Another good day's digging today in the woods of Forty Hall as day 10 finially saw the threat of showers give way to more seasonal sunshine.

Late yesterday afternoon we finally uncovered the expected wall line in Trench 3, albeit not quite where we had expected it.

Today we finished revealing the top of the wall and clearly defining its edges.

We think this is a continuation of the facade wall on the front of the gatehouse, which meets the corner of the turret in trench 2, and which we saw part of last year.

The wall is not where we had expected it, we think because there is a dog-leg somewhere between Trench 2 and 3, but is of comparable construction and certainly robust enough to be the facade of our multi-storey gatehouse.

Meanwhile in Trench 2 we removed the rest of the fill of the new polygonal turret which we had half-sectioned yesterday to fully reveal the apparent brick floor that had emerged at its base.

The limited exposure of the base yesterday had appeared to be very highly compacted bricks with virtually invisible joints with the possible exception of a patch in the south east corner which seemed to be a more loose mortar surface.

With all the fill removed and a cursory trowel-clean, the surface of bricks seems to cover most of the turret base, with wedges of rubble and mortar at some of the edges, but most notably in the south east corner, which seems at the moment to be made only of crushed brick and mortar.

It currently looks as if there might be an edge to the bricks in this corner, almost like two wall lines meeting each other rather than a deliberately laid surface, which if that is the case, might again confirm our theory that the turret is a later insertion into a pre-existing building.

The turret and adjacent walls still need a much more thorough clean and detailed recording before we can draw any firm conclusions from them, however.

Meanwhile the main features of Trench 4 were fully recorded and the main body of the trench began to be backfilled this afternoon.

The extension to Trench 4 remains open, however, which was cut to push us back towards the deep rubble context we had expected to find in Trench 4 but failed to materialize.

Finally late in the afternoon we did find the line of the cellar cut, right at the very extremity of the extension. We now suspect that the octagonal pillar feature that we found in the cellar fill last year must be located right at the very back edge of the cellar, rather than in the middle, and the cellar itself is probably not nearly as big as we assumed.

Since we've found the edge of the cellar fill we think there must also logically be a cellar wall lurking not far away and confirming this will be our next focus.

Although the process of backfilling has begun there is a lot more to do and the scope for further trench extensions is shrinking rapidly.

Tomorrow we will probably extend the Trench 4 extension to expose more of the cellar fill, possibly even joining it to Trench 2. At the same time we may make a very small extension to Trench 2 to uncover a bit more of the wall junction at the new turret's south west corner, which forms the gatehouse's southern face.

That will likely be the limit of new work for this dig, and our focus will gradually shift over soley to backfilling probably by the weekend.