19th October 2005, 05:21 PM
Heres one for you chaps and chappess`s,
Having been up to my neck in mud today coz of the damn rain I was wondering is there a eutopic geology out there, the holy grail of surfaces to work on that is easy to work in the wet and a pleasure to work in the baking heat of a sunny summers day. Whats the best and worst geology to work with. Whats the worst you?ve ever dug.
Your views please.
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19th October 2005, 05:35 PM
Don't know about the best, but the worst I worked on was Severn valley gravels, lots of pointy rocks inbedded in rock hard clay/silt, did my knuckels and knees wonders
Where?
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19th October 2005, 07:06 PM
Trethellan Farm, An amalgam of slate fragments and clay, like cement. theres a term for it but i can't remember...Clean gravel's pretty good in wet or dry I reckon.
When the going gets weird...
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19th October 2005, 10:27 PM
The thought of digging on a brickearth site turns my stomach: if its wet you can't dig cause it clings to everything, if its dry you can't dig because you simply can't see anything. Normally would've said river gravels were good except for having had to hoe back an excavation area for a few weeks. Got sunburnt front and back
(I really have worked in the field)
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20th October 2005, 09:18 AM
Yup, brickearth is the worst you could ever find. The best I have ever worked on is chalk. In the baking summer it reflected the sun so that you got an even tan. In the wet it remained resolutely hard, unlike brickearth. And the features were all black against the white chalk, so they were easy to see. Marvellous.
Cheers,
Eggbasket
Gentleman Adventurer and Antiquarian
Manners maketh the man
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20th October 2005, 09:31 AM
I would agree that nice hard chalk is the best. Was never all that bothered by brickearth though. The worst I ever worked on is Clay-with-flints. All the nastiest aspects of clay, with great nodules of flint all over the place. Horrible.
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20th October 2005, 01:11 PM
I love the mud its fun and great for your skin aparantly!!
Aphrodite
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20th October 2005, 01:29 PM
best surfaces to work in- anywhere in the middle/near east.Worst surfaces, anywhere north of Portland.
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20th October 2005, 07:41 PM
Come on people. what about glorious sand? Lovely to trowel, lovely to shovel, and drains freely. Doesn't forgive a heavy hand or boot though.
Got to disagree about chalk though. Doesn't clean up very well (It's as bad as gravel) And the black on white thing is a myth. Try off-white on off-white. Try digging beaker burials and ring ditches topped with rammed chalk that is cleaner than the natural. Reminds me a bit of the black on black stuff in cities formerly called "dark earth" (I've thought for a while that AS archaeology will be revolutionized when someone invents a polarized optical gizmo to distinguish different shades of dark grey).
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20th October 2005, 08:11 PM
The boulder clays of East Anglia are bloody awful, your mattock just bounces off into your shin and trowels snap.
However I have been on some beautiful fen edge sites with acres of fine, clean and uniform windblown sand. The only bugger is when the wind gets above 2mph you spend your entire life cleaning.
