It's a piece of cake!

Day 6. Our team today were; Si, Dawn, Andrew, Helen, Andy, Clare, Sophie, Ted, Andy, Liz, Alison, Otis, Max, Emily, Mili and myself.

Andy, Clare and Sophie had travelled all the way from Stoke today to join us on the dig as they did last year. Andrew (from Harthill originally, like his sister, Dawn) and Helen, his wife had travelled from their home in Woodsetts, whilst Si and Dawn had joined us again from Kiveton.

Today was my birthday, and I got to celebrate it with some lovely people on a gloriously hot and sunny day digging for archaeology in the wood. We were even treated to a flypast by the BBMF Dakota - although I don't think it was for my benefit!

I was treated to a rendition of Happy Birthday and presented with a lovely cake. Mili kindly bought me a 'proper' archaeologist's trowel which I duly christened by using it to cut my birthday cake!

Andy, and Si, both former Coldstream Guardsmen were the first to hear the distinctive sound of the Dakota as it approached the wood.

Trenches 11 and 12 were recorded by Emily and Otis and they will be backfilled either tomorrow or Monday.

Tomorrow we are expecting more visitors including a few children and their parents who have supported Weston Park Museum. We will need some more people-power tomorrow as we begin to backfill the trenches, so we were more than happy to oblige.

Now that trench 12 has been recorded, Otis dug some post holes and a pit and filled them with various pieces of archaeology and covered them with topsoil for the children to discover tomorrow.

In trench 13 Si and Dawn dug a little deeper through the subsoil and came across some more stones. We will look closer at these tomorrow but at the moment we think they are most probably the natural bedrock.

Alison and Andy were shown how to record the archaeology they had uncovered in trench 7 by Emily.

Max opened a new trench that had shown a possible 'something' on the geophys' and he discovered a feature containing some metal. He will excavate it further tomorrow.

By 3.30pm we decided to call it a day and we all headed off to the pub for an enjoyable birthday pint.

Roll on tomorrow! Cheers!