Today marked the first day on site for the new students, which started with the basics and a safety briefing before beginning a mass trowelling of the site. Shortly after, Sue and Brian, volunteers from SSARG arrived on site and joined in trowelling – meanwhile at the northern end of the site Hayley and James finished planning a feature.

Chris and Hayley had continued working on their features from last week, finding a fragment of a hypocaust flu tile. It is most likely to have come from the Villa, and is likely akin to the tile given to us by a neighbour last week.

https://flic.kr/p/rQgAfb

After morning break the students and volunteers were assigned to features that had been revealed during trowelling, some sherds of pottery were found throughout the day – a highlight being a fragment of medieval green glazed pottery found by James H. Samara, Tilly and Holly-Ann took on the mammoth task of removing a large layer in the northern end of the trench, whilst Chris and Josh continued to remove slot from a ditch started on Friday.

The new starters arrived back at camp in high spirits, but they’ll be aching in the morning!