(unedited version, due to archaeological fieldwork damage)
Making sense of things is not however the easiest of pursuits. At the ‘oven’ end of the site, a double wall feature had been identified at the end of day 3. A full day of excavation later, and we are still none the wiser. What we can say is that we have some substantial wall features, with at least ten courses of dressed stone walls revealed by the afternoon. Capping one of these walls are two substantial flat stones, yet the purpose of these stones is utterly unclear. We do know that there is some wall collapse visible in section, which runs off in the direction of our original oven feature. Day 5 will be focused in on revealing as much of the relationship between wall and oven as possible, but the meters worth of rubble stone in fill will make this one heck of a challenge.
In the middle of site B, having removed the somewhat ephemeral internal stone wall, the team was finally allowed to start lifting the surviving floor surface, including Claire’s much coveted millstone. This was intended as an exercise of ‘just in case’, an effort to reassure ourselves that there were no underlying features. As is so often the way though, there were, of course, underlying features. In this case an earlier flagstone floor. Reasonable well preserved, this floor surface seems to extend from the flagstone floor identified in the summer. Hopefully we can finish off cleaning this extended feature in the morning, and possibly use it to aid our understanding of where the door to this fifteen meter long building was (after two excavations, we still don’t have a way into the building)!
Then there was the pig sty end of the structure, where yesterday Chris and Andy has found a series of new walls and a further flagstone surface. The guys did a great job cleaning the features found yesterday, but ultimately progress was limited by the pig sty from which the site derives its name. Set in the middle of the western end of the site is a (barely) standing pig sty. Overlying the very same wall and floor features revealed yesterday, the pig sty is in such a precarious state that excavation in close proximity to it was just simply too unsafe. Before we can proceed, the pig sty will need recording and then removal, which means our understanding of this site will be far from complete until at least the first third of 2014.
The deeper we go, the more we know and the less we understand...which is probably why we will return here at least once more. Until then, we have one day to go, and a final chance in the morning to resolve some of our outstanding archaeological problems.