A rainy morning luckily gave way to drier weather this morning, and cooler temperatures than the last two days were a welcome break, as we set out a large extension to trench 2.

So far we have uncovered a long stretch of the south side of the 'Long Barn' - a storage barn attached at its west end to the palace boiling house which we excavated last year. The east end of trench two relocated the east end of the barn, which we have seen before, and we were able to examine the building's south east corner to confirm that the bricks projecting from it were not the beginnings of a structure built against the barn's east end (see yesterday's post).

Having removed the rubble which lay up against exterior of the barn wall, we were slightly surprised to find little to no evidence of any structures abutting the building towards its east end. Since we know the boiling house abuts the barn at its west end, we had expected to see more structures, perhaps also associated with the kitchens, running along much of the barn's length.

To get a better picture of the situation, early this morning we extended the trench west to almost meet the stretch of barn we excavated last year, and south to open up a large enough area in front of the barn to hopefully find evidence of adjacent buildings in the form of walls or perhaps robbed out floors - at the very least we will hopefully find more evidence of the east end of the boiling house, which was impossible to positively locate last year due to a very large demolition cut having removed a substantial slice of the building.

Late in the day that evidence did appear to begin to emerge at the very west end of the trench - a line of brickwork perpendicular to the barn wall shows definite evidence of an adjacent structure, although not enough of it has been excavated yet to tell whether it is a wall, or another multi-phase brick floor which characterised the boiling house.

Either way, finding this out tomorrow looks like it may be hard work, since the weather forecast is not good. On top of this, we will be finishing early tomorrow so that those of us who are not too exhausted can attend the opening of Enfield At War: 1939-45 - the latest exhibition by Enfield Museum Service, at the Dugdale Centre in Enfield Town, coinciding with the launch of our latest book of the same name!