Shoot four navigation
Today Phil Harding has taken over as the supervisor for Trench One. ‘It looks like we could have up to a metre of make-up here. I’m going to get the digger in and pull some more of this modern stuff out,’ says Phil. So, if we are fairly sure now that this was once a furnace what can the Team expect to find? ‘There’s no way you can build a massive structure like a furnace, knock it down and leave no trace in the ground,’ says Phil. ‘Hopefully when we clear out all of the levelling material we can get down onto the real archaeology.’
The mechanical digger moves into position and starts extending Trench One to encompass Trench Two and make one large trench. With speedy digging the vehicle’s driver, Grant, soon breaks up even more of the pub car park and the trench grows at a rapid pace. All under the watchful eyes of Casper the driver’s trusty dog.
Things are going very well over on Trench Four in the cellar. Katie Hirst has uncovered the tuyere opening of the furnace (see background) and is still quite happy working in the damp and dark conditions. ‘This is quite exciting,’ says Katie. ‘I can see in the stone courses that this opening would have taken two air pipes that then joined together and went straight into the furnace.’
As the morning moves on geophysics have brought their equipment into the cellar to do some ground penetrating radar surveys on the floor. ‘We’re getting some good readings from in here,’ says Chris Gaffney. ‘We have some good spikes on the readout that look like iron. With radar, iron almost appears to vibrate on the monitor. The thing is the spikes are not quite where we were expecting to find them. I think some more digging will need to be done through the floor so that we can see what’s going on.’
Meanwhile a large tanker has also been brought onto site to suck out all of the stagnant water lying in the bottom of the wheel trough. Work will start in this area soon to try and determine any phases of construction and use of the wheel.
