Digging resumed after our midway day off, as we enter the second week of our two week exploration of the inner gatehouse of Elsyng Palace in the woods of Forty Hall.

Work continued in and around the newly discovered turret in Trench 2. We half-sectioned the fill of the turret, removing a mostly nondescript deposit of dark brown brickearth and pebbles which was notable mostly for producing occasional sherds of medieval pottery at fairly regular intervals throughout the afternoon.

At one point there was possibly ephemeral evidence of a central posthole, perhaps for a scaffold pole during the turret's construction.

After going down six courses of bricks we eventually hit a solid flat floor. At first we were not able to tell if it was brick or tile or even a solid bed of burnt clay, but on careful close inspection it can be seen to be made of very tightly laid and highly compacted bricks, with a slightly rougher mortar rich patch on one side.

Why the turret has such a base and at six courses below approximate Tudor ground level is currenly a mystery, as indeed is the function of the turret in general, beyond decoration. It is almost certainly too small to be a staircase, and other functions are not currently obvious.

Outside the turret, on its north and north west sides, a demolition rubble layer was removed and this revealed a stub of wall emerging from beneath the turret's north west corner (see top turret pic, beneath the root). This supports our earlier theory that the turret is a later insertion into a corner of an already standing gatehouse building.

Meanwhile nearby in Trench 3 work continued in the extension that was opened on day 6 in the hope of picking up a continuation of the facade wall that connects to the front of the turret in Trench 2. This wall has been aggressively truncated and robbed out in places making its line hard to follow but late this afternoon our efforts were rewarded when the top of a probable wall line finally emerged from a mass of loose brick and large mortar chunks.

More work needs to be done to define it but if it is the wall we're after it must have followed a dog-leg between Trench 2 and 3, which is why we've struggled to find it!

Excavation also continued in the extension to Trench 4 which was opened on day 8 to bring us back into the area of the cellar fill which has surprisingly so far failed to show up in Trench 4 as expected.

We're still removing the upper rubble deposits at the moment so there's nothing new to report from there yet.