Mid November

 Week starting 11/11/2024

Arsenal drew to Chelsea, not looking great for us right now but still a long way to go. Anyway work has been okay but just the same really. Honestly, I'm writing this a week and a half in the future so details may be lacking, this is just for me to keep track. I finished in area 2A by Wednesday so Naomi sent me up to area 3A to start hoeing the topsoil off to expose the tops of any features, from the scans we believe there is another stone linear and a distribution of post holes, possibly signifying a structure. Anyway I spent the last 3 days of the week just hoeing, very boring but it was hard to interpret what I was uncovering so I had to keep going to make sure we weren't missing anything. It appeared that I had uncovered another stone linear, adjacent to the one on the scans, that contained what could be some pit features and post holes. 

My dad came to visit on the weekend, he arrived on Friday the 15th. Saturday we did a walking tour of Belfast, which was very informative and despite living here for 2 months I clearly don't know that much. However, I was able to fill my dad in on some little tit bits that the guide missed out, even if they were useless ones about what happens during the night. I then took him to the Common Market, a great spot for food, drink, music and all round buzz, this led to a surprise pub crawl that I did not expect my dad to up for. Sunday we went to the Crumlin road Gaol museum and took a walk down Shankhill Road and Falls Road, this made the feel of the troubles feel very real, as in the city centre you would never really know it even happened. 

Another week

Waking up on Monday the 18th was a bit of a shock, although I knew the temperature was supposed to be dropping the reality was not pleasant. It was another day of hoeing area 3A to expose these features which kept coming up so I had to keep hoeing. The stone linear was definitely a bit of a mystery but I had to keep exposing it just in case it is archaeology, within that same area that I am hoeing there are definitely some post holes coming up, indicating a possible structure. On Tuesday I started to clean and excavate some of these small features within the stone linear but it became clear very quickly that they were not archaeology and most likely just natural depressions in the ground where rocks had sunk the soil, leaving this looser, darker stuff on top. I cleaned up a few of these but decided not to excavate them fully as nothing was coming up. 

We came back on Wednesday to a shock, snow and ice covering the site, it had dropped into the minus degrees and at 8am it was negative 3, however, the beautiful sunrise made it slightly more bearable. The only thing we could really do in these conditions was hoe as excavating what we couldn't see is not a good idea for obvious reasons. So, we continued hoeing the upper area of 3A for the day with a few breaks for snowball fights. It was the first time Gargee had ever seen snow so she was loving it, and so was I! (Apart from the numb toes and fingers). Definitely going to need another pair of socks and gloves tomorrow.

I returned the next day with my extra pair of socks and gloves equipped, it felt slightly less cold but the snow had continued and the site had a full blanket, it was quite amazing. Again, all we could do was hoe, which we continues doing at the top of 3A. We got caught out in two of the craziest snow storms I have ever seen, it was spectacular! But yeah we couldn't get much work done really. Friday was not so bad but the site still had snow over it so we just continued hoeing, exposing the natural soil, which would then be planned using a planning frame.