Will Davies of Cadw giving me the following report and photos at the end of the day.

DIG DIARY DAY 7

Almost ideal conditions on Twmbarlwm today, cloudy with the odd spot of rain and a gentle breeze. All trenches have been progressing well with the volunteers working very hard. I don’t know the numbers of the trenches so will describe by feature.

Cairn.
The western external face of the cairn has been exposed, confirming that it is a Prehistoric funerary monument with a characteristic kerb of larger stones and almost certainly of Bronze Age date, although no finds or other dating evidence have been retrieved. The ground to the south and west are showing considerable evidence of burning from the 2018 fires, with areas of ash and burnt, shattered sandstone. This will be cleaned up for recording by photogrammetry tomorrow.  

Circular feature and southern rampart.
Sterling work from Sophie and her team has seen them remove several tonnes of sandstone rubble to create a 1m section cut through the rampart and circular stone feature to its rear. This is increasingly looking like a disordered rubble dump some 0.7m high with little sign of structure and no finds other than some naturally occurring fossils on the sandstone slabs, and is very like the smaller feature behind the north-western rampart excavated in 2021. They have reached a stony yellow clay across the bottom of the trench, which is likely to be the natural subsoil, or just above it. We are still assuming that the feature is associated with the construction of the rampart from material cast up from the ditch below. Work continues tomorrow.

SE corner.
Chris’ team have now cleared the face of the seemingly incomplete end of the rampart down to the natural yellow clay and have extended the trench to the full width of the possible shallow or incomplete ditch beyond, where there is a hint of a darker fill in its base. The profile of the bank itself is relatively gentle in comparison to the very steep sections around most of the ‘hillfort’ enclosure and there is little or no sign of any stony upcast even vaguely resembling that that Sophie’s team have been excavating in Trench XX and visible on the surface across most of the rest of the earthwork. Some rain tonight may produce a better contrast between very subtle colour changes and help to make decisions on which areas to sample next.

A really good day from our volunteers –  there will be some aching muscles tomorrow.

Thank you Will – click here to visit the Cadw website – and why not follow them on Facebook too

Katy has been working the first trench – the one on the SE edge – and she has been amazed by the number of rocks with fossils being pulled out – not much to do with the archaeology that we are investigating but interesting nonetheless. I will get our friendly palaeontologist to identify them and write a little about them later in the blog – but in the meanwhile here’s some of Katy’s photos of the fossils.

CLICK HERE – for a gallery of photos of the pats couple of days