Don't fence me in...

I had a day's work yesterday, it was through His Royal Highness Viscount McCoy. Together with his lordship I was working alongside Rear Admiral 'Action' Jackson. We were working in Stainforth, the arsehole of Doncaster which in itself is the arsehole of South Yorkshire. It's like the shit has no where else to drop except Stainforth. As an archaeologist I generally get to work in places that the rest of the world don't want to see and this site was no different. We arrived after battling the traffic to be greeted with a view not dissimilar to the latter stages of the Battle of Stalingrad:

Stainforth, a stain on the good name of South Yorkshire

At that point we had no site facilities, the boys had only been on site for the previous day and after inquiring about the welfare cabin I was directed to the site hut:

'Break time!'

Before getting down to work, Mike gave me a brief site tour or rather, a tour of what overlooked the site. It included the travelling circus storage lot, the dog track, the gypsy camp (whom we were warned about repeatedly through the day) and the two burned out houses in the distance. The site entrance was flanked by a betting shop and Bargain Booze. Who ever thought that perfect juxtaposition up has to be border line genius.

BYOB

I was on trench laying and fence erecting duty for the day but while we waited for the fence panels to arrive Richard began working the machine on the first trench. He was very mindful of missing the active sewer marked on the service map but it quickly became apparent that this would be no easy task of machining out a trench, cleaning it and recording it:

I need someone to get in to draw these sections...

As Rich contemplated the contaminated water pissing into the bottom of the trench, Mike and I set about laying out the rest of the trenches. We used the time honoured method of marking the trench ends with a house brick. This would lead to great confusion later for Rich as we were working on a site covered in house bricks. The fencing duly arrived and the guy driving the truck introduced himself to us as 'Mad Mick'. It quickly became apparent how he got his name when he demonstrated to us his patented way of getting the fence panels off the back of the truck:

'Mind your heads'

A proper site hut arrived and it was like nothing like I've ever seen on an archaeological site before. It has an electricity generator, a toilet and even heating! It was scoped at various times throughout the day by the passing gypsies, and far be it for me to cast dispersions on the Romany folk's impeccable nature, but I bet it won't be there when we return to the site... I then spent the rest of the day erecting fence panels and tightening bolts until we were finally finished an hour and a half late. Mind you, I still got to enjoy the local Flora and Fauna of Stainforth:

Rat au Van (a rat that's been run over by a van)

All in all a Cake and Arse Party of the highest degree...

I received my new Burzum Album today. Eleven years was far too long...