Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham House
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Attendees: Deborah, Tim L, Martin, Gabby, Margaret, Jill, Terry, Barbara, Hazel, Phyllida and Keith

Work continued in the southerly extension of Trench 2B with Gabby, Deborah and Martin who completed removal of the topsoil and recorded the contexts revealed. After recording work continued to remove the next layer of stratigraphy – and discovered a Roman numus denomination coin within the last bucket of the day on the spoil heap.

In trench 1A Jill and Margaret worked on sampling the fills of the two ditches revealed in 10cm spits so that finds can be used as dating evidence for these deposits. The samples will be used to identify activities that may have taken place within the nearby paddocks using XRF testing.

In trench 2A work continued to define the extent of the deposit of large flints at the southern end of the trench. This revealed a possible N-S aligned edge together with less dense deposit of the flints overlaying fragments of roof line suggesting post-demolition deposition. Further work will be needed to clarify this interim interpretation. The northern end of Trench 2A Tim revealed a shallow sandy/mortar deposit parallel to the N-S aligned edge revealed last week suggesting that these two features are associated.

We were lucky enough today to be joined by Phyllida Shelley who is a prominent local artist living in Cookham, who the ‘artist in residence’ at the University of Reading’s excavation at Cookham Abbey. Phyllida’s portfolio includes artistic interpretations of archaeology in action, and being keen to gain a perspective of voluntary sector archaeology, spent the day with us capturing interpretations of the features being revealed in the trenches by the BAS team. You can see more of Phyllida’s work at www.phyllidashelley.com – and the day’s results shown in Figure 7 vividly compliment the objectivity of the plans/sections produced by the BAS team on perma-trace to great effect…