Dave's Dig Diary

The Castle
It started on a typical Sunday Afternoon, I was down the local with some guys I know ( no names I promised) drinking Bombardier and talking, when they told me about this idea of theirs for a Historical Site all about my home town of Wellingborough, they were trying to get me in on it, but it sounded like to much hard work. We went back to mine for some food and ended up watching TimeTeam, well this and the Bombardier really got me in the mood, so I said lets do it. We grabbed a tool kit and a couple of halogen lights, jumped on the JCB and took off.

We started round the back, in the carpark, lights blazing, now we didn't have any of that fancy ground radar stuff so chucked my carkeys and said that's trench one! The asphalt came up easily under the bucket and within no time we were down 5 foot. We jumped in the hole and looked around, I could clearly see the earth was two colours, a lighter shade here meeting a darker shade curving where they met, I thought it could have been where the original Moat had been back filled, but Russell (not his real name) said it was just the shadow from the lights. Taking my screwdriver (I didn't have a trowel in those days) I scraped away at the earth, suddenly it struck something hard, excited we eagerly removed the remaining earth, revealing some old stones, each about the size of a deep fat fryer, lying in a line straight through the middle of out trench!

Clearing away the muck from one side we could see that there was another layer of these stones underneath, I was fascinated, we had found a wall, I wanted to continue excavating here but Russell said, this wasn't what we were after, we were looking for evidence of the people who build the castle not some 600 year old wall.
We had gone to deep, so we back filled the trench and opened up trench two closer to the building itself.

With trench two I was much more careful, removing only the tarmac, then we started by hand, before long out finds tray was filling up, nails, bits of brick, even a few bottle tops, but so rusty we couldn't determine the brand. Suddenly Russell let out a scream, crowding round to see what he'd found we could see something silver in the ground, using a paint brush he removed the soil from around it revealing an old style 5pence piece you know before they introduced those tiny little ones. It wasn't long before he'd uncovered a few more, as well as a 50P too, this was evidence of the mysterious builder of the Castle, I know people with disagree with me here but I'm sure we found the place the workers had hidden their wages, but long since forgotten them.

Back at my end of the trench I was unearthing more bottle tops and had found a bit of "four by two". I'd come across what I think was originally paper, but was too much of a mulch to make anything out of. Paul (again not his real name) was doing a site walk, wandering around the site with a torch (it was dark and we only had enough lights for the trench) when he came running back, "I've got something really exciting over in the bushes there" he said nearly out of breath. Taking one of the lights we went over to examine his find, "I was just wondering around trying to imagine how the builders must have felt as they worked here when I spotted this". Taking a closer look it appeared to be a plastic bag, the outside, covered in a green mould.

We didn't have time to cut the bushes out from around it so breaking with all archaeological rules we pulled the find out of the bushes onto the grass, the bag appeared to contain something it was quiet heavy, we all looked at each other wondering who would be the one to open it, it really should have been Paul, it was his find but he was still shaking with excitement, so I stepped forward and using a stanly knife sliced through the sides of the bag, the wind caught it and the flap I had cut, blew back revealing the contents. Despite being the plastic bag water had managed to seep in, and had soaked everything inside the bag, however, we could clearly make out that the bag contained magazines, and there looking right at us was a naked woman! We had found the Builders Jaz mag stash! Paul quickly fetched a finds tray and we lifted the complete bag into it, this find would go back to the lab for further investigations!

Time was really against us it was by now nearly 1.30am and we all had work in the morning. So all three of us were in the trench for a final half hour. It really amazes me how when your coming to the end of a dig, you find something that makes the whole thing worthwhile, and answers many of the questions you came with, and for us it was about to happen. embedded right in the side wall of out trench was large stone, I'd avoided it each time I passed by, because i didn't want to hurt myself on it, but with the three of us now in the hole there wasn't room, it caught my shoulder on it as I passed, the pain shot along my arm and the stone fell away from the side of the trench taking a fair bit of the earth around it to.

It revealed a rusting can, using my screwdriver I started to prize the can out of the earth, to my horror the can broke clean into two pieces. Devastated as ruining a find like this I swore. I took a look at the piece of can in my hand, I recognised it, it was clearly a budwiser can, the unmistakable white and red colouring, we quickly pulled out the other half and stuck it back together with some insulating tape.

Our first dig had been a success, we had evidence enough to prove that the builders of the Castle were paid for their work and not slaves as previously thought, that they indulged in both pornography and drinking, and had done a very cheep job on the carpark, the surface being only 1/2 an inch thick, whereas it should have been 2/3 - 3/4 of an inch.

I still have the can at home, complete with insulating tape. Paul took the Magazines back to the lab for further investigation, but reported that there was too much water damage to be able to prepare them for a public display.

I hope you've enjoyed my diary of our first ever dig, and who knows maybe one day we'll invite you to join us!

Dave

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Produced, compiled and written by Dave "JCB" Digger (c) 2002 Visual Distractions