This year's dig on the site of Elsyng Palace in Forty Hall has been confirmed for July 6th-20th. We will be revisiting the turreted gatehouse of the palace's inner court, exploring elements of its interior structure, and will also be making an attempt to re-locate elements of the trenches which first put Elsyng back on the map in 1963-66.

Please note that places on this dig may be limited - if you are not already a member of the Society and want to join us on this dig, the deadline for application is June 20th.

There is also a community dig planned in Broomfield Park, Palmers Green, provisionally scheduled to start April 26th. Further details to follow hopefully soon.

A composite 3D model of the gatehouse turrets excavated in 2023 and 2024:

Tudor Gatehouse Turrets (Composite) by enfarchsoc on Sketchfab

It was the final day of digging today on day 13 of our 14 day investigation of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Palace.

Trench 2, our only remaining open trench, was thoroughly cleaned for detailed photography and fully planned by about lunchtime.

We then followed that up with methodical photgraphs of all the exposed vertical wall elevations.

There are many different walls in Trench 2 of many different phases representing multiple modifications, insertions and demolitions over its centuries long use and precisely describing and explaining them all will be a long task in post-excavation.

All the recording work was completed together with a comprehensive photographic survey by about 2pm after which we switched over to the unglamourous task of backfilling.

Backfilling is now the only remaining task and we hope to finish up tomorrow perhaps by about lunchtime.

A summary and eventually a report on the findings of the dig will as usual appear in future editions of Society News.

We'd like to thank our hard working members who made this dig possible and perhaps our most productive in terms of high status structure discovery since 1967. Understanding the location and layout of the inner gatehouse has been a years long effort that will go a long way to advancing our understanding of the layout of the palace, especially that of the inner court which remains largely unexplored and hidden in increasingly inpenetrable woodland.

We are also very grateful once again to Forty Hall Farm and Capel Manor College for the provision of tool storage space and the generous loan of wheelbarrows which has made our job much easier than it might have been!

Work continued at a reduced pace today as the intense July heat finally arrived and sapped our already tired digging team's energy over the course of the afternoon.

The number of digging jobs has dwindled and backfilling continued in Trench 4 and began in Trench 3, leaving only Trench 2 active.

We finished exposing the foundation course of the wall that connects the two gatehouse turrets, and followed it to the corner of last year's turret.

The foundations here do not follow the above angular turret but are square and project from the corner (redundantly) quite a way. We think this is probably because when the foundations were laid a decision on the final shape of the turret had not yet been made.

Meanwhile the final digging task continued in the last extension to Trench 2, which was opened to follow the line of the southern facade wall of the gatehouse from our newly discovered turret, and potentially examine its junction with the internal cellar wall we confirmed the location of yesterday.

We found that wall today in the expected position as well as a continuation of the facade wall, but its interpretation and chronology is complex since there are several butt-joints at this junction, and the cellar partition wall is more substantial than it was when we found it yesterday less than 2 metres away - roughly 10cm thicker. Furthermore there seems to be a wall continuing on the same line as the cellar wall running south into the section.

There's still a little more digging to do before it is all cleaned up and a proper interpretation made.

Yesterday digging in this spot produced numerous fragments of carved stonework including several high quality pieces that joined together to make a fragment of a Tudor arch.

The stone fragments continued to emerge today including more fragments of burning which so far have led us to believe that the stonework may be from a fireplace.

Today's star find, perhaps the star of the dig so far, was another large chunk of finely carved stone this time notable for the scratches across its flat face that on close inspection turned out to be deliberate graffiti.

There are two clearly visible capital E letters and a larger probable C. Elsewhere on the surface are much harder to see marks that might be an I or J and possibly an H. One of the Es and the C may also contain residual traces of paint.

Hopefully post excavation work will reveal more!

Tomorrow the residual digging jobs will probably be wrapped up quite quickly and we'll make a big push to fully record the turrets and connecting masonry in Trench 2 before moving over to the not insubstantial task of backfilling the trench.

Digging continued but the pace began to wind down today as we begin to move into the recording and backfilling phase of the dig.

High temperatures also taxed our hard working diggers, who had mostly backfilled the main body of Trench 4 by the early afternoon.

Trench 4 had originally been intended to explore the deep rubble 'cellar' fill that we found during last year's dig but failed to find it, and so an extension was laid out on day 8 to push back very close to the location of the pillar we found last year in the cellar fill, on the theory that the pillar may have been a reinforcement for the back wall of the cellar, rather than a free-standing support in the middle of it as we had supposed.

That theory appears to have been validated today, as the cut of the cellar fill, and eventually a brick wall, emerged in exactly the right spot for such a back edge to the cellar (meaning the cellar is a fair bit smaller than we'd originally thought).

Meanwhile one final trench extension was opened to Trench 2, to reveal a little more of the south west corner of the new polygonal turret (under the pictured blue tarpaulin) and potentially pick up the junction of the wall with the back edge wall of the internal cellar, which we had freshly confirmed in Trench 4.

We progressed fairly quickly down onto the wall and by late afternoon had confirmed the cellar wall does join it where expected, albeit at a much higher level. There's a little more work to do revealing and defining these wall lines, and there may be a hint of yet another wall springing off of the gatehouses southern external side, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Today's star finds came from the rubble deposit immediately covering the gatehouse's southern wall, in the form of several fragments of carved stone of various sizes and some fitting together - the most notable being several joining fragments of a Tudor arch. Judging from the burning visible on several of the fragments we think this is most likely the remains of a fireplace.

Tomorrow our focus will continue to move from digging to recording and backfilling. In terms of palace structure we've probably revealed about as much as we can this year, which has been some of the most extensive and high quality building work we've seen in the past 20 years.