Another successful dig at Holwick
Our dig at the Well Head medieval settlement at Holwick, Upper Teesdale is over for this year. Sixteen days of fine spring weather and the sheer hard work of more than 40 volunteer diggers enabled us to achieve all of our key objectives. You can read a day by day account of the dig and see lots of photographs of the archaeology we uncovered in the blog on the Projects page of this website. Although the digging is finished there is still much more to do. Post-excavation cleaning and recording of pottery and other small finds will take place later in the year. As part of this we will be organising a couple of open finds processing workshops so if you are interested in handling the objects and helping us clean and catalogue them please watch out for further details which will be posted on the website soon.
The dig uncovered a number of interesting artefacts, some of which appear in the photographs below. The date of the circular hearth beneath the north-east corner of the longhouse in Trench 3 is not known at the moment but we hope that C14 testing of charcoal samples we took from it will give an answer in due course. The marks or graffiti found on a large stone associated with this building are intriguing. They may be medieval in date but we need to do more research.
We were delighted that more than 30 members of the public came along to have a look at the work in progress during our site tours and guided archaeology walks. Interest in the heritage of the North Pennines is clearly strong and we take great pleasure in sharing our passion for archaeology with visitors.
We will be producing a report on the 2018 Holwick excavations soon and also organising a further public meeting at which we will share our current findings on this fascinating site. We look forward to discussing these with you so please come along. The date will be announced in due course.
Finally our thanks are due to all the fantastic AA members who volunteered to participate in the dig. Not only did everyone work hard but they were great company and we had fun. We are also enormously grateful to Northern Heartlands Community Initiative Fund managed by County Durham Community Foundation for financial support.
Trench 3 3D model: Once clicked it will take some time to load depending on your connection.
Mouse controls: rotate = drag left click, pan = drag right click, zoom = mouse wheel.
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| Longhouse in Trench 3. |
Circular hearth in Trench 3. |
| Click Images to Enlarge |
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| Graffiti on large stone, possibly medieval? |
We think this is a mortar, perhaps for grinding grains for food. |
| News Record: 39 Updated: 14-06-2018 09:55:31 |
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