Several weeks
have passed and the tree planting plan continues in earnest. As part of the
project Oxford Archaeology East (OAE) where brought in to use the holes dug for
the trees to see what, if any, laid beneath the soil.
This also drew
the interest of the local newspapers who showed up at the beginning of the hole
digging to report and take pictures. Even today I was in town and bumped into
someone I knew and the first thing they said was “I saw you on the front of the
paper the other day!”
The day before
the local news arrived and filmed a short piece on the ‘search for the lost
village at Wimpole’ that included boss Simon and our colleague Debs digging a
hole. I don’t think she was very impressed as it cut into her coffee break! I
managed to escape this one (but not the photo opportunity sadly) as Shane, Paul
and I had scarpered for a brew at the same time.
Before everyone
gets excited I should just mention this important fact. We aren’t looking for a
lost village! I know it would be exciting and a huge crowd puller but the holes
are there for trees not for seeking lost villages. Which incidentally aren’t
near the hall in any case. As much as I enjoy archaeology, this was a secondary
objective and we thought it’d be worth the look as we were digging up the lawn
anyway!
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| Slowly but surely... |
Enough of the
media coverage though, I’ll add a link at the bottom of this post if you’re
interested in reading the article. I have to say that the Royston Weekly
highlighted the tree planting, so thumbs up for you!
So we assisted
(or is it the other way round?) OAE in digging the 157 holes needed for the
trees, which conveniently doubled as small test pits. I’ll be writing a piece
about test pits on our sister blog some time in the future for you budding
amateur archaeologists!
While OAE dug
the sensitive areas by the hall (blue stakes), the rest of us dug the
not-as-important white staked areas. A scattering of pottery, mainly Medieval
was found in some of the test pits; along with animal bones and a reasonable
quantity of building rubble.
Unfortunately
the weather hasn’t been the greatest of late and although it made the holes
easier to dig, the mud tended to stick to everything (being mainly clay soils
at Wimpole) and everyone! It also had the added bonus of filling many of the
completed test pits with water that then had to be bailed out before we could
plant the trees.
Before I got to
dig any test pits though, I took over from where Peter left off. Namely mark up
every blue and white stake with an ID number and the tree species that was
designated to it. So for a good day or two I set of with my set of maps and ID
numbers and labelled every stake. It also helped OAE as they had to record any
finds and the location of every test pit with GPS. It wasn’t without its
headaches though as during that first week there were severe gusts that made
map reading and ID sorting not the greatest of jobs!
Eventually
though as you can see from the photo above, I did eventually manage to dig a
few test pits. In the beginning (there was light!) I had started my first test
pit and went over to check with Paul. I noticed he had dug up quite a number of
animal bones and being both an archaeologist and an osteoarchaeologist I
swapped so he could carry on digging while I handled the more delicate of the
two.
The more I dug, the
more bones were revealed to me and as I unearthed each new bone I began
counting, calculating a quick MNI number in my head. MNI stands for ‘Minimum
Number of Individuals’ and is used to work out how many individual animals are
present at a time (more on this in the future). First there were two lambs,
then three…and by the time I had got to the bottom of the test pit I lost count
but I think I was up to about five! The photo below was taken near the start of
my mini excavation and the board was literally covered in bones by the time I
had finished.
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| Look at the bones! |
It took me the
best part of that day to finish digging one test pit (tree hole) it was that
full of bones and even I was getting a bit tired of pulling out bone after bone
and not finding the end of them. First off I was thrilled because I’d never dug
a test pit with this many finds in it before but that had completely
disappeared by the end of it!
After
each test pit was completed, it was left open to be recorded by the OAE team
and we erected a simple tripod of stakes to a) identify easily the location of
each hole and b) to stop the general public blundering into said hole by
accident and suing the National Trust for damages.
The tripods were
Shane’s idea that very morning, since we were trying to come up with a solution
that was quick and easy without too much faffing about. We did find it quite
funny though when Simon decided to draw us a tripod to make sure we knew what
the end product would look like! In the end work almost ground to a halt as we
set out to work and left the technical drawing with all the dimensions behind!!
Fortunately Shane remembering from scratch what a tripod looked like and we
were all saved, well done Shane!
With holes dug
and tripods up, we were well on the way. Starting in the east corner adjacent
to the Pleasure Gardens, we worked our way across the park and up the hill to
the wood belts at the far side of the parkland. It took a good while but after
much digging and tripod raising the job was done! All that was left was placing
a spiral guard round every tree; wire mesh to protect against foreign invaders
(bunnies) and a metal guard to protect from the farm livestock…
Thanks to Paul
and Debbie for the photos!
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