This season has been full of surprises, and the greatest surprise of all came on the penultimate day. There is another Roman building underlying the bath-house at Truckle Hill. This was a completely unexpected and very exciting discovery.

It had been difficult to explain the painted plaster wall outside the caldarium (hot room) but a new wall immediately outside the wall of the tepidarium (warm room) is clearly part of the same, earlier building. The excavated section includes a window opening, and the masonry work is of very high quality. This wall had also been decorated with painted plaster.

This first building was clearly luxuriously appointed with a mosaic floor (a small section of floor was found in situ at the base of the painted wall).

Work has continued all week in the first frigidarium (cold bath) and the remains of the steps down into the bath have been uncovered. At more than 1.5 m it was much deeper than expected and would have been more of a plunge pool than a bath. Large pieces of roof tile from the collapsed roof lay at the bottom of the frigidarium, together with blocks of tufa which had formed the ceiling.

Groups from the South Wiltshire Young Archaeologists’ Club and from Hardenhuish School have been out to help excavate the area at the end of the valley. It now seems almost certain that this was the building site where large quantities of mortar and plaster were produced for the bath-house, its predecessor and the villa. This is exciting – it is unusual to find evidence of a Roman building site.

We end the season with lots of new questions. What was the connection between the first Roman building, the bath-house and the villa on the top of the hill? How large was the first building, when was it built and what was it used for? These are the questions which we hope to investigate next year.

We have many people to thank at the end of our 2008 season. First of all Mr Antony Little who has so generously allowed us to investigate the site. We would also like to thank Wiltshire County Council Archaeology Service and North Wiltshire District Council Community Awards for helping to fund this project and last but not least, the many volunteers who have helped in the excavation.

Tufa: soft limestone rock which forms beside water saturated with carbonates. Tufa is still produced in streams nearby.

The second week of excavation at Truckle Hill is, if anything, even more rewarding than the first. Some 3m away from the rear wall of the caldarium and running more or less parallel to it, is another wall, in remarkable condition. Interest turned to real excitement when careful trowelling revealed decorated plaster on the wall. This suggests an internal wall beyond what we had thought was the extent of the bath-house. The plaster is painted with a design of red and yellow, imitating exotic foreign marble, with a buff panel framed with black. Only a small section has been uncovered but it is likely that there is more, hidden beneath the soil.

Painted Roman wall plaster

Down the slope from the bath-house we are finding quantities of wall plaster, small fragments, many of them coloured. Pieces of stone roof tile, flue tile and the odd tessera all suggest that this is where building material was dumped when the bath-house was altered or demolished.

Some 100m from the bath-house, work continues on the mysterious mound further up the valley. There is a spring near here and last week it looked as if this might have been the site of a cistern, providing water for the bath-house. Now this seems less likely. Layers of mortar have been uncovered where the ground dips in the centre of the mound. Could this be where the mortar for building the bath-house was produced?

As so often happens, this excavation is not only answering old questions, but raising new, exciting ones as well.

The trees are just beginning to change colour at Truckle Hill and it is the perfect setting for an excavation. This year nearly 40 volunteers have signed up to help investigate a Roman bath-house near the site of a villa discovered in the 19th century, close to the Wiltshire village of North Wraxall.

Work began here last year when English Heritage, Wiltshire County Council and Wessex Archaeology funded a community excavation to find out as much as possible about the building and to conserve it for the future.

Although we will only be here for a fortnight this time, most of last year's volunteers and many new ones have signed up to help.  I visited the site at the end of the first week, on a lovely, autumn day, to find eight volunteers hard at work.

The first trench has been cut at right angles to the outside wall at the rear of the building, to locate the flue which would have fed hot air into the caldarium (hot room). After digging through quantities of sand, a small square was visible in the wall. Too small to be the flue, it looks at the moment like a putlog - a hole for securing scaffolding.   

Inside the caldarium the curved wall was being exposed along with the base of an arch which once spanned that end of the room. One tessera gave a clue as to the floor surface, a suggestion borne out by finds from a trench further down the slope. Here, amongst the rubble of the fallen building were more tesserae and intriguing fragments of painted wall plaster.

Fragment of painted wall plaster, held by its disoverer

Some 100m away from the bath-house, also on the side of the valley, is an area of raised ground. It wasn't clear from an earlier geophysical survey whether this was a pile of rubble or something more interesting. Excavation has uncovered what looks like a collapsed wall here, but whether it's part of a boundary, a building or perhaps a water cistern we have yet to find out.

The collapsed wall during excavation. Is it part of a boundary, a building or perhaps a water cistern?

 Find out more about the Roman bath house at Truckle Hill.

Today was our last day at Down Farm as, after five successful years, this will be our final year on this site. After a week’s training our participants are now confident and competent and needed little instruction from us. The site was quiet except for the rustling of records and the scratching of trowels as we pressed on with work on this Iron Age settlement site.

Over the past five years we have dug countless postholes, several pits, an enclosure ditch and numerous sections of enigmatic quarry hollows. This has revealed a wealth of information about the prehistoric residents of this site.

We now believe that we have found a small farmstead where a small group or even just one family lived for several generations. They farmed the land, built roundhouses and square ancillary buildings, quarried chalk and buried their waste. We’ve found evidence of activities that may have been rituals – a cow burial flanking the enclosure ditch and a human femur buried in a shallow pit – the meanings of which are now lost to time. All that remains of their lives are the traces preserved beneath our feet which our teams have painstakingly excavated in order to bring to life the prehistory of Down Farm.

The team from week two of the Practical Archaeology course 2008

Thanks

Wessex Archaeology would like to thank everyone who has dug with us, this year and over the previous four years, and everyone who has supported the project. We’d like to thank those that have given workshops and worked behind the scenes on post excavation and project management to make this a success. We’d also like to thank Martin Green, not only for letting us work on his land, but for the talks, tours, advice and good humour he has shown over the past five years.

The Wessex Archaeology Team.

A package arrived at site last night. We opened it expecting to find essential site kit from Wessex HQ and were delighted to find instead a gift of sweets from Keith who came on the course last week. Keith, you are a star and we thank you!

The Wessex Archaeology team with their gift of sweets sent in by Week One participant, Keith

Buoyed by the sugar we spent the whole morning on site. Most people have now completed their first posthole and some are storming ahead and are working on their second, third and even fourth features.  This is fantastic progress, especially since we lost nearly two hours dig time due to Tuesday's wet weather.
 
The information that we have gathered this year will help us to further understand the prehistory of Down Farm. By linking postholes with similar fills and dimensions we can infer which form structures with those around them. The site is complicated as it seems that Iron Age settlers built and renewed many structures on the site over hundreds of years. This has left complicated patterns of overlaid postholes dotted across the chalk and only the careful excavation conducted by our participants can unravel them.
 
Matt Leivers joined us in the afternoon to teach our team about prehistoric pottery. This is a popular workshop using real examples - both wonderful and nerve-racking to handle - which was captured on camera by Wessex Archaeology's top photographer Elaine Wakefield. 

Despite a bruised sky and threatening clouds we managed to stay relatively dry today. The site, which we had to abandon last night due to the continuing rain, was little more than damp underfoot – ideal for excavation.
 
Today has been a day of visitors. Our first was a newt which had inexplicably crawled into our tea hut overnight – we think he might have been after the Jaffa Cakes. Later in the morning we were joined by Wessex Archaeology’s geophysicists Paul Baggaley and Ben Urmston.  They conducted a survey of the unexcavated section of the settlement enclosure which is to the south of our site. This builds upon a smaller geophysical survey that was conducted last year and will help our understanding of the site as a whole.

A friendly newt visiting the site tea hut

At lunchtime we were joined by friend of the dig Margaret Melsom, who bought gifts of cakes (much appreciated!), and Jessica Grimm, Wessex Archaeology’s animal bone specialist. Jessica took our team through the basics of animal bone identification and for a short while our tea hut was transformed with jaw bones all over the place.

Recording a post hole

To finish the day we returned to site. A further eleven features have been excavated and recording continues on eight more. This is fantastic progress and we learn more every day about the prehistoric inhhabitants of Down Farm.

A sombre start to Friday with the rain penetrating even the most sophisticated of waterproofs. Only the intrepid ventured on site to finish their work with most staying back at HQ, where Mr Ellis was holding a session on the Harris Matrix technique.

By lunch time, and with the "intrepids" return, everyone was looking thoroughly brain frazzled and satisfied with their week's accomplishments. The Wessex staff were kept busy answering questions and filling in any gaps. The enthusiasm of the digging team was only quelled by the "oh no, I've got to go back to work on Monday" syndrome.

The afternoon brought with it an extensive guided tour of Cranbourne Chase by Dr Martin Green in which everyone was pleased to brave the elements and face the rain.

By end of play, we were safely back, and with rosy cheeks and red noses, final farewells were made.

I don't think it is "final" farewells...from the look of things, we will see more of them in years to come...

Group photo from Week One of the course

It was a bleak and wet start to day four of the Wessex Archaeology Practical Archaeology Course at Down Farm, but morale was still high. Despite the rain most of the diggers had finished their immaculately dug post-holes and were beginning to contemplate doing a second. Before moving on, however, there were context sheets to be finished and plans drawn.

Chris has been showing our diggers how to use a dumpy level to survey in their excavated features and today he gave a short introduction to on-site surveying techniques using the GPS. These days the GPS has become the standard technology for surveying, so Wessex Archaeology staff had to jog their memories a little before they could help our diggers to use the dumpy level.

Matt Leivers teached students about prehistoric pottery

This afternoon Matt Leivers arrived for his second talk – a workshop on prehistoric pottery, which was very useful. If only we could find some!

Unfortunately our tea-breaks were particularly ill-timed today. They coincided with the sunnier spells, and more than once we had to abandon our digging and huddle in the lee of the van as the clouds periodically burst above us. It didn’t seem to dampen spirits though, or spoil another successful day.