Team Kaims!

For three days this week I've been at the wetlands site called Bradford Kaims. It's about 3 miles from the castle. It's a very different site. It's farming land that was and in places still is marsh land.

Below you can see me opening my first ever 1x1m test pit. I'm not heavy enough to de-turf it all on my own though. I would jump on the spade up to 10 times before it would go in then the supervisor Graham would come along and push it straight in. 

Here's Jackie hard at work supervising us by ear. He swears he wasn't sleeping.

The next morning my test pit was rather wet with ground water which I had to bucket out all day.

It's a bit damp in there!

 Nearer to the end of the day the bog oak is slowly reappearing. I forgot to take another photo so I don't have one of how much oak I uncovered. I also ran out of time to draw my pit :(

On my third day we opened up a massive 2x20m trench elsewhere at the Kaims. I found some stinging nettles with my forearm. Apparently I react badly to them. Jackie was telling me the swelling should go down in about an hour. Well an hour later it wasn't as red as it was but it was swollen as you can see in the below photo. The area remained itchy and tender for another 2 days. Today finally the last of the blotches seems to have gone away.

It seems my olivers have seen better days. They are still water proof some how but the soles are falling off. On the upside I don't have to worry about cleaning them up to bring them home they will just gone in the bin on sautrday afternoon. 

 This is what the field we're working in looks like. The bushes are thistles which really hurt when they prick you and the purple ish coloured plants everywhere are stinging nettles!

On thursday I was at the castle finds sorting while it bucketed down outside. The kaims staff where all wondering around 'supervising' and mocking the students. All in good fun. It was still raining when we got back to camp so we had a beer, got into dry clothes, covered up with waterproofs and went to the pub for dinner and stayed there until 11pm when it closed. Our mess tent is currently a swap!