#RomanCircus20 Blog – Martin

Some words from Martin, who helped CAT out on the Sergeants Mess excavations:

“It was a fine late Spring day when I arrived at the garden of the Colchester Garrison Sergeant’s Mess, armed with my newly purchased trowel and knee protectors. A novice excavato”It was a fine late Spring day when I arrived at the garden of the Colchester Garrison Sergeant’s Mess, armed with my newly purchased trowel and knee protectors. A novice excavator, I joined the other newbie “archaeologists” around the shipping container that served as the site office and a good deal of mirth was directed at the size of my trowel. I had had no idea what size to purchase and had arrived with what was declared to be the smallest and daintiest trowel ever seen on a dig site! 

I had only learnt of the dig a week before it was due to start and, after some hasty negotiations at work, arrived one week into the excavation, with the turf off and the tops of the brick-and-mortar remains of the starting gates just visible above their 1,500-year-old mud cocoon. I was assigned to a small square on the periphery of the trench and bent to it. All of us went painfully slowly, at first. On day 3, with excitement, I struck a small curl of greenish metal. Revealed fully, it proved to be a small circlet of copper-alloy, probably a child’s armlet. Two weeks and a lot of soil later, this proved to be my only find but it was exciting to see the brick structures around me slowly emerge.

The last day of the dig arrived, with only me, Owen and Philip on site. Owen and I were told that we had to prepare the site to be photographed and were handed mattocks! Only the qualified archaeologists had been permitted to use these, so far. A nervous, tiring day followed, under the close scrutiny of Philip (from the edge of the trench, of course), but the remaining soil proved to be as bare of small finds as it had been all fortnight. At close of play, we received the ultimate accolade of “good job” from Philip and left the site feeling immensely honoured that we had played a small part in the story of Colchester’s Roman Circus. We looked back with a pang of sadness, knowing that soon the machines would move in to cover it all over again, to protect it until such time as a decision about its future could be made.

This was a fortnight that I will never forget.”

Many thanks for your help Martin!🥳

#RomanCircus20 #Archaeology #Colchester