Community Archaeology 2018

That’s a wrap!

Our community archaeology dig for this year has come to its end, we tackled two weeks of insane heat and incredibly hard soil! Slathering on the sun cream the Kenley project team and 30 amazing volunteers helped us uncover some of Kenley’s hidden treasures.

As some may remember from last years dig, the discovery of the ‘concrete circles’ happened, this year we wanted to uncover what they actually were – the great debate for the year was between them being a gun emplacement… or a toilet. Within our first week this year the volunteers were able to dig the entire left circle out, which uncovered a metal holder – thus meaning it was indeed a gun emplacement, most likely holding up a Lewis gun, this was a great start to our dig and had smiles on lots of faces!

Gun Emplacement – Left ring

Gun Emplacement – Right ring

Our volunteers also spent a lot of time excavating part of the blast pen, for first week the group worked on finding what kind of construction the structure had on the wing, digging through to the middle it seemed that it was built up of sand, soil, hardcore and concrete pored on top as a spine to the top. On the second week the group worked on the end of the wing, as it seemed as the end had been made with a brick wall to hold it in place.

Volunteers taking notes on the dug out wing

Volunteers measuring height of brick wall on wing

As well as these our volunteers uncovered the base of a building over towards the trees and what was thought to have been part of a small arms range, as well as a variety of items buried in the ground, including a badgers skeleton and some NAAFI branded pieces of pot. All the items that were found are being cleaned, cataloged and photographed by volunteers so look out for uploads into our archive!

Overall the two weeks were incredibly enjoyable and we hope that everyone that was involved with the dig learnt something and enjoyed their time at Kenley Airfield.

We would like to give a special thanks to all our volunteers who took part, Dave and Portia from MOLA for leading the dig, Guy, Odette and Jan for the help, also a massive shout out to Neil our Archaeology Champion who spent time with us over the two weeks!