On a sunny and warm Sunday afternoon I set to work preparing the garden for tomorrow's fun. In consultation with the owners of the garden we agreed the best placement for the test-pit.
The garden is a narrow one, so there wasn't much debate! One potential obstacle is drains and other services, so we looked for man-holes and drains in the vicinity. 
After that I laid out the trench, measuring 1.5m by 1m. At this stage the youngsters were in the house and therefore missed a no-doubt gripping lecture on geometric principles and the hypotenuse of a right triangle (1.414m for a 1m x 1m square, since you ask).
De-turfing was a simple enough affair with my trusty Lidl spade, during which the first finds were recovered (See Maggie's post). A nice assemblage of lost toys, sweet wrappers, flower pot fragments, a clothes peg spring, 19th/20th Century pottery fragments and brick rubble was soon collected; all good evidence of use of the space as a garden (no surprises there).
I also dug an exploratory slot at one end of the test-pit to get some handle on how deep the deposits were likely to be and to make sure there were no nasty surprises like electical cables. Beneath the topsoil and turf was a deposit of orangy brown gravelly sand from which I recovered some brick and a post-medieval pottery fragment.
Beneath that, at a depth of 0.45m, was a very cobbly orangy brown clay and sand deposit. The geology of the area is very similar, being made up of glacial moraine deposits, but it was clear that this was a disturbed deposit and therefore potentially archaeological.
Initial signs look extremely promising and I can't wait to get stuck into it with the children and parents tomorrow!
Until then...
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