SERF blog

Day 9-Ben Effrey

Hi my name is Vlad, I am a foreign exchange student from Romania. Today was beautiful and sunny outside, with the long awaited warmth, some breeze and no traces of rain – a bit for everyone, really. Team Effrey (or occasionally Jeffrey), consisting of Tessa, Cathy, Tom, Vlad, Dan and Adriana (who was absent today because of field walking duties) along with Lorraine, made its glorious entry in the hillfort after a 20 minutes climb in a mesmerizing landscape. The sheep had taken advantage of our empty site in the past two days and rudely left their characteristic marks all over. Despite this we set off to work right away.




Unfortunately we didn’t have any finds today – it’s not that we are unluckier than everybody else, just that the site we are digging is prehistoric, you know, so it is likely to be more than one-metre deep to reach traces of human presence from the Iron Age. While Lorraine and Cathy were doing the topographic survey of the site, the rest of us mattocked and towelled in different parts of the trench in order to uncover the three ramparts of the fort and also record the development of the site over time (tumbled stones, reason for abandonment, possible destruction etc.). Around noon, we had three visitors – a father with his two small sons – who were passing by and were curious to find out our mission up there. Hmm apart from that there were no other notable events, but we don’t need any in order to enjoy ourselves while trying to bring a great contribution to our archaeological project :-)