After a day's break we're now past the halfway point in our two week exploration of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Tudor palace in Forty Hall, and thankfully the weather is cooling of, making the going much easier in the woods west of the Hall's lime tree avenue.

The pace of work has slowed slightly now, as digging in Trench 1 has finished, having progressed as far as it safely can this year, and most of today was spent drawing, photographing and surveying the exposed walls of what we believe to be a subterranean room at the base of a staircase tower within the Tudor gatehouse.

Surveying the wall in the south western corner of Trench 1 (see yesterday's diagram) showed that it has a very slight but definite outward tilt of about three degrees, and we suspect that this explains the not insubstantial wedge of solid mortar and stones on the outside edge of the wall; our theory is that during the lifetime of the wall it began to tilt out (towards the moat) and had to be reinforced. We know from contemporary documents that the gatehouse was four storeys tall and so three degrees at its base would correspond to a lot of movement at its top!

Speaking of substantial foundations, in Trench 2 today we worked on uncovering the foundations of the wall on the opposite side of the tower (see diagram above) and found that the wall in this location appears to have been constructed on a raft of mainly large lumps of chalk or 'clunch'.

Amongst the clunch foundation is also a large piece of limestone which is dressed on at least two sides perhaps like a keystone, and so this section of building is evidently at least partially re-using material salvaged from an earlier phase of the palace.

Meanwhile in nearby Trench 5, late in the afternoon the continuation of the wall in Trench 2 and the NE corner of T1 (see diagram) showed up more or less exactly where expected.

This proves that there is most likely another room next to the room in Trench 1, i.e. that the staircase tower in Trench 1 went down to a subterranean level, and led via a doorway most likely by the socketed end of the western wall into a cellar proper.

Although work in Trench 1 is now essentially complete, there is still a lot more to do to reveal and record the wall in Trench 5, and if we have time we'd like to remove the baulk between Trenches 1 and 2 to examine the junction there in more detail.

Whatever happens, we hope to start a slow paced backfill from Thursday onwards so that we won't have too much rubble to shift by the weekend.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

The pace of work slowed a little today, as we reached the halfway point of our two week dig on the site of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Tudor palace, but we nevertheless managed to get some good work done including finally discovering the missing fourth wall of our cellar room in Trench 1.

We've been slogging away all week in Trench 1, removing the vast deposit of demolition rubble that filled the room which dominates most of the trench.

By the early afternoon we had reached the maximum safe depth of excavation across most of the trench - the very sandy mortar matrix of the rubble makes the sections of this trench extremely unstable so we won't be able to get to the bottom of the cellar room at least this year, and suspect it could still be at least a metre or two away.

On the bright side, we did manage to locate the missing wall that would have formed the fourth side of the room - see today's schematic diagram - the wall springs, as expected, from the wall in the corner of Trench 2 and although we were only able to uncover a short length of it, it follows the expected alignment across the north side of Trench 1.

Interestingly, the wall is a T-junction rather than a corner, and continues to run north from Trench 1, so late in the afternoon we laid out Trench 5, which we hope will pick up the wall further north, and will hopefully be able to see more of this wall without having to wade though tons of brick rubble to get to it!

At the same time we laid out Trench 4, which is located nearby hoping to pick up another wall line, this time from 2024 (see above diagram). Trench 2 in theory came close to the line and maybe picked up tentative evidence of a nearby wall at its east end, but hopefully Trench 4 will be better placed to find it.

If you are wondering what happened to Trench 3, we opened it a few days ago some distance away to the north east, to test a tentative hypothesis about the location of some trenches the EAS cut nearby in 1963-65. It has drawn a complete blank, meaning that the 60s trenches must have been located further away than suspected, and so will be backfilled early next week.

We're taking a day off tomorrow to catch up on site records and gather our energy for one last push to finish trenches 4 and 5 and record Trench 1, before beginning the daunting task of returning all the rubble to where it came from!

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

We had a good open day today, as we approach the halfway point of our two-week investigation of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng palace.

Slowly but surely we're working our way down through the rubble fill of the cellar feature in trench 1.

We still haven't found the fourth boundary wall of the cellar, which we still think may be the base of a staircase tower, but having removed the consolidated line of rubble/mortar that crossed the north side of the trench, we are still sure that there is a context boundary line at that point.

We are still working on removing the darker deposit north of this line, which is revealing yet more rubble, and we are still holding out hope that a wall line will appear on the alignment of the context change.

Meanwhile we also worked to reveal more of the wall in the south west corner of the trench. See today's schematic diagram.

As we worked around this wall, we found the northern end of it broadens slightly, and in fact just as it enters the western baulk of the trench, the beginnings of a bevelled return corner can be seen.

As if that wasn't surprising enough, later in the afternoon as the level of surrounding rubble became low enough, a moderately large void in the brickwork emerged.

Eventually we were able to expose the void in the brickwork, which appears to be a roughly square socket set into the broadening of the wall, with signs of roof tiles having been mortared in as packing around whatever once fit into it.

This is presumably a socket for something like a fairly substantial timber, which would have been salvaged for reuse or sale by the seventeenth century demolition team before the tower was felled, filling it with rubble.

At the same time, studying the top of the wall showed that its width did not take it into the corner of the trench; there is a triangle of very solid mortar and crushed brick (see diagram above) on what ought to be the wall's exterior.

Late this afternoon we started work removing the mortar to try and find out if there is more in-situ structure under here, or if it's a peculiarity of the wall's construction, and hopefully will find out tomorrow.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

The theme of the day today was rubble mining, as we continued to remove the loose brick and mortar fill of our newly discovered Tudor palace cellar.

Yesterday we uncovered two perpendicular walls in the corners of Trench 1 (see the schematic diagram) which, combined with the wall in Trench 2, we think form three sides of a roughly square room, perhaps at the base of a staircase tower.

The fourth side of the room is still in doubt, however; yesterday we had a line of consolidated brick and mortar across the north side of the trench which we thought might indicate at least the remains of a demolished wall line, but on close examination this morning came to the conclusion it was a coincidental area of more dense cellar fill, and so in the afternoon we began to remove it along with the rest of the cellar fill.

Trench 1 is getting quite deep now and close to our limit of safe excacvation and we almost certainly won't be able to get to the floor level of the room. The rubble fill continued to drop hints about its possible floor throughout the day in the form of dozens of fragments of glazed floor tiles (probably dating from the early Tudor period), mostly in red-brown and dark green, which probably once formed a chequerboard pattern if not in this room then in one very close by.

For a bit of variety we did find another unusal Delft tile yesterday, similar to the one on day 2; dating probably to the early 17th century and possibly hexagonal in shape, again likely from a tesselating set.

Tomorrow is our public open day and most of the morning will be taken up with setting up our stalls and displays and family activities, and the pace of excavation when it does get going is likely to be slow, but hopefully we can get to grips with our missing fourth wall before long.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.

It was a hot and laborious afternoon's work in Trench 1 today as our diggers slogged away at removing the considerable amount of rubble and mortar that dominates the trench.

Their efforts were rewarded, however, with not one but two substantial Tudor palace walls, first in the south east and then in the south western corners of the trench (see today's schematic diagram).

Together with the wall in the corner of Trench 2 and a line of very solid mortar and rubble crossing the northern side of Trench 1, these seem to form a roughly square enclosure which contains our very deep mortar rich rubble fill.

The sheer depth and quantity of rubble and mortar in Trench 1 is now making us wonder if we have found another cellar or perhaps a staircase tower with an underground room at its base.

We're still uncertain about the northern side of the feature, defined at the moment by a line of very solid mortar and rubble - it's unclear currently whether there's a surviving wall line here or whether it's been robbed out.

The most notable feature of the surviving walls in Trench 1, other than their substantial size and high quality of construction, is the fact that their interior faces are immaculately rendered, some fragments of which even bear traces of white paint or whitewash.

If this feature is a staircase tower, we might expect to find the base of a central pier in the middle of the trench, such as was found in a similar structure in 1964. It would also be nice to find the floor level of this room, but as in the cellar we dug in 2024, there is a limit to how deeply we can safely excavate, especially with such a loose and sandy mortar matrix, which make section collapse a significant danger.

Tomorrow we'll continue removing as much rubble as we safely can, and look more closely at the solid rubble/mortar line to see if it does resolve into a fourth wall for our new palace room.

Please Note

The future of research at Elsyng is under threat: Please read here for more details.