Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham House

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Attendees: Joanne, Katharine, Sam, Zoe, Simon, John M, Martin, Chloe, Lindsey, Tim L, Beth, Peter Cl, Louise and Keith 

As can be seen in Figure 1, the open area trenches are located within the middle of the pasture. As conditions today were very warm to say the least, but we were fortunate to have gazebos to provide much needed shade to allow excavation to continue, albeit at a more relaxed pace…

Once the gazebos were in position, excavation was able to proceed in relative comfort, with sieving taking place beneath nearby tree cover. Sam was able to bring his experience a professional field archaeologist to apply to his “bus-man’s holiday” at Wickham, with renewed focus on the exploratory slot being dug along the north of Trench 15 to better define in section some of the features seen in plan. Much progress was made in both the slot and the ditch along the Roman road, which will be recorded in future blogs.

Trench 16 was similarly equipped with a gazebo to provide shade, which allowed Lindsey, Peter and Tim to continue to explore the corn drier flue in detail from the projects started last week. The layers of archaeology around the flue are complex, but with patient removal/recording of each deposit the phasing of the features is slowly being revealed…

Trench 17 was left somewhat exposed to the sun, so Chloe and Zoe retreated to the shade of a nearby tree to bring the trench records up to date. Paula also took advantage of the tree cover to bring the records for Trench 15 up to date, whilst others helped out with the sieving.