We are half way through our evaluation programme, dear reader.

But before you find out what we have for you this week, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who came to our first two open days last weekend. A special thank you goes to the last group on Saturday who, together with us, got completely soaked, but still stayed to the very end of the tour. Thank you all for your lovely, supportive, encouraging, creative and constructive feedback. It was good to see you all. We will be on site this Saturday and Sunday (15 and 16 September 2018). We are, again, fully booked, but we have a couple of talks coming up this month, so, if you can, do join me there.

The Sheffield Castle site Some of the finds from this week at Sheffield Castle A volunteer excavating at Sheffield Castle

Photographs courtesy of Paul Rowland

This week, on our Castle menu we had:

  1. Cementation furnace related brick-built structures, boundary stone walls, on a bed of cobbles. Baked layers and small fragments of medieval pottery on a side
  2. Victorian structure and re-deposited natural soil (yes, it has been confirmed!) sitting on a plateau of geological layers
  3. Modern infusion of brick walls and Victorian drains (two for the price of one) on an organic layer above a stone surface
  4. Layered Victorian archaeological cake
  5. Tender ground under 19th-century stone and brick wall
  6. Recommendation of the week – warm mixture of sandstone castle walls
  7. Proper, free-range drains, on bedrock
  8. More bedrock infused with 20th-century concrete structures
  9. Small section of a moat, enveloped in concrete
  10. Deep layers of moat – but still in higher up levels
  11. Carnivorous remains from slaughterhouse structures

Coffee, tea, a lot of biscuits, and Alison’s courgette cake