The archive report for this year's dig on the site of Elsyng Palace in the grounds of Forty Hall is now available to download here.

Once again, a big thank you to everybody who made it possible, especially our hard-working digging team.

We look forward to seeing to you in the woods of Forty Hall again next year!

In case you missed it, here's an interactive model of the well and associated features found in Forty Hall this summer:

Post-excavation work is well underway and the full report will be available here in due course!

The final day of our two-week dig on the site of Elsyng Palace went without a hitch, except for a short sharp mid-morning downpour, but we were able to finish of the last small digging job at the north end of Trench 2 and get it recorded and backfilled by late-lunchtime.

There are definitely two diverging phases of wall at the north end of the trench (opposite end of the trench to the well) - the earlier, probably late 15th/early 16th century wall running in a north-westerly direction, possibly on its way to intersect the other hefty wall we found in Trench 3, and then the later, more orange coloured wall built partly over it.

Looking at the brick sizes and more shoddy construction we think the later phase may date to the early 17th century, when the palace was reduced in size by James I and remodelled as a grace-and-favour home for his friend the Earl of Pembroke.

Much more work remains to be done on interpretation, and we will more than likely be back next year to see more of these structures, including more of the room by our newly-discovered well.

As ever, a summary of this year's dig will appear in due course in editions of Society News, and eventually the full dig report will be published here on the EAS website.

A big thank you to our enthusiastic diggers who endured the record-breaking summer and biting insects with good humour, and especially those of you who lugged equipment up and down Forty Hill every day.

We are also grateful to Enfield Parks for clearing the site for us, and to the London Fire Brigade for preventing it from going up in smoke.

A special thank you also to Forty Hall Farm for providing us with tool storage space and the loan of wheelbarrows, without which today's backfilling would have taken much longer.

No further significant developments on the penultimate day of our extremely productive summer dig on the site of Elsyng Palace.

Most of our efforts went into recording the well and associated features - see yesterday's entry for details.

One further mystery did arise by the well - at the end of the upper of the two channels (see yesterday's diagram) we found a small concealed recess - within which are two small iron items set into the brickwork. One the main wall side is a round iron 'bar' of about 4 or 5cm length, and opposite it is a small hook - see the close up pic above.

These are apparently the remnants of some kind of mechanism to do with the water channels, but what that was and how it was operated is not at all obvious.

We also probed the length of the lower channel and found that it does not penetrate the north wall - we assume therefore that it too, like the upper channel, has a vertical connection down into the possible nearby culvert. Without dismantling the entire structure is is not possible to be sure.

Once all the necessary recording was done, we backfilled the well with soft, stable material and closed the south end of Trench 2.

Meanwhile at the other end of Trench 2 we pressed on to finish digging at the end of the wall we had been chasing yesterday. Contrary to the conclusion of yesterday's post, the main wall does in fact continue in a straight line - it is the wall of the other feature, connected to the brick 'floor' surface, that diverges. Why it does this is still a mystery - there is still no sign of an actual culvert or its possible destination.

In digging this feature we cut into a stratigraphic layer that underlies the whole area of the Tudor gatehouse - in previous digs we showed that the artificial platform on which the gatehouse is built was created in the earlier medieval period - and this was again demonstrated today by significant quantities of South Herts Greyware, as well as several finds trays worth of animal bones, which was a nice reward to our diggers who have worked hard breaking though sun-baked brickearth and gravel all week.

All that remains now is final recording at the north end of Trench 2 followed by the last bit of backfilling. We're hoping that the forecast rain will hold off long enough to be finished by the afternoon.

The overall pace of digging slowed down slightly today as we enter the closing stages of this year's summer dig on the site of Elsyng Palace in the woods of Forty Hall.

The Tudor archaeology has been concentrated mostly to a single trench this year but there's an awful lot going on in a very small area.

The most impressive feature this year has undoubtedly been the well chamber at the south end of Trench 2 and today it got even more impressive as we made one final small trench extension to fully uncover the circular chamber.

As we revealed the east edge of the well structure we found what at first looked like a single narrow channel created by an adjacent wall set againt it, and as we removed more of the very loose rubble around it we found a second channel beneath the first, connected by a vertical hole at their north end.

See here for an annotated version of the above

We think these two channels probably feed into the culvert that we think is beneath the nearby brick 'floor' surface. At the same time we also removed a little more rubble from inside the circular chamber, and found two more small square apertures through the brickwork - one to the side of the hole we found yesterday, and a counterpart directly opposite.

These suggest water supplies entering and/or leaving the chamber, which may point to the well in fact being a cistern or settling tank.

Outside the chamber, in the deep rubble fill of the adjacent cellar, we found two sizeable offcuts of lead sheet - archetypal material for water tanks.

Having done about as much digging here as is practical, the main remaining job at the south end of the trench for tomorrow is to clean up and meticulously record every detail of all of these various structures in order to better understand them.

Meanwhile at the opposite end of the trench, the extension that we opened to follow the wall/culvert partially succeeded, in as much as it has found more of the wall, but in typical Elsyng fasion the wall has arbitrarily changed course and vanishes off into the trench corner.

We will finish up excavating the extension but it looks like finding the ultimate destination of the wall/culvert will be a job for another year.

The focus from tomorrow will be to finish off digging jobs as quickly as possible and get everything recorded hopefully before Sunday.

Trenches 1, 3 and 4 have mostly been backfilled and we'd like not to have to spend too much of Sunday backfilling Trench 2, especially in light of the possible rain creeping up on the forecast.