Sunday 20 July - click here for images
The team is beginning to form up for another project in the
Today was machining day – and Pete and Sarah Clayton were on site early to begin work. We had a chance to dig a couple of evaluation trenches earlier in the year so we had a good idea of what to expect – and Pete was able to clear the site of ploughsoil leaving a recognisable demolition/destruction level of flint and crushed mortar as well as, in places, the tops of walls – too early to say if they are walls themselves or just the foundations. We are all surprised at how shallow the archaeology is – in some places over the flint and crushed mortar, only 15 to 20cms deep.
We have also got some finds – some fragments of Grimston ware, iron nails, a couple of copper alloy fragments and some lead from window cames. We also had a small sherd of samian ware. So, first day down and excellent progress. We have our trench open - it trench measures 13 by 23 m and is aligned along the central east-west axis of the chapel itself. Tomorrow we continue cleaning the trench, expose more of the demolition deposit and clean up the visible walls.
Monday 21 July - click here for images
The rain was torrential during the night, but fortunately the weather was good to us during the rest of the day. We were able to get a good early start on the site and spent most of the day continuing working on the thin spread of plough soil that still covered our archaeological features. We have concentrated on three areas; the north-west corner of the chapel, the north-east corner with the north wall of the chancel extension and the south-east corner with the corresponding south wall of the chancel extension.
The wall of the chancel extension is beginning to show up very clearly and a layer of mixed material on the outside of the building to the north and south of it looks promising. It is definitely archaeological and will require careful examination later in the week or next week. At the west end the west wall of the chapel is looking very robust – I imagine the foundation to be very deep here, perhaps as much as a metre deep.
Everything is going well, but one thing that does disturb us is the possibility of being hit by nighthawks. We have reports of them working in the area – the Estate staff and people from the neighbouring estates tell us that they have often had confrontations with such people, some of whom have travelled some distance to loot and steal from the sites in the area – including some recent incidents. We have discussed this at length with the Estate and a careful watch is being kept on the site, including by the keepers who are out late. Let’s just hope that the measures we have in place help and we don’t lose out.
On a happier note, more of our team has arrived and we are approaching full strength. We managed to have a stroll around the site of West Acre Priory to plan our geophysics programme there – our license to work on the scheduled site has just come through in record speed. It might be a bit difficult to use the GPR in all areas, but there is still enough for us to study. This aspect of our work looks very promising indeed – I will try to put the results here as soon as possible.
Latest Update Friday 1st August - please scroll down
Tuesday 22 July - click here for images
What a cold night that was! We all felt it – except Wendy, June and Louise in their camper van! But it didn’t take long for the early morning sun to warm us up – helped by lots of tea and coffee.
The ground penetrating radar programme over the scheduled site begins today. Ralph, from UEL, came up yesterday and is raring to get started. He will be assisted by Ed and Joanna today. The remains of what looks like spoil heaps from the 1920s excavations will prove a problem, but Ralph has a plan!
On site we continue from yesterday and much, much more of the building is beginning to reveal itself. The apsidal end of the first phase building is now becoming clear, although it is partly masked by some debris from either its demolition or the floor foundation for the chancel extension. We also seem to have our first graves. Very promising grave-shaped features have appeared at the south-west corner of the trench, outside the chapel, and in the south extension trench. Over the area of the chancel, the relationship of the apse to the chancel extension and one of the cross-walls is beginning to become clear, but too early to go public on what we think is happening. Louise had a go in the trench today too.
Tonight we are going to have a relaxing evening around the fire again. Ralph has processed the first results of an area he has done in the nave of the monastic church – and they are very revealing. The main column foundations can be seen as well as a number of walls which seem to pre-date the final arrangement. He has to run some other software before it will become clear what we can see.
Tomorrow is predicted to be a good day. I am expecting my daughters and their friends to arrive – so real family joining our St Peter’s dig family.
Wednesday 23 July - click here for images
It is going to be a hot one today. The forecast is for little wind and lots of sun, so plenty of factor 20 and lashings of water is the order of the day.
We started with our site tour as always, and there was a little bit more to discuss today. We can start to think a bit more about the sequence of building at the east end – the chancel walls and their extensions in particular. Also, the mixed deposit we can see in some areas around the chapel is a good topic for discussion. Is it disturbance caused by grave digging? In which case it is difficult, in fact impossible, to detect any grave cuts. One or two patches of flint look ‘grave-like’ but that is about all. Or could this spread of material be demolition debris? If that is so then the prospects are quite exciting, because any demolition deposits would seal the original chapel graveyard surface – and any graves cut in it. So, still a lot to play for!
Our team has reached its maximum numbers today, with John
arriving from his home in
The hot weather, though, didn’t stop us from having another day of good progress on the site. We have continued cleaning the area around the chapel – we should eb ready to start in the area over the nave on Friday. We were also able to call back Pete Clayton and his JCB at very short notice. A quick call to Sarah and he was able to get over to us in half an hour! He extended the trench eastwards for us, so that we now have the full extent of the cnahcel extension. We also put in two more extension trenches of our own, one going east and another going west so that we can now confirm the full extent of the site. The western of these revealed a substantial mortar foundation – no clue at all what it is at the moment.
Another camp fire tonight – lamb casserole for supper with some apple pie and custard! Bliss!
Friday 25 July - click here for images
I never thought I would say this, but we could really do with some rain! The ground is beginning to bake so that troweling is very difficult. Mattocking is hard work in the sun – but everyone is in good spirits and a lot of work is being done.
It does look now as if we have a lot of debris from the chapel’s demolition strewn around the building. Joanna and Kirsty are examining an area on the north east corner of the site and seem to have found the limit there of a mixed mortar, chalk and flint fragment spread. Interestingly, a compact layer of flints is showing up beneath this spread – another target for a grave, perhaps! Similar flint concentrations appear on the south side of the chapel where they are free of demolition debris.
Gib, John and Peter have made very good progress on the west end of the nave. A number of ironstone fragments are appearing – they look very regularly spaced for random rubble. We will examine them more closely tomorrow. At the east end of the nave, Anne and Margaret have been able to clean up one of the wall that squared off the east end – this appears to post-date the apse, obviously, but pre-date the chancel extension. Evidently, at some time the apse and its, presumably, small windows was removed and a straight wall, probably with tall, lancet type windows – I can imagine them filled with coloured and painted glass panels – was inserted, paid for I suspect by a patron wishing to have his soul protected in the afterlife.
On the north side, Jon and Edd continue to reveal the north wall – but a feature that appears on the GPR still refuses to show itself. Could it be hidden by the demolition debris? Only Jon and Edd can help us there!
The weekend is soon upon us and we will be losing some of our team. Most of the rest will be having a well-earned break but some of us will be continuing on the chapel and doing some geophysics elsewhere on the Estate.
Saturday 26 & Sunday 27 July - click here for images
No rain on Saturday, just more sun - and no breeze to cool us, not even for just a few minutes today. Most of the team are having a well-earned break this weekend but a few of us went up on site today. Agnès and Tracy arrived last night for the weekend and Neil arrived too. He will be staying with Edd, Jon and Dave to do the experimental work. We worked on the nave – which is now looking very interesting indeed. The lines of ironstone are very regular and we suspect that we have a portion of collapsed wall here. If that is true then this could be a very exciting find – the wall would have fallen onto a floor beneath sealing a great deal, hopefully, of information for us.
Jon, Joanna and Kirsty met up with Tim Dennis from the
But the highlight of the day has to be the West Acre Village Fair – a great time had by us all at the end of the day.
On Sunday we decided to call a temporary halt to work on site, although Neil did help Tim with some magnetometry on the field that will be used by the English Civil War Society for their battle. Some of us went over to Castle Acre Priory – a great place to visit. We noticed the same ironstone being used in the earliest phases of that building as in our chapel. Pictures attached here.
Monday 28 July - click here for images
The first day of the second week – and a lot got done today. The weather wasn’t as hot as previous days, and there are rumours of storms coming into our area tonight. If that is so then a refreshing downpour on the site would give us a good opportunity tomorrow to do some photographs. So, in anticipation, a lot of today was devoted to cleaning various areas and accentuating the contrast between wall foundations and rubble, which isn’t easy in some places.
Our targets for the final week are much clearer now that we have discovered what appears to be a collapsed wall. We need to be clear about the full plan of the building – so the cleaning exercise will do this for us. We also need to examine a little more closely the fallen wall fragment, over 4m long and 2m wide, and be clear of its relationship with other debris and the in situ foundation. Finally, we must examine a number of individual features scattered around the site. All of this is to assess the quality of data we have available for study in future years – last week we were able to identify the extent only.
By the end of the day the contrast between the wall foundations and the surrounding debris was nice clear and clear. In particular, cleaning the central chancel wall showed the remains of in situ rendering and wall plaster- suggesting a small portions at least of standing wall.
Tomorrow we will delve deeper into the detail of the site – into the nave and chancel – to examine the deposits in those parts of the building. Hopefully we will find floors, maybe graves and hopefully some architectural fragments and other objects to give us some more detail about the chapel.
Tuesday 29 July - click here for images
Well. If the storms gathered and did their worst during the night then we didn’t notice. It is cloudy today, but not threatening rain. The light is better for photography though so we took a lot of record shots.
We have started looking into the demolition debris on either side of the chancel cross wall to check out the depth of archaeological deposits in that area of the nave and chancel. The debris itself contained nothing much of interest – some small window glass fragments and a very small piece of moulded stone. It sealed, however, a fairly level surface, which was quite soft. Surely this wasn’t the floor to the building? If so then it would have been very dusty in there. A couple of features are showing up. One is a rectangular shape filled with lumps of broken mortar. Again, its shape and alignment suggests a grave - something to examine later in the week.
We have also begun looking at a number of the features scattered around that might be graves, but none of them were very productive. In fact, apart from a couple of human bone fragments from the bottom of the ploughsoil on the south side of the chapel, human remains are still conspicuously absent on this church site. Perhaps the demolition deposit is still sealing them – we must wait and see.
Two nice small finds came out today – a small pilgrim badge and an iron knife. They came from the area around the chancel cross wall. We are also finding more Saxo-Norman and medieval pottery the more closely we examine the layers associated with the chapel itself.
Tomorrow we must start to think about the final steps of this evaluation exercise leading up to finishing on Friday. We have learnt a great deal – but we still have a couple of bits of information that need to be added to the equation. What is the pre-construction soil like underneath the chapel? What is under the demolition debris outside the chapel on the north and south side? Will we find any trace of the cemetery there?
Wednesday 30th July - click here for images
The area on the west side of the chancel wall extension is proving to be very interesting. Although we do not have a floor we do seem to have another feature parallel to the grave-like thing we saw yesterday – and the central position of the two features suggests an altar table base. Very exciting – such things are rarely found and there is much debate about the position of altars in churches and chapels.
The general plan of the building is looking much clearer – it does look as if the chancel was made smaller by removing the apse at some stage before being extended later in its history. But all this is just relative dating – we are missing the all important absolute dates at the moment. The groundplan of the building in its initial phase looks Saxo-Norman – perhaps early 12th century for this part of the world – and we have the Dissolution as a good context for its final demolition. I need to add that we have found absolutely no evidence fo the chapel being used for any other purposes after its ecclesiastical life.
The fallen wall is very interesting indeed. It looks as if there is a window there too – we can see the reveals for a splayed window with plaster adhering to them. The window is about 1m wide and seems to have been inserted into the ironstone coursing.
So we have much to consider as we enter the last few days. Do we have any human remains? What of the detail of the fallen wall? What are the few odd features scattered around? As always, so many questions.
Thursday 31st July - click here for images
At last we have proof of human remains in situ on the site. The flint packed feature at the north end of the south extension, which Dave and Kev found last week, contains a well-preserved adult, probably female. I am very surprised and pleased by the quality of the bone – the survival is very good indeed.
So a change of plan. With so many of the team wanting to stay on over the weekend we will finish on Saturday, giving us another day to search for and excavate some of the features in the south extension trench. Meanwhile, the feature in the west extension trench, which Mark, Big James and Wendy have been working hard on, has turned out to be a mortar mixing pit. A very nice find, and just where we would expect such a thing to be, located to the wets of the church.
Press day today – hopefully we will have something in the
Eastern Daily Press this weekend. A photographer is coming tomorrow to take
their pictures. All good stuff, but always a bit of a lottery. I spent 15
minutes explaining what we have found and they have a press release but I bet
they get some of the facts wrong. As long as they make sure we are at West Acre
and
We also had a very useful visit from Andrew Rogerson, who works with Norfolk Landscape and Archaeology, the County curators for archaeology. He had a lot to say about what we had found and most excited he was too. The ironstone is a conglomerate that he recognises from any other early buildings in the region, just as we saw at Castle Acre on the weekend. He also remarked at the similarity in size and development of St Peter’s with his own ecavation of a church in Barton Bendish. Good to know that we fit into a pattern.
Friday 1st August - click here for images
Madeleine’s birthday today – a whole 9 nine years old – so party time tonight. But sadly we also say goodbye to a large part of the team – Anne, Fireman John, Gib, Jen,
So today we have continued on the south side of the trench, examining the flint packed feature, which Jen had revealed and Trefor cleaned up – and it wasn’t long before more human remains were found on the north side of the feature– the left arm of an adult. It is possible, I suppose, that the large flint spread is a multiple grave, so we started approaching it from the south as well – and once again, human remains turned up. This time it was the right femur of an adult. We started cleaning the area between the two finds, but our progress was slowed down by the remains of two neonates. Not that we were complaining. They are buried very shallowly, not surprising considering their small size, and the bone is very spongey.
Pete and Gib continued looking at the demolition debris on the south-west corner of the chapel and they too found a skeleton. Again, buried in a very shallow grave, and just below the plough soil, it almost looked as if it was in the demolition debris itself, but on close inspection we could see that it was in a very shallow grave cut with a thin spread of rubble over it. The skeleton was of a child, perhaps 6 to 8 years old. Comparison with our 9-year-old Madeleine showed that he/she was 20cms shorter.
So, the count so far is three adults, one juvenile and two infants. A good first sample.