Stories from "Windy" Clump (2013)

My slot in the middle.

I try to make it out to Rocky (AKA Windy) Clump at least once a week now, but last Wednesday (the 23rd) left a long gap of 1.5 weeks since I had last been out there. I was placed back in my little muddy Stonehenge slot, amongst my ring of large friendly flint stones and chunks of white chalk. John, the director of RC, bestowed upon me a new nickname on Wednesday in honour of my new troweling context (announced in his weekly e-newsletter of the shenanigans that we get up to): "Pete, Chelsea (Rocky to her friends) and Fran, along with Mark worked on the floor surface north of the barn, and it is producing lots of archaeology. Chelsea had lots of large flint nodules in her section, and was loathe to move them, while Fran and Pete got down to those lower levels where there were fewer flints." That pretty sums up excavations conditions on Wednesday, with many poor attempts to find a comfortable middle ground amidst the flints that were slowly closing in around me like angry gnomes, to rest my knees on my foam gardening mat . I troweled up the usual bits of pot, fragmented animal bones and teeth (an assumption here), fire-cracked flint and a few bits that looked very important but were covered in so much mud that they are probably going to turn out to be just clumps of ironstone or sandstone when cleaned.

Fernando, Rocky, Windy.

The weather kindly held up but that cheeky wind had me chasing Pete's kneeling mat around the field. There were no inquisitive cows again, although we did have a rather irritable cow mooing over to the next pasture whose voice echoed eerily around the downs. We concluded that he liked to hear the sound of his own voice.