If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt5

I'll continue with my holey memoirs. I saw Stella the other day and she told me 'I were rate enjoyin' it, then tha stopped wraytin' it.' So this prompted me to wrayte a bit more...

Where was I? Oh yes, I'd moved to York, living with Kelly and Hel and just quit working for Humber in Beverley. Bring yourself up to speed here. I was offered a few more weeks working for Humber; we'd discovered most of medieval Beverley under the unexcavated area of site in the last week of the job (as is the usual case with archaeology...). I had to decline as I'd already agreed to start work with Network Archaeology in the North Yorkshire Dales. Oh! How I wished I'd stuck with Humber... You may recall, Network were the company that piled into Ireland and created a ratshit pile on the N2 project that CRDS had to clear up. Alarm bells should have been ringing, but I was lured by money:


The job was similar to the Welsh Pipeline that I had worked on with Cotswold; so again the picture here is a representative of the area in which we were working. I should have known something was up when we were required to be on site for twelve hours a day. This didn't include the hour drive to site every morning and hour drive home, which we were not paid for. This was because, as usual with archaeology, the HR people had accommodated us in a village an hour away from the site, rather than looking for somewhere close to work. Bodies on site, not hearts and minds, is the catch phrase for most archaeological companies. Everybody was tired, especially the drivers, minutes became precious, we had about two hours to ourselves at night. In which time I had to prepare food, eat and get washed, leaving just enough time to stare at Imogen Thomas on Big Brother for an hour before bed and doing it all again.

Thanks Imogen, you helped me through the bad times...

This is where I first met Sir Stanners, we became close friends due to our hatred of pretty much everyone else we were working with. The two of us were housed together for a short while and we would just bitch about all the other cunts we were working with. It was one massive freak show, the entire 1983 Ministry of Works digging circuit had joined Network for the job. There were the stoned out hippies that had missed the seventies. They'd all lived through it, but they just weren't aware of it happening around them they were so whacked out of it on goofballs. It was like Ken Kesey's Magic Bus has tipped up and unloaded on the side of the site. The Nether-Kennet Acid Test had turned on, tuned in and dropped out in North Yorkshire.

'Hey dudes! Get on the bus, quick, I hear network are hiring for the summer!'

The entire archaeological operation seemed to be fumbling about under the smoke screen of the killer drug Marijuana. There was so many people smoking on that site it was ridiculous. I think there was only Stanners and I that were not on the 'evil weed'. There was a point that the Pipeline contractors came up with the idea of random drug tests for all staff including us. I was quite in favour, after all, we were working along side heavy plant and welding operations. The site was littered with massive concrete pipeline fittings. I wasn't keen on people operating heavy machinery after having been drinking or smoking the previous night. The news reached us and there was pandemonium amongst the archaeologists. There were calls that it was against our human rights, that we should protest against this infringement on our privacy. Let's all make a stand against 'The Man'. Basically nobody wanted to lose their jobs after being tested positive, which ninety percent of them would have done... Sir Stanners and I just laughed at the paranoid wrecks of humanity before us. Network broke me as an archaeologist and as a human being. I quit, I took the money I made in the short while I worked there and took a break from working. As the money dwindled I had to bite the bullet and find another job. With an intense hatred of commercial archaeology I took a temporary job working for Gamestation in their factory:


This was three months of further madness, mumbling Joan, that poison dwarf Dawn, the neanderthal Metal head with a receding hairline he was refusing to acknowledge, Jose and the rigged election and the Polish day with the 'frenetic' translations of Polish to help us all integrate. I finished here in time for a move back home to Rotherham after a trip to Morocco with Nathan. Back in my parent's gaff I was stuck for a job until I saw ARCUS advertising for work in South Yorkshire and Leeds. I sent in a CV and was called by the office. Can you guess which job they offered me? The one that was ten minutes from my house, or on the site I would have to get up at five am to get to? As usual no one in the office had read my CV and they offered me the job in Leeds. I told them about where I was living and that it would be easier for me to get to Templebrough as it was just over the hill from where I was located. It was like a light bulb had been turned on somewhere in the darkness of the ARCUS office. So I ended up on a Roman Fort outside of Rotherham:


The true horror of this site is now buried under an industrial building. It was in the midst of shitty cold and wet winter, working on a clay site, excavating V shaped ditches whilst being constantly harassed by the digger driver and his banksman about how little we were getting paid. Mind you, there were some good people on this site, most of whom I was to work with again over the next few months; I met Lauren, Clare, Linzi, Mike, Izzie and the Serial Killer Scott here. Scott and I went on to work at Smithfield Carpark in Sheffield after we'd finished:

You can actually see one of the trenches we cut through the concrete in the satellite image. There is very little to say about this site except that nearly three years on the site still has yet to be developed. Next up was Broad Street:

Yes, it's a block of flats, but it wasn't when I worked there. The housing development had been halted by Paul who was conducting the watching brief before the buildings were being erected. He'd stopped the construction as he claimed he'd discovered medieval buildings on the site. This is how he sold the site to me when I arrived on my first Monday. It quickly became apparent that he was way out of his depth and the 'Medieval' walls turned out to be a 19th century factory boundary wall. He told me it dated to 1649 as that was when Sheffield Castle was pulled down and the sandstone blocks that made up the foundations were obviously stone from the walls of the castle. The fact that it had a bottle from about 1850 sticking out of it seemed to bypass Paul. The 'late medieval' road had modern hardcore in it's construction and appeared on a 19th century Ordnance Survey map.

Sheffield Castle circa 1267

The site was contaminated with diesel and we all refused to work in a trench where the stuff was leaking out. I fondly remember all the staff standing on the edge of site watching Paul try to shovel clean the edge of the trench with his one good arm (the other one had been kicked by a horse over the preceding weekend, it probably disliked him as much as we did), whilst diesel ran over his boots. Great days. There is a blog's worth of stories about Paul and not just from this site, I have been told of his past work. He was working along with his twin brother (a transvestite vicar, I shit you not) and they would frequently have wrastlin' matches on the spoil heap. The two were placed far away from the rest of the site on an area they couldn't harm and on the Friday site tour they would duel with mattocks rather than explain what they had done the previous week. The site director would just walk away with the phrase 'Thank you, once again Gentlemen, for your valuable insights.'

Would you trust a site to this man? No, me neither...

The site finished and we all moved inside to work on the post excavation, everyone else mainly cleaned pottery from the site, whilst I sat and did sudokus and forced everyone to listen to Kraftwerk. I scored myself a job in Singapore but that portion of my memoirs is reserved for the next part...

Simon Jenkins is a Dog Bummer

I have just returned from a week in France so I thought I'd tell you all about that, also, you can read about last night's Damnation Festival, the highlights and lowlights of a day of METAL! First off though, France:

Moody battlefield cemeteries...

After Danny deciding he was going and then deciding he wasn't going about forty times, I travelled down to Brighton, stopping on the way to see Jo at Victoria Station, we had a jolly nice meal at Cafe Rouge, in order to get me ready for France. It was really good to see her again, albeit for an hour or so. I carried on to Brighton and met Justin ad Lucy at the station. Back at their gaff Bob (aka Sarah) called over (in a fucking sweet Reign in Blood t-shirt...) and in time so did Danny. After a wild drinking session, the bunch of us piled upstairs to play with Justin's gun collection.

Rule number one of gun safety, never point your weapon at someone else unless you intend on killing them...

We had to get the guns out from under Justin's bed where he'd hidden them in case the landlady came round and didn't take too kindly to her house being used as an arsenal. After more drinks and curry we hit the hay for the early morning rise for the trip to the ferry. The ferry journey was enlightened by a lovely Romanian girl who gave us all a massage for next to nothing. She offered to take me to a private room for my massage and I must say the offer was tempting... But I didn't fancy getting thrown overboard by the ship's crew for giving her undue attention. Arrival at Ocean Villas tea rooms was greeted by meeting the rest of the lads and lasses of NML and also Walter Rapp, the descendant of Jakob Hones, the body I discovered at Serre a few years ago. Shaking hands with the descendant of a body you have excavated is a humbling experience. After a look around Avril's museum and a buffet meal, Justin, Danny and I made for the place we were staying for the week, Snowden House:

Sixteen archaeologists crammed into a house packed with World War One Militeria makes for a great week!

By the time we had reached Snowden House the Irish Contingent of the team had arrived and we said fond hellos. I haven't seen many of them nearly two years and it was great to see everyone again. Even Simon, the Dog Bummer. During our stay in Snowden house we were over looked by this rather alarming looking fox:

David had to be physically restrained from trying to hunt this poor fellow

Unaware that Sunday was supposed to be a work day, Danny, Justin and I took off on a walk around a small part of the 1916 front line. The day was beautiful and we didn't want to waste it by working so we settled down for a snooze by one of the many CWGC cemeteries that dot the landscape of the North East France. It was the middle of shooting season and there were many French farmers walking around blasting anything that moved, so we didn't linger too long in anyone place for the fear of taking a peppering of buckshot.

The lanscape of a small portion of the 1916 battlefields

The main reason we were in France was to work on trenches that we had excavated in previous years. A few years ago, the Somme Association of Northern Ireland had bought Thiepval Woods opposite the Ulster Tower, Carol, the boss of the Somme Association had asked No Man's Land (of which I am part) to help out excavate the trenches that lay in the woods. This was in order for it to be turned into an interpretive visitor attraction for the growing tourist market in the area of the Somme. Actually it works as a non-profit attraction but tours of the trenches have to be booked at the Ulster Tower before hand and they are the only excavated original front line trenches that exist on the Somme Battlefields today.

A Mortar Pit, situated just behind the front lines, as excavated and reveted by NML and the Somme Association

Obviously the trenches need constant repair and rework in order that they don't collapse in on themselves. Over the past few years work has been done to revet and sandbag the trenches and this trip was another one of similar repair work. The trench which I had worked on for the most time was a second line trench system which had an associated dugout. The trench had cut through an early dugout, which had collapsed, possibly due to shell damage. We had quite a difficult time working out the sequence of events but a small amount of archaeology conducted on the end of the trench cleared up our confusion. I had small but crack (head) team under my supervision: Black Shining Heather, Dog Bummer Jenkins and Mo-Jo, we were augmented by the demonic sandbagging abilities of Douchebag Philips:

Area 8 team, left to right: Dog Bummer, Mo-Jo, Douchebag, Black Shining and self

We were so fucking great we had all our work done by Thursday morning a full day earlier than expected. The trenches looked fucking amazing and it was testament to everyone's hard work that we got it all completed so quickly.

Area 8 before

Area 8 after!

The rest of the week between work was taken up with drinking and playing Wings of War. The other highlight included Dr David Kenyon eating a plate of shredded carrots without using his hands for three euros. Like a fucking horse.

Go on Dobbin, get it in you..

As ever with trips to France, I come back with more things than I left with. I try to travel light but the return trip always has an increased weight bag. This time I returned with a hat that had been sitting in David's car for two years, a fake Iron Cross from the turfed out collection at the Waltham Gunpowder Mills, a pair of moleskin trousers from Steve and a pair of Army boots from Major Carling. All in all it was a great trip, especially since I haven't been out to France for eighteen months and haven't seen the Irish lot for even longer. I miss them all and it is the proof a of a great friendship that we can all get along as though no time has passed between our last meetings!

Proudly eating shit for NML since 2003

Last night was a night of something slightly different, Dave, Ross, Amy and I drove over to Leeds to spend the evening in the company of about a thousand social misfits and chronic masterbaters at the Damnation Metal Festival. We saw some great bands although the venue seemed to suffer from bad sound all the way through. I was gutted that the Romanian Negura Bunget didn't play, the singer had laryngitis apparently. I would have thought that should have only improved the performance... Rotting Christ were my overall highlight, their set was fucking great. I've been into them for over fifteen years, so to finally see them play live was great. They were full of energy as well and put on a blistering performance.

Rotting Christ, the angriest Greeks around...

The other highlight of the festival was the last ever performance by Mistress. I'd never heard them before but their set was fucking brilliant, with stage diving galore, just like it was 1991 again. The lowlight of the day was by far Akercocke, a British Black Metal band, a poor man's Emperor in their shit days. Dave said the singer and keyboardist looked like they worked in a call centre and the bassist was a homeless.

Akercocke? Shit Cock, more like

The other band I was really wanting to see was Jesu, the project Justin Broadrick formed following the split of Godflesh, as you no doubt already know. This performance was completely ruined by the sound engineer fucking everything up and playing the vocals and drums too loud in the mix. Jesu perform a delicately balanced soundscape of beautiful low-fi music and it needs to be mixed correctly to be able to appreciate Justin's incredible song writing abilities. The sound engineer should have been dragged out and shot. In the event I dragged myself out to go and watch Lock-Up, who's cover of Fear of Napalm was the highlight of their set.

Jesu: it could have been brilliant...

Just a Quicky

I'm going to give you baying wolves one final short post before I go off to France for the week. Before I start I have to give a big shout out to a big man; Owen, he gave me a shout on his radio show on Forge FM which he presents to a listenership of six people on Saturdays. He also asked if I'd plug his Blog for him, so here it is... 'Small and robust, the Owen is a cautious and ridiculous creature who can waste entire days just looking fantastic. He's been known to enjoy rocking and has more hair than you can comfortably imagine.' I had to do this or he would start crying again...

Owen: Idiot Savant

At work my last day's demands for cake fell on deaf ears, Lauren brought some Halloween biscuits and Wincey brought some cup cakes. There was no Cadbury's Celebrations from Sir Stanners though. He had brought Alice some when she left. I asked him why he hadn't brought me any and he said 'I like Alice.' He then poured insult on injury by offering me the last stale Jaffa Cake from the day before.

Not for you, Sotheran

The previous post's text message theme caused quite a stir amongst my six readers, so I thought I'd have a look at some of the other text messages which I have received over the past week. I tell a lie, the first one below I recieved quite a while back but saved it as it was so good. I present them all here and assure you every single one is a genuine text message that was sent to me by one of my friends, I won't tell you who sent which ones though...

Yeah. He's a moral guiding light, like Ghandi or Jesus. In fact i think the final judgement will be in the form of the jeremy kyle show. It says so in the bible. There's a sketch there. Or nuremburg in the style of jeremy kyle, imagine that. 'where i come from, son, we don't kill six million jews'.

well, he'll get what's coming to him. Next time either of us see him it'll be in a German Sheiss video, tied up and crying.

I didn't give it a second thought at the time. It was only when i got back to the day centre that I realised i was wearing the ceremonial headgear mother brought back from indochina. No wonder the children on the street were lobbing stones at me! I was dressed as mekohla, the dark spirit of war

Nothing in all my days with the medicine shows prepared me for what I saw that summer. Evil was brewing under the streets of pentonville and we all knew it. No one was quite sure how it would end least of all the so called leaders of our society... Oh, wait a minute, cash in the attic is about to start.

Yo yo yo! Yeah man i had a fine weekend, saw mudhoney ended up on the golf course...hows you?

I'm thinking of making a remake of Herbie but with explicit reference to the car's nazi origins

I'll allow you all to ruminate for a week on the meaning of all this...

Some corner of a foreign field...

I haven't updated for a wee while. That's because I've been either too busy or too tired, so suck it up. I was going to do the next part of my digging memoirs, but I've decided to write the next bit when I come back from France in a week. So you'll have to fucking wait, you impatient dogs.

What I will tell you about is... Tomorrow is my last day with Onsite, at least for the foreseeable future. The last couple of days have been pretty good. I have been digging out a large feature. But I have no idea what it is, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. But anyway, I found a fuck load of Roman pottery in it. Not only that but some of it was Samian ware. 'No shit!' I hear you say, but wait, there's more! It was not only Samian, but... Drum Roll... it was decorated! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! Yes, that's right, it was decorated. I couldn't believe it myself. We all had a look at it and it has two horses on it along with a wheel, so we reckon it's most likely a charioteer scene. Just like Ben Hur!

How I imagine the picture on the rest of the pot looks...

Anyway, I mention this because it beats the piece of shit Samain that Sir Stanners found the other week. Then he was all getting in my face about quality over quantity. I said now I've got quality and quantity, so shove that in your pipe and smoke it, you posh bastard.

Stanner's approach to modern professional archaeology

Speaking of professional approaches to modern archaeology, one of my sources (Deep Trowel) is working in Humberside (they want to call it East Yorkshire again, but if they change their name to Humberside once, they can fucking stick with it). He is having 'difficulties' with the staff there and their general lack of interest in the job. This is coupled with the fact that one of them is a pre-op transsexual who demanded his/her own toilet and vanity mirror, another turned up to work one Monday after several of his teeth fell out over the weekend and some others are camping on the site like they think it's still 1983 and everyone is working for the Ministry of Works. When I asked how things were going I received the following text message off 'Deep Trowel':

It's like babysitting spastic alligators at feeding time in a room with no lights whilst a stereo blasts Motörhead with a chicken fillet stapled to your forehead.

Aren't you glad you don't work in archaeology?

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt4

As mentioned in the last post, I fucked off to France again before finally finishing with CRDS and Ireland, the first place I went was to these woods outside Thiepval:


Many times Justin, Luke, Danny and I had driven past these woods wondering what secrets they held. They marked, after all, the British front line and the jumping off point for the Irish 36th Ulster Division during the Battle of the Somme. You can see their memorial at the Ulster Tower directly north of the red circle. We would return to excavate the trenches here again and again in the woods over the following years, thanks mainly to the Somme Association's purchase of the land. It was during one of these sojourns that I 'found' a gas battery with my mattock blade...

Two of these Gas Canisters were empty, two were full. It was Russian roulette with a mattock...

After this trip we were commissioned by YAP Films of Canada to make a Battlefield Archaeology series, 'Finding the Fallen' (AKA Trench Detectives). We worked on several sites for this show, the first two at Forward Cottage and Bixschoote were outside of Ypres. as these sites were running concurrently I only worked at Forward Cottage:


You can quite clearly see X Track Cemetery to the east of the site. We always seem to be in close proximity to the dead when working in France. Because of the Flanders clay this site yielded really well preserved trench lines and artefacts, I even found a load of bullets that had been preserved in oil and looked like they'd only been dropped yesterday, not ninety years previously... The next site we worked on was at Beaumont Hamel:


We were literally outside the fence of the Canadian Memorial Park, the trenches of the park ran straight under the fence so it was quite easy to site our excavation trenches... In the satellite image the park is the large expanse to the west of the marked site. You can just about pick out the lines of the 'preserved' trenches in the park. This was a memorable site, not only for the ability to match trenches in the ground to named trenches on maps, but also for the discovery of our first latrine, still in situ (or shitu...):

Sometimes my job is shit...

The final site we worked on for this project was at Auchey-Les-Mines near Lille:


The smaller of the two circles shows where I started excavating the edge of one of the mine craters, one of several blown under the German Hohenzollem Redoubt during the Battle of Loos. The second larger circle shows where the excavation was moved to when we discovered a mass grave of German soldiers. Again further work led to the identification of one of the men, a certain Gefreiter Leopold Rothärmel of the 9th Coy, 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. This identification shows the importance of the work we do. This was a very difficult excavation, we worked in teams of four and took it in turns to work through the night, sleeping for an hour then working for an hour. We'd had looters on the site the previous night so thought it better to stay to deter further interference. It was probably the toughest (not just physically; psychologically as well) but one of the greatest things I have ever done. We were finished with this project but I wasn't finished with France, there is more to come later...

I'd left Ireland and had a job with the Cotswold Archaeological Trust. I was initially supposed to be going to work in Worcester, but instead despite my protestations I was thrust into Mid-Wales, to Four Crosses, close to Oswestry:


There was nothing wrong with site or the crew, all of whom were good eggs (Sam turned out not to be, but that is a different story...). I do remember Ian's method of trying to seduce Sam by eating his birthday cake whilst getting in her face with it. Not a very pleasant prospect: a hairy Viking reenactor with his beard covered in chocolate cake cracking onto you... The worst thing about this site was the cunt that owned the accommodation we were staying in; Cedric. He was a cunt of the highest order, ex-army wanker, a life-long career that had never seen him rise higher than Sergeant. There's something that works well in the army hierarchy that keeps the scum low. If you open the Oxford English Dictionary on the definition of 'Cunt', there is a full size picture of Cedric. He blamed me for his faulty cheap kettle that nearly burned my flat down. He wouldn't allow me to use his laundry room during the weekend so I could wash my work clothes and I had to get a taxi the eight miles to Oswestry since there is NO FUCKING PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN THAT SHITHOLE OF A LANDFILL THAT MASQUERADES AS A PRINCIPALITY THAT IS WALES!!! I hope he's dead.

Straight after the job finished in Four Crosses, I was herded out to Worcester to the original job I had been lined up to do:


As I have covered in a previous post, myself and the other lads were kept in a farm cottage about twenty miles outside of Worcester, the only bus we could get to site was one that got us into the city about an hour before work, or fifteen minutes after work started. Guess which bus we took? We would arrive fifteen minutes after everyone else, but to be honest the five of us did more work than the rest of the site put together anyway. One day the fuckhole (who's name I forget) who was running the site, had the audacity to ask me if we could all try to get in on time one morning. I reeled for a second and and rather than let fly a barrage along the lines of 'If Cotswold want to put us up in fucking house within the fucking boundaries of the fucking city rather than the next fucking county, then I'd be more than fucking happy to come into fucking work on time, as it is we are living in the middle of fucking nowhere so have little fucking choice about what fucking time the fucking bus arrives. Would you like me to have a word with the fucking transport department that organises the fucking bus routes and see if they can't get a more fucking convenient fucking bus timetable for you?' I merely explained the situation. I used words a five year old could understand with barely concealed rage.

How it feels to try to talk common sense to Archaeology Managers...

It was also in Worcester that I met Boba Fett, or at least the guy who dresses up like him in the Star Wars films: Jeremy Bulloch. He was signing in the local comic book store, so I took along a book for him to sign for a friend's birthday present (I swear, it wasn't for me...). At a loss for anything to talk to him about, I asked him if the voice in the Empire Strikes Back was his or not. He started giving me this massive discourse on what language the character was going to talk in and what he was going to say. After about fifteen minutes of this nerd barrage I was just wishing for a simple yes or no. After the heady excitement of Worcester I was Wales bound again. Cotswold had the big pipeline project that was trumpeted by the Welsh. Little realising that the pipeline was being built to pipe gas OUT of Wales, not into it. The dumb-backwards-sheepshagging-cousin-marrying-schoolchildren-burying wankers that the Welsh are.

Again the amount of pissy little sites which only had one post hole in a strip that was 20km long that we worked on along this route of the pipeline would be impossible to identify, so here is a picture of South Wales and our approximate position at any one given time... One memorable moment from this job was when Allan stayed over in the accommodation with me one weekend instead of going back to Cirencester, like the rest of the crew. On the Sunday evening, before everyone else returned, we rigged up a pair of trousers with boots attached and hung it from the stairwell to make it look like one of us had committed suicide... By the start of 2006 I'd had enough of living in company accommodation and moved up north to York to move in with Helena and Kelly. I also landed myself a job with Humber Archaeology in Beverly:


There was a guy on this site called Andy (not Frudd, another Andy) who always had a better story than anyone else. I was talking about the Watchmen comic one time, Andy was good mates with Alan Moore, they used to go drinking all the time. I mentioned Hawkwind, Andy had been their roadie through the seventies. We talked about the landings on the moon, Andy had singlehandedly attacked Mars and conquered the Martians... Nothing was free from his boasting. I wondered how an illustrious life as Andy's could end with such an ignoble end as scraping mud with a trowel and living in a Bed and Breakfast?

Andy, if it smells like it, then it probably is...

The site finished with Humber and money beckoned, money in the form of Network Archaeology. I'm going to leave this one until next time as it's a good one for stories of madness...

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt3

Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms Treefingers said they wanted more U2 rantings, well, I was going to write one but then I thought, no, fuck you. I have spent several days writing these posts, if you don't like it, don't fucking read it. Some people seem to be enjoying it, so here is part three of my excavating stories. If you missed the first two parts of this find part one here and part two here. My first taste of France was over and I was back in the warm bosom of CRDS, work had now shifted to Trim, just behind the facade of a shop on Market Street:


As ever Google earth comes up trumps when it comes to Ireland and this is the best picture of Trim I could find. I was back working with Donal, Laura, Aaron, Denis and the certifiably mad Swifty. Swifty was a war nut as well so he and I would spend all day trading quotes from War Films. I told Herr Swift that I was also interested in the Second World War and he turned up at my flat with his collection of Third Reich Helmets and SS Daggers. He told me he'd spent some time in the St John Of God Mental Hospital in Dublin, so I was unsurprisingly a little wary of this turn of events. Another of Swifty's stories that he told me was that himself and his mate were out drinking on a Friday night. They had started to chat to this young lad who turned out to be a dope dealer, the two boys convinced this young kid to get a taxi with them to buy some smoke off him. When they were in the taxi, they locked the doors and started screaming at the lad 'We're going to rape the fucking shit out of you!' Swifty never told me if they actually did or if they let the lad go. I could write a fucking book on the madness of Swifty, his brother was no better, only older...

The Swift Brothers go for a drink in Rathmines...
(Actually the guy on the left looks uncannily like my mate Dr David Kenyon)

The site was a medieval market square and we spent a few days shovelling off the tightly packed cobblestones in sweltering heat. I spent most of the time keeping my head down in case my ex-landlord (the fifteen minute evicter) saw me around town and decided to give me more grief. We were working literally in the shadow of Trim Castle, we could see it from the site in plain view. Trim Castle was used in Braveheart for most of the scenes involving Castles, it is the largest Norman Castle in Europe and the largest castle in Ireland. Imagine my dismay when some of my fellow English tourists came onto our site one day. They stood with their backs to the castle and asked if we were excavating the castle. Laura got her Big Donegal Head on and simply pointed at the castle behind them.

Spot the castle

Actually Trim is not just famous for Braveheart, but has other cinematic connections, the main one being the film 'Fatal Deviation'. Among the highlights of this piece of classic cinematic history is a kung-fu fight in Trim Londis supermarket. Trim was easily forgettable by the rest of Ireland, as demonstrated when Ireland was hosting the Special Olympics. We were still working on the site when the Olympic flame was being carried through every host town in Ireland. The denizens of Trim lined the streets ready to cheer on the flame on it's journey. We joined them and we waited. And they waited. And waited... And waited... Then someone realised that the convoy carrying the flame had not taken the turn off from the motorway to Trim and had carried on to Dublin... One final thing about the excavations in Trim, Aaron took the following photo of me on site with the site camera. Vera was downloading that particular film in the CRDS office one day when she let out a scream:


From one small company I went to another, this time Judith Carroll & Co. I was working with Kenny, Laura and Rachel on housing project at Balrothery, just North of Dublin:


There wasn't a whole load to say about this site, except one day found us excavating Machine Caterpillar track ruts which Kenny desperately wanted to be a prehistoric trackway. I also did a little bit of field walking down near Limerick City (Stab City) for Judith, but there is no way on God's Green Earth that I'd be able to find these fields now, so you can cry me a fucking river if you want to see them. I found myself unemployed for a while after the Balrothery site, mainly through choice rather than there being no work. I was waiting on a job coming up with CRDS again, but before it was confirmed I was offered a job with IAC again. For my sins I took it. It was in the centre of Dublin on Church Street:


You will see that the site is enclosed on the North and East by blocks of flats. The residents of these flats were not in the higher echelons of society, so to speak... Their children had grown up dodging blows from drunken fathers and learnt their language from their screaming mothers. They took out their frustrations of a lack of attention on us. For the week I was on that site we were rained with a shower of eggs, vegetables and broken wooden pallets. It wasn't just because of Health and Safety Legislation that we all kept our hard hats on... As I said I was on this site for a week as CRDS called me up and offered me the job I had been waiting for. Dermot the Director was OK about me leaving, but as I was walking off site on Friday at 4.00pm my phone rang and it was the IAC office. Before I could speak they offered me a position on the job I had just finished. My own job, the one I'd just quit. Talk about lack of communication. I took the job with CRDS the following week at Dunboyne:


Once again, we've hit gold with Google Earth and Ireland. I have no idea at all where the site was in Dunboyne, it was a nondescript field somewhere near the town. That's the best I can do. I was only there for three weeks, I'm not a fucking miracle worker... The job was so nondescript that I can remember very little about it apart from a horse skeleton being found and working under polytunnels for protection from the rain. They were murder every time someone farted...

Gas Gas Gas! Oh My God! Get out! My Eyes! It's Burning my eyes!!

Dunboyne was finished and there was no further work with CRDS, so scouting around I found a job with Margret Gowen Ltd, I had never worked for this Behemoth of Dublin archaeology before, but like everyone else I was eventually sucked into the maelstrom... I was placed at Hammond Lane:


The more astute and eagle eyed amongst you will notice that the Hammond Lane site is just over the road and down from the IAC Church Street excavation that I had left three weeks previously. In fact, on my second day on Hammond Lane, Dermot and the other supervisors decided to come and visit the site for the first time. I panicked and spent the entire time they were on site hiding in the toilets rather than face tough questions about why I was now working over the road... I worked on Hammond Lane for a brief period before I was sent off to Franc Miles' excavation at Ardee St, still with Margret Gowen:


This was in another rough area of Dublin and we spent the first week clearing the site of dead cats, tramp shit and dirty syringes. The dole scum would walk past the site on their way to pick up their scratcher. As they did they would stop and ask us with booze stinking mouths 'Mister, have you found any feckin' bones?' My God, inner city work is so rewarding. This was also the first time I worked closely with Mark Kelly and Sheelagh Conran, two of the most idiotic people you could ever hope to meet. We ended up going together (along with Fred) on the road trip of a life time across America. From coast to shining coast...

The face of modern Irish Archaeology is exemplified by Mark Kelly

I trusted these two to drive me 7,000 miles across the States... What was I thinking?

In fact this site had it's fair share of lunatics, Jose (who tried buying us tickets to America with a stolen Credit Card...), Dirty Ray, Greg, Mad Charlotte, the ever late Steve McQueen to name but a few. We also had an influx of Swedes and the supervisor Tara who denied any knowledge of the vast amount of contexts sheets she hadn't written up and left the rest of us to do it for her. One particular joke we would play on this site was whenever anyone would get a phone call in the cabin, as they answered everyone would start making loud animal noises, cats, dogs, chickens, monkeys etc, forcing them out of the cabin. During work on this site I had another trip to France, this time for the BBC Ancestors program about Wilfred Owen. We headed out to Serre:


We were excavating right next to the massive British Cemetery Number 2 on the Serre Road, you can see it as the big rectangle next to the circle. This excavation yeiled our first skeletons, two German and one British. The German soldiers were subsequently identified as Jakob Hones and Albert Thielecke both killed in 1915. The British man had been killed in 1916 but was never named although his remains were buried with full military honours in the Serre Cemetery. The two Germans went to Labry German Military Cemetery near Verdun. It is a very strange sensation being able to not only know the name of a skeleton I have excavated but also look at a photograph of the man whilst he was alive.

I had the honour of excavating the remains of the man laying down on the extreme left.

Back in Dublin I finished work with Franc and parted ways with Margret Gowen's company and went back to CRDS and the massive N2 Ashbourne Project they had going on. Little did I know this would be my last project in Ireland. It did last for eighteen months however:


As before, I have marked out the road we worked on rather than the individual sites, because a) I can't remember where they all were and 2) I can't be bothered. There was some marvelous archaeology on this site, including a Souterrain and several early Medieval water mills.

That's me in the centre of the picture, in white, digging out the Souterrain. Before Donal puts his barrister head on, I'd better tell you that this picture is copyright of CRDS, and is reproduced here merely for illustrative purposes

The project had been taken over by CRDS from a conglomerate by Judith Carroll and the British archaeology unit Network (I ended up working for Network, but more of this in another part...). The joint venture had fallen through because of bad management. It got so bad one person was paid his weekly wage in a bag of one Euro coins, others were told not to cash their cheques as there may not be enough money in the bank to honour the debt. Not everything was tickety-boo with the Celtic Tiger ... It was another massive road scheme and attracted it's fair amount of lunatics. Peadar was one particular one, a staunch Republican from the North. You could see a difficult up bringing in his eyes. One day I went into the cabin he usually had his tea break in, someone had smeared mud all over the walls, I asked him if he thought he was in the Maze and was doing a dirty protest. It didn't go down so well... There was Mad Patricia, I had heard stories of how she would like to blow her nose into her Pot Noodle. For extra flavour, I guess. If she forgot to take her tablets she would fall over asleep when trowelling. There was an older guy, John, who would taunt the girls, Cory and some of the lads were chatting about tattoos, when John came over and announced that he had a tattoo on his cock of the the town he was born. Cory asked him where he was born in, to which John replied 'Newtownmountkennedy!' I asked John if I could see the tattoo, his reply was 'I rubbed it off!' When the sites were finally finished myself and the other supervisors went inside for six months to work on the post-excavation phase. We were shipped off to the office in the Ashbourne Industrial estate:


Most of us weren't made for indoor work and it took at least a month to adjust to this new environment. We were like caged animals but I finally settled down and completed my part of the post-excavation work. By this time I had been in Ireland for nearly four years. In 2001 I had promised my then girlfriend that I would only be going for three months, that relationship didn't last much longer after it was clear that I wouldn't be coming back to the UK anytime soon. In 2004 and 2005 there were more trips to France, which I will cover in the next segment, but my life in Ireland was finished and I felt it was time to try something new. I had gone to Ireland to get myself enough experience to work on the British circuit, so I looked to that direction and headed over for work with Cotswold Archaeological Trust...