A very successful and well attended open day today on day 7 of our two-week dig in Forty Hall today, as nearly 200 people came to enjoy the displays and activities and see the newly discovered remains of Elsyng Palace's inner gatehouse.

We were pleased to see a steady flow of visitors all day, who were suitably impressed by the splendid Tudor brickwork on show in Trench 2 and even managed to sell all our on-hand copies of our book Elsyng: Enfield's Lost Palace Revealed (order yours here!) and several of our others.

Late this morning we laid out the anticipated extension to Trench 2 and began removing the first rubble layer. The extension essientially widens the trench by a metre at the end with the newly disovered angular turret and gatehouse facade wall.

Hopefully this will reveal the currently obscured corner of the turret and possibly also the south side of the gatehouse, which we have yet to see. There is also a thin and very damaged stub (presumably internal) wall at the far end of Trench 2 which this extension should reveal more of, and give us a better idea of its function.

Another head-scratcher emerged in Trench 2 later in the afternoon, in the form of a stack of mortared-together roof tiles in the section of the trench very close to the corner of the free-standing turret we found last year.

We currently have no idea what this could be, and the only way to find out will be to extend the trench to reveal the complete feature, which will likely begin to happen tomorrow.

The wall in Trench 4 meanwhile did not conform to expectation. We thought yesterday that it was the boundary of the back (western) edge of the gatehouse building and so should have contained the cellar fill we found last year only a few metres away, but digging today showed that it has at most only 4 surviving courses and so is not our circa 2m deep cellar wall.

As we peeled back the rubble deposit on its inside edge this too proved to be relatively shallow and not the significant cellar fill we expected. We have not yet fully excavated the rubble deposit and so may yet find the cellar in Trench 4, but if so we would also expect to find another wall, i.e. the boundary of the cellar itself.

If this is the case, one possibility is that the column base we found in the cellar fill last year was located at the cellar's edge rather than the middle as we had supposed, perhaps acting to reinforce this hypothetical wall.

One final surprise late this afternoon in Trench 4 was the emergence of a relatively thin looking wall joining the main wall at 90 degrees on the north side of the trench. Although this is broadly where you might expect the north side of the gatehouse to be, the wall itself looks rather too thin to be an external wall, so more work needs to be done to reveal and interpret it.

We're only at the halfway point of an already very productive dig, so the coming days promise to be packed with many more puzzles, and hopefully one or two answers!