9. Digging in the Castle

Sam's first few weeks at the dig proved to be uneventful. Once the basic procedures had been established and the gravel layer had been removed by hand ( no mechanical equipment could easily be got into the castle), three trenches had been established. One towards the eastern aspect of the chapel where any alter may have once stood. The second to the west at where it seemed the only entrance to castle smithy and arsenal had seemed to be bizarrely through the chapel. The third one was beyond the route to the northern postern where it was thought the bake house once stood. There had been strict instructions from the CADW liaison officer that the integrity of the nearby well should not be compromised.

Cataloging, Sam's main priority, had initially been been just a matter of disappointing the undergraduates by explaining the proffered rare shard of pottery or bit of glass were only early twentieth century. But now that they were digging deeper especially in the second trench they were actually beginning to find things while not actually that unusual were certainly interesting. Iola, as the Professor had permitted her to call him, would intermittently call an impromptu lecture. The undergraduates would excitedly cluster around as he explained the intricacies of 14th century crossbow manufacturing. Sam drifted in and out of the discussion of how the weapon had democratized  warfare. You could be reasonably competent with a crossbow in a day. Learning to use a longbow took years of training to be able to draw bow with enough force. 


It was quite obvious the some of the undergraduates had never done a physical days work in their lives. Most evenings they would congregate in the pub and complain about blisters, their muddy clothes and the shear tedium of moving dirt with a tooth brush. The site had not been examined for over a hundred years. The Victorian archaeologist in general was not known as a preserver of such sites and as expected the remaining finds were proving  to very dull. However the next weeks they would investigating deeper into the trenches where the previous dig had not gone.


It was high summer but the next day, a Friday, a thin drizzle and mist enveloped the castle and by lunch time the prof called a long weekend. Sam took a long soak in the bath and prepared her self for that evenings shift in the pub.