A witch on a swing...

Hayley reports:

Very cold start today - luckily no rain, though, and the sun made a very welcome apperance this afternoon. The North side of Trench VI was trowelled today with numerous finds being uncovered including: Medieval pottery, Post-Medieval glass, porcelain, clay pipes, a handle possibly belonging to a small slipware jug and the highlight of the day, a completely intact green glass bottle which amazingly was uncovered whilst using a mattock.
Inscribed on the bottle was "Edmundson's & Co. Birkenhead" and an image of what has been suggested as "a witch on a swing". Fingers crossed for more exciting finds next week!

Karen reports from Trench VII -
Today has been less of a paddle in the mud and more of a trample in the trench! Our group continued to trowel back a very wet trench with varied success. We continued to find lots of small finds like clay pipe stems, glass and sherds of pottery, mainly dating from the post-medieval period. However Rachel and Aaron found the two star finds! Rachel unearthed a rim of Roman pottery known as 'Black Burnished Ware,' which dates back to, roughly, the second century AD! After lunch we returned to the trench and Aaron found teeth! Oh yes! The sticky, gelatinous candy type covered in mud .... we dated this wonderful find as definitely 21st century.
In the afternoon we had the opportunity of planning (drawing) part of Trench VI. This involved drawing onto graph paper a bird's eye view of the things that can be seen - like stones and other features that may be important, too. This was a welcome task for my ancient knees! It was a good day.

Nick writes -
It was a bit of a chilly start today, so I threw on a few more layers and headed to the dig. Today the group and I were learning to plan and level. We were showed how to plan using a 1m by 1m planning frame and we drew up the T-shaped feature. The plan came out well and we were all very pleased with it.
In the afternoon we had a leveling lesson in which we learnt how to use and set up the equipment, and after being shown how to take levels we measured a few heights from around he park. When we were all confident with our leveling skills we set up a temporary bench mark on the site which can be used in the future to measure heights in the two trenches. There were also a couple of birthdays on site today - happy birthday Ross and Hayley!