Plough marks vs. Farmer's tool kit: Day 2

Plough marks or a farm hand sharpening a blade? Oh and a bit of a mower too!

So day 2 starts with me waking with a jolt (after pressing the snooze button three times) and realising I need to get my youngest son to Nanny's in Abergavenny before I get to the dig. There follows a lot of me rushing around and shouting from various rooms "just get out of bed!" and "just put your bloody shoes on!" and "just take your toothbrush with you!", oh my poor child, I didn't even give him breakfast! Any way, after successfully dealing with the domestic issues I reach my final destination, and await the arrival of the rest of the diggers.
After a recap and update on the previous days accomplishments we crack on, Andy and I (minus Gareth) get back to our enigmatic barrow. We are down in numbers today as a whole group, but no less eager to get on with the hard work.

Late medieval green glaze rim sherd

Andy and I decide the best course of action is to remove the loose stone from the base of the mound before we tackle things at the top. After shifting buckets of stone for maybe an hour, we start mid way up the mound to scrape back the loose soil and debris. It was not long before we had our first find, a small piece of rusty metal which looked suspiciously like it may be related to the corrugated iron dominating site A. Not letting the brief excitement of letting our first find overtake us, Andy and I carry on and a short while later we unearth a piece of white glazed pottery. I don't mind telling you that it was at this point I started to question the origins of this 'barrow'. Now we have a couple of finds we are eager to find more, and we are not disappointed.
By roughly 11.30 we had unearthed something rather exciting. Andy was merrily scraping away and 'flick', something most definitely not stone or root shape pops up. "What's that?" says I, excitedly pointing like a 7 year old! We both know straight away that this is part of a substantially sized pot, and it looks early too (not that we're experts of course). Not two minutes later David pops his head around the corner to see how we're getting on. Concurring with us, that this is indeed something interesting, he makes a note and off he goes, shortly to be replaced by Ray, "I hear you have something I may find interesting", a statement which is shortly followed by the words "green glazed" and "late medieval" and "this trumps anything found so far". Wooohooo! Go team C! 
That was about it for us by way of finds until after lunch. We decided to go and pay a visit to the other sites to see how they were getting along.

Site B and the possible long house 

Site A, an image showing the troublesome corrugated iron is propped against the structure. 

 After lunch more shifting stone and loose soil before we decide to extend the top of the trench for us to gain better understanding of the summit of the mound. It was during frequent trips back and forth to our growing stone pile that I noticed not one but two stones that (I thought) had unusual, possibly man made markings in them (see first image on this post). My imagination went into overdrive and I started daydreaming about 19th century farm hands sitting atop a giant pile of rubble, in the sun, drinking cider from a demijohn and attempting to sharpen a blade on a hunk of sandstone.  Then Ray came along and crushed my dreams and said they were probably just plough marks... pffft! Ho hum, lets carry on. 
The rest of the day consisted of us extending the trench and finding lots of sherds of possible Queen Anne ware, hunks of lime mortar/plaster and a curious metal disc probably from a mower(!), all indicating that this barrow feature may indeed be a rubbish tip for the original small holding, but nothing is conclusive yet, we still have three days to go.

As a follow up to the conclusion of my post yesterday, where I mentioned that students should grasp opportunities to enrich their university experience, when I got home, aching and stinking dirty from a days digging, I had a pleasant surprise waiting in the post. Earlier in the year, in a bid to cram in as much as is humanly possible (because being a student and a Mentor just isn't enough), I volunteered to be a Student Panel Representative member of the university's re-validation process, and today I received a certificate for my efforts. Everybody loves a certificate!