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...

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt2

Welcome to the second part of my archaeological memories, if you missed part one, find it here. Before I begin, you are cordially invited to leave your own comments and memories of lunatics you have met working in archaeology, c'mon, let's get a database gong here! After working at Castell Henllys for six weeks I only managed to get a job tour guiding for York Archaeological Trust at their St Leonard's Hospice site in the centre of York. Some may remember this site when Time Team dug there expecting Medieval hospital remains. The only Medieval period remains they found was a single column base. The rest had been fucked out by a Second World War Air raid shelter. The fact that the older residents of York repeatedly came along and said 'Oh yes, that's where the air raid shelter was, you'll never find anything there...' didn't stop them from digging. A little local knowledge goes a long way...

'Is it Roman, Tony?'
'No you daft cunt it's an air raid shelter and drop that fucking stupid accent, isn't it strange you don't have it when you're in the pub when filming has finished? And another fucking thing, get that fucking hat cleaned, there's more sweat on it than a whore's mattress.'

I digress... I could find no digging work in the UK. The country was recovering from the foot and mouth crisis and there was scant employment opportunities. Ireland on the other hand, was still running at full tilt with the Celtic Tiger boom and it needed roads and needed them fast. The EU was pouring money into the country like it was going out of fashion. Well, toothless simpletons riding bareback on horses, travelling on dirt roads weren't going to give Ireland the infrastructure it needed to compete with the Robotic Germans was it? In order to build the roads, the developers needed to sort out the archaeology before building could begin. On the back of this EU money several million Irish archaeological companies set up shop and had a piece of the Euro pie. I got work with ADS (Archaeological Development Services ltd), from here on in you will notice there is an awful lot of Acronyms in Archaeology, most have the letter A in them somewhere. The worst, in every possible sense of the word, and I shit you not this is the real name of a company, is ARS. Anyhoo, having applied by email one evening and then getting a reply the first thing the following morning desperately asking when I could start work (I should have noticed something was up at this point. A company with so much turnover of staff must be a good one right? Wrong...) I found myself in the Hostel at Wicklow town awaiting work here:


The Cullenmore bends. You will notice this looks more like a motorway interchange than an archaeological site. That's because it is. Please, do try catch up at the back. As I've explained most of the Irish sites we were working on were ahead of road building schemes, so most of the satellite images show roads now rather than the fields I knew them as. Now this was a baptism of fire and it was only the sheer brilliance of the digging staff (Bennen, Rupert, Angelos, Ger, Jonny, Charlotte, Jo, Pins and Cillian, to name but a few of whom I am still good friends with) that kept me going for the three months I was on this site. What was up with this site? First off, the Director Catherine was the biggest cunt I have ever come across, I have worked for many other people since and not one has come anywhere close to be such a colossal worthless piece of shit of a human being as Catherine. She was a complete control freak, she hated me with a passion, not only was I English, but male and also had an opinion. Secondly, we were not allowed to talk on site, one of the few things that gets you through the day in archaeology is chatting with your co-workers. With this basic human right thrown out of the window we were nothing more than slaves. I broke this rule so much that I was actually sent about 100 meters away to work alone from the rest of the crew.

'Guys! Guys! Where are you! Is it tea break yet? Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?'

Amongst other luminaries of the Irish Archaeological world that populated this site were the brothers Jimmy and Mick, every fortnight on the Thursday payday they would disappear off from work and not return for about four days until their wallets were empty and their skins full. We had Lenny, who would eat only mustard sandwiches. We had the fat Scottish Lisa who would eat only Nutella out of a jar with a spoon. We had that prematurely bald cunt Dan who had his tongue so far up anyone in charge's arse he couldn't talk properly. At the time I didn't realise how easy it was to get other work otherwise I would have got out of there quicker. It took me three months in Hell to call up another company and get work, It was for VJK (Valerie J. Keeley) and the controversial Carrickmines site...


This was the biggest site I've ever worked on, there were about 120 people on site at it's peak. The site was being excavated for no less than two years... The site huts resembled a refugee camp that had become semi permanent and at least one person was camping in the grounds of the excavation.

Soweto or Carrickmines? The difference is there is running water in Soweto...

I can't even begin to scratch the surface of the amount of freaks that were at Carrickmines. It was like one massive Care in the Community program. We had Cedric the Bretonian Bagpipe playing Frenchman, Eoghin the Space Cadet (his mother would make his sandwiches every day, when she went away on holiday she would put them in the freezer for him with the day written on the bag...), Timo the Finnish Sex Pest who went off on European sex jaunts and would text people on site with his successes, often actually during the act, Jim '18' Wheeler, who managed to write up his area of the site from inside the cabins, these are just four that spring to mind. There was a three legged dog called 'Stumpy', there was another one with all four legs intact and to tell them apart this one was called 'Not Stumpy'. As Frisbee and dope were the order for the day at Carrickmines, there's little wonder it took so long to excavate. It truly was as if the circus had come to town. There were mud fights, worm eating contests and moat swimming episodes, all of which invariably ended up in the Magic Carpet pub...

Cath probably only got 20 Euros for swimming the moat, this shows how depserate for money we archaeologists are...

The madness had to come to an end and Carrickmines finally did finish and I had to find another job. I threw my lot in with IAC (Irish Archaeological Consultancy (are you keeping up?)) at Kilkock (no, not a town full of Lesbians):


As you can see on the picture I have marked the entire length of the road as I can't locate the actual field we were in. Most of the landscape was ripped out so the recognisable features have disappeared. So sue me. I do remember we had to walk over several fields to get to site, some of which were full of Rams. Gerry 'Magic-these-gloves-smell-like-balloons' Carty would always stop and admire them. 'That's a fine head o' Rams there' he would say. IAC were always 'saving' money and this site was not exempt from this, the site furniture had to be made by one of the crew out of the surrounding fence posts and whatever else could be scavenged, we archaeologists are nothing if not resourceful... I worked at the Kilkock site from September to December, in the deepest winter. We only had two gas rings to heat ourselves with. The crew would spend the breaks huddled together for warmth, given that we were all covered in filth from the disgusting conditions outside it was like we were fighting at Stalingrad. I tried to find a photo that I have that shows the conditions we worked in, I couldn't find it so the following picture gives some idea of how we were working:

Imagine this with more mud and you have Kilkock...

There weren't so many freaks on the site at Kilkock, there was the Frodo Baggins look-a-like Niall, but beyond Emma eating teabags for a bet one break there wasn't much else. The madness happened off site, like when we were evicted from our house for having a party during which another certifiable nutter, Belgian Paul was caught pissing up against the wall in the kitchen. A day after the eviction I left to go on a holiday in Romania for a few weeks and came back to find the site finishing, so looking around for work I made the fine choice of working for CRDS (Cultural Resource Development Systems, say What!?). We had the honour of working before the car park went in at the high class Golf course on the K Club in Straffan, County Kildare:


Again, identifying the actual location of the site is impossible given that it has all changed since the Winter of 2002/2003. This was a great site, I was working with good people: Aaron, Laura, Denis and Donal, the archaeology was nothing to write home about and we were still in the depth of winter, one morning we were mattocking the frozen ground, we didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I tell you there is nothing like breaking the ice covering your feature before bailing out the freezing water below at 8.00am to make you feel ALIVE! This was also the time Aaron was sleeping on my floor in the Dublin Dungeon. 'I'll only be about two weeks' he promised me. Three months later he was still feeding me Chinese takeaways and walking through my bedroom to take a shit every morning at 6.00am on the dot (the toilet wasn't in my room, you just had to pass through it to get there...). CRDS were at their best during this time. They were small, I knew all the permanent staff and management and they did their best to look after Laura and I, giving us post-ex work when they could have laid us off. I have always maintained CRDS were the best company I ever worked for in Ireland. During this time at CRDS I managed to sly my way onto No Man's Land excavations at Ocean Villas, in France.


I'm afraid this was the best resolution picture I could find of Auchonvillers, so it will have to do. This was the first taste of Battlefield archaeology I got and I had a great time and met many good friends through this project. I still remember the thrill when mattocking a section to straighten it and about one hundred British .303 rifle bullets fell out...

After this short excusion to France, I flew back to Ireland and went back with CRDS, but that will have to wait until part three...