Day 5 of our two-week exploration of the gatehouse of Elsyng palace continued with fair weather and fantastic archaeology today.

We picked up where we left off yesterday, having discovered a second, larger polygonal turret close to the one we found last year, and after excavating and recording the upper deposits, began removing the rest of the rubble covering the new turret.

The outline of the turret turned out much as we expected, essentially a larger version of its nearby twin, a kind of truncated octagon with four facets facing outwards towards what would have been the outer courtyard, but squared off flat along its back edge.

The most notable feature of this turret, however, is that it has a substantial wall attached to its front face - in fact the same truncated wall we found yesterday and have been looking for a continuation of in Trench 3.

This proves that the new turret was not in fact free-standing as we had suspected yesterday but appears to form one corner of the building containing the deep cellar that we found last year, and is now a favourite contender for the gatehouse building proper, which it would seem had not only polygonal towers on its corners but on last year's evidence also had smaller free-standing turrets likely flanking it as well as an ornamental screen wall with integrated octagonal columns. No doubt quite an impressivn impressivet as it was approached across the moat we dug in May!

We have not yet fully excavated the interior of the new turret so we don't know if it has a brick floor as was the case in the smaller one.

Meanwhile nearby in Trench 3, on the extended line of the truncated wall (ie the same wall that connects to the new turret), we found that the wall is still absent at this point (ie robbed out) but we did also find a small brick drain running up to it.

Following the extended line of this wall is now quite important to potentially find the other side of the gatehouse (and possibly another corner turret), so we will likely extend trench 3 or open a new one to try and do this, in the hope that the truncation is only fairly localised and we will find in situ brickwork resuming further along.

Similarly, it looks inevitable that we will extend Trench 2 to more fully expose the new turret and also to see more of the new gatehouse building. Late this afternoon as we finished revealing the wall that connects to the front face of the turret, we found a stub of wall projecting into the building, in very poor condition, and seeing more of it may also help to understand it better.

The forecast looking ahead seems fairly optimistic so hopefully tomorrow will be an equally pleasantly surprising day!