SERF blog

Hello out there, Hilary here! Yet another day of lovely weather for SERF.

Shall we have a little introduction to Dunning, where my team is? We are digging next to St Serf’s churchyard wall in hopes of finding an older boundary to the churchyard and possibly some dating evidence to tell us when it was constructed. Over that past few days we’ve been clearing off the modern junk that has accumulated over the recent years. In the upper rubbish we did find a few treasures in the form of two bullet shells, a 17^th century coin, and some painted window glass.

Our potential Jacobite burned building quickly became a circa 1950’s coal shed when we realized we were digging up coal rather than charcoal. Today we finished recording the excavation of that feature and moved on to other things; a nice big pit with clay at the bottom for instance. From said clay we constructed a makeshift trench-deity during tea break.  

We also have several sondages (a trench within a trench) cut into the bank that abuts the churchyard wall; all of them are showing different features and there is consequently much head scratching going on.  But in the sondage I was digging I found a ditch-like feature than just keeps going down. We are hoping it is the older boundary we are searching for but more excavation is in order before we can be confident about that. Unfortunately tomorrow is my day to learn standing building and topographic surveying so I will be unable to continue to excavate my cool new feature. On the other hand, tomorrow I get to learn standing building and topographic survey!