Twenty Seventh Dig Day – Friday 26th July 2013

Digging E and SE of toilet.

Friday was a great day for finds as well as, I hope, for our 5 volunteers. We finished excavating the area in which we had previously been working and opened a new 2x2m grid square over the path to the front door of the house.

Path E of toilet.

After cleaning up the north side of the path, heading east from the toilet, and the garden between it and the north boundary wall, I am now as certain as I can be that we hadn’t got a turn heading diagonally towards the front gate (whose location definitely lies further east than we have excavated so far).

China doll face

What we did find in the fill above the path surface was part of the face, including her painted mouth, of a china doll. We also found a strange tubular metal pipe, about a foot long and an inch diameter with a hard black rubber externally screw threaded end, and strange rusty fixtures and fittings to its sides – possibly part of a stirrup pump. Another really nice find was two (adjoining) fragments of a fine ceramic saucer or bowl with the wording “cock robin?” and “sparrow” from the children’s rhyme ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’

In the demolition rubble fill between the path and the wall a large quantity of finds were uncovered. A wide variety of ceramic fragments, bottle glass, nails, a length of barbed wire, and over a dozen .303 cartridges, half of which were read & all found to bear the date of 1942.

No. 36M Mills bomb base.

The most exciting of the finds from this part of the trench has been identified as the screw threaded base of a No. 36M Mills bomb, or hand grenade. Areas of both the path and garden surfaces showed some signs of burning, including fragments of charcoal.

Sunday our new 2x2m grid square SE of the toilet will be excavated – over the path to the front door, and the possible site of a well (which was supposed to be outside the kitchen window). Progress will be slow digging through the layer of demolition rubble, so extra volunteers are definitely welcome. The adjacent grid squares have all yielded some nice finds – so plenty of good reasons to join us – and no experience necessary, though it is always very much welcome.