TV historian Bettany Hughes visited the site on the last day of official digging, and tweeted a nice picture that covered our end of the trench very nicely. I reproduce her picture below, with some embellishment - the dotted yellow line indicates the edge of the trench as we left it, the red circled area is roughly where Sean and I were digging, and the blue arrowhead marks the stone I pointed out in my July 9th post (red arrow on day 7):
The photo nicely shows the huge collapse in all the late structures running up the centre of the picture, presumed to be due to a ditch from an earlier structure.
Sean and I enjoyed it so much, we decided to have a go again! The November 1st application frenzy took place at an even more astonishing pace in 2013; and despite getting onto the site within the first second of it opening at 8:00 AM Eastern I was unable to get us both a slot; it appears to me that the system gets overwhelmed by the load in those first few minutes - I had a spot in my cart but when I clicked to make it two my cart suddenly became "empty"... However, with a little patience and some help from the Trust I was able to snag two spots for us later in the day. So, we'll be getting tired and dirty in the same post-break fortnight in 2014, combining it with a family holiday in the Lakes, taking in the start of the Tour de France. Should be quite a trip.
