Postscript for 2012's dig...

I guess the blog was a bust last year. Sorry. Had a great week, only lost one day of the five to rain, despite 2012 being one of the wettest on record in the UK. We defined a ditch that probably ran along the outer perimeter of one of the earliest forts at Vindolanda. However, because the very wet conditions meant we were all covered in thick mud the whole day, I took very few pictures. Here's evidence of how wet it was, showing the crew first thing on day 4, looking at thousands of gallons of rain in our trench from an overnight storm, believe it or not we were digging an hour after this picture was taken:

And here's a shot of the dry trench the day before, with the ditch in view running through the middle of the shot, right to left at a slight diagonal (a marker post is lying along the bottom of one side of the ditch):

And here's a view I took of the entire site from Barcombe Hill (Hadrian's Wall is on the ridge in the background, at right), on our day lost to rain, with our trench visible in the north field towards the centre right of the image:

We were visited by a BBC film crew during the week (see link to a news story about it), filming an episode of the series "The Flying Archaeologist". It turned out they showed a nice find of mine from that day, a small piece of armour: