Day Twenty-Four: it's all over, for now...

Today was the final day of digging, so in traditional fashion there was lots of last minute activity taking place all over site. Gareth's team finished cleaning up inside the building and demonstrated that there are all sorts of medieval features below. As these are not part of our research design we're leaving them intact, but we are recording their presence so that other people in the future will know about them.

The final push

The other main digging job taking place was the final clearance around the stone tank and drain features, which saw Andy, Pete, Alex and Gareth all diving in to expose the final portions of the drain. Otherwise, the main activities taking place were (lots of) drawing, photography and note taking.

It's not Tudor, but it's still lovely

Given we weren't digging many new contexts today we weren't expecting to come across any nice new finds. However Ian surprised us all by discovering the prettiest piece of medieval sculpture we've come across so far. It's a decorative 'crocket' from the church which was probably chipped off and thrown away when the stonework was being taken away and reused at the dissolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocket

Towards the end of the day we started the long process of backfilling, and this will carry on for the next couple of days. Although rather boring and hard work, it's very important we return the site to the state we found it in.

Alex digs in

Gareth makes it look so easy

So after four long, but really interesting, weeks it has all come to an end. However, the work will still continue after we've left the site. Pete and Hugh still need to scrutinise all the plans, photographs and notes and piece together all the evidence we've uncovered. All the finds need to be studied and recorded and these will help provide an accurate picture of the site in the past. This will take some time, but eventually all our hard work will end up in a published report and all the records and finds be sent to the museum.

Goodbye everyone and thanks for following our progress!