Dig 1 - Sunday 18th April 2004

We've been waiting for months for this moment, we've completed the training, been to lectures but now, finally the moment to get our hands dirty has arrived. The plan was to start the dig on the first Sunday after the Easter weekend. The week leading up to the day has seen fabulous weather and now we are preparing to start work excavating a bronze age barrow.

I was awakened in the early hours of Sunday morning by the sound of rain lashing against my bedroom window. I told myself that by the time I get up it will have passed, did it heck!

The site is a couple of miles west of the village and many of our team had planned to cycle down to the site. It was a great relief when I received a phone call from Peter Smith at 8.30 offering a lift. We picked up Liz and Gill (our Chairman) on the way. In the end just one brave soul, Tim, managed to cycle to site. We duly arrived on site at 10am after a brief friendly meeting with the site owner Peter Lee.

At the site half the committee had already arrived and the others soon followed. It continued to rain and the wind blew with vigour. Eventually we left the dryness of our container to commence surveying the roundabout that is, hopefully, our barrow, known as Sut 7. For the next two hours the rain comes and goes as we mark out the site.

Firstly we found the centre of the of the barrow and from there mark out the grid on the site. At about 12 o'clock we are ready to start removing the top of the South West quadrant. We broke for lunch at 12.30 with nearly a third of the quadrant de-turfed.

Just after 1pm we continue with the job and all goes remarkably smoothly and within the hour the top layer of the quadrant is all removed. David ran his metal detector over the quadrant but nothing comes to light.

We mark out 1 metre by 0.5 metre sections along the straight edges of the quadrant. We are allocated a section each and our task is to scrape away the soil in that section to a depth of 10 cm. Again the rain started to fall and even turns to hail for a brief time but we work on through. While we did this some of the AFU staff are clearing the side of the mound to reveal the original topsoil below and the natural level below that. The Soil changes from the black fen soil to a light coffee brown and below that the gravel layer. Once we have cleared our allotted section we move onto an adjacent one and start the process again.

The rain continues on and off and we are wet through so by 2.30 we called a halt to the days procedures. We spent the next half an hour packing away and tidying the site. Our finds for the day were a rusty washer, a wire brush and a small piece of medieval pottery!

The biggest surprise was how much we achieved on the day. In spite of the weather we all agreed that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We now have a month before we can return to site and in the meantime will put all our efforts into researching ancient tribal sundances.