I had an almost enjoyable visits to the quarry this week. The days were bright and sunny, although chilly indeed and for some reason the quarry felt friendlier, more intriguing than threatening. I was straight into my second and third excavations. Context 2 is one of the dead end clearings about halfway down. On first inspection there didn’t appear to be much there at all. The floor had a thick covering of moss and ivy, so many of the finds were concealed. I marked out an area 3m x 4m and took to work searching through this green carpet. All my finds were small, 18 in total, including two pieces of crookery and a third potential piece that I wasn’t positively able to identify. Context 3 was on the opposite side where the covering of scrub is much more dense. It is also incredibly steep in places. I did another 3m x 4m section on a flatter level. There was a few larger finds but not many and no crisp packets or beer cans, 45 small finds. Maybe that is why everything felt easier this week… the finds were much more manageable – much more ‘archaeological’ somehow.
And to think this is the sight I feared the most. I’m not sure if my change of response to this place is because of the place itself or whether the experience is changing me a little somehow. Am I hardening to the process of riffling through the dirt… through other people’s rubbish? It is still uninhabitable, unwelcoming, chaotic and frustratingly unknowable, but in all these things lies a certain comforting fact, no one else has any desire to be here. It is hard not to feel romantic about it in a way. To have a reason to spend a morning in this forgotten corner, busy with my task, uninterrupted, undisturbed, invisible to the rest of the world. At The Boffy my guard was always up, my senses heightened by the threat of confrontation with an unknown, imagined being. Here I lose track of time, my bearings and quite often my footing but in the awkwardness, the clambering, the snagging, the stings, the dirt and the discarded, I feel a very specific threat fall away.
