rubbish part 2:

2 Weeks later and nothing has happened until yesterday and today.I had a visit to the site yesterday and the area where the bottles etc where being dug from has now been filled in.thats not too bad because the narrow lane that cuts the site into 2 halfs would have been undermined by digging under it so no going there.the rubbish etc appeared to be under the road which implies that the road was a later addition leading to the conclusion that the entire site was a landfill site.Excavating the entire site is a job for another day and we are in the process of talking to the council about this. the situation now is that all the earth that has been excavated is now in huge piles adjacent to the site.This area of the site is the area that contains the rest of the landfill site.It is fenced off with barbed wire etc which will help when this area is excavated in the future.There is an awful lot of bottles etc still in these piles of earth .I could see it all through the fence just lying around some of it only half exposed.One bottle was right next to the fence so i was able to get it out through the fence.As is the nature of landfill the older deposits are lower down.I could see broken pieces of stoneware and necks of bottles that were C1850 scattered around.there were a lot of others lying around just out of reach.A lot of what has been unearthed have been containers for what would have been in their time expensive goods which implies rich peoples throwaways which would be what i would expect to find.There is still a lot of valuable material in these piles of earth because it was scooped out by a JCB and just dumped.none of it has been sifted through.Its just a shame that my friends dad Derek Askey isnt still alive to see this.He wrote 2 authoritative books on the subject of bottles and digging.One is called Stoneware Bottles [A guide to].

Today a call was made to the building company managing director and to the project manager of the site.What was proposed was this:either let us have access to the spoil heaps to dig through it and to also have a look around the site itself too see if anything is still exposed.What we want is an informal agreement between ourselves to dig.The alternative is for all work to be stopped on site until we have explored it and dug through the spoil heaps.Obviously the first option is preferable to the second.The end result is the same.We get to dig anyway.Its just a shame that no progress has been made up until now.I had to get things moving or we will still be waiting at christmas time.I cant wait that long.I have dreamt about this twice now so i must be obsessed !!