Day 9 has arrived of Little Asby Community Dig and we were blessed with a morning of glorious sunshine. It is days like these that remind you of how lucky you are to be working in such a fantastic location with some great people.  As we all arrived we made our way up to site to begin work.

We had three fresh-faced volunteers joining us today, Cecelia, Liz and Roger who Andy took around the site to brief them on what had been done so far.  Everybody else headed off with Katie to carry on with what they were doing yesterday.  

As the weather was so nice it was decided that it would be a great opportunity to get on with the recording of the sections within Trenches A and C.

In Trench A Linda and Bob worked on recording the sections that were looking at the construction of the longhouse south-western wall and the possible lowered level of limestone pavement in the north-eastern corner of the trench.

In Trench C the recording of the long south-west facing section.  The section will record the sondage within the north-eastern end of the longhouse, the north-western wall of the longhouse and the external area to the north-west of the wall. Also in Trench C Jane was working on removing a section of the north-eastern wall in an attempt to see if any construction cut is visible for the wall. Once recording of the long section was completed Simon then took samples of the deposits within the sondage as charcoal was evident below the wall level. It was decided that Trench C would be extended south-west to see if any evidence of the floor surface survived.  Andy set to work getting this ready for de-turfing tomorrow

In Trench E, Richard and Tim were busy removing the darker brown upper deposit to reveal the orangey deposit below.  They are looking for any evidence of charcoal which they can then sample and hopefully get some dating evidence.

Myself, Cecelia, Liz and Roger were sent away from the longhouse excavations to look at the possible entrance in the north-western wall of the enclosure. We set up our trench location over an area where there is possible narrowing of the wall and an opening. This entrance also appeared to have been used by the sheep as one of the upright stones had been rubbed smooth from the many passing, itchy sheep. We set to work de-turfing in the morning and then cleaning in the afternoon.  

We still have a bit of cleaning to finish tomorrow before we can then record it via photogrammetry and start removing the fallen rubble. It is still unclear if this was an actual opening but hopefully time will tell.

Well, the forecast is a little grim for tomorrow as rain is expected. Hopefully it will pass quickly and not dampen our spirits too much.