Welcome to the tenth season at Berkeley Castle!

Well, here we are. Back at Berkeley for the 2014 excavation season and what an amazing start we have had to our 10^th year here! The press interest in the excavation has been absolutely amazing and so far today one of our directors, Professor Mark Horton, was interviewed by BBC RadioGloucestershire for Chris Baxter’s show. We have been pleased to host Professor J. Cameron Monroe who is on sabbatical from the University of California Santa Cruz and were glad to have been given an interview that will be coming your way shortly. Doctor Stuart Prior, our other dig director, gave his exciting annual tour of the excavation and castle to all of our new first years and was deemed a Viking by one of the touring schoolchildren in Berkeley today.

Professor J.Cameron Monroe visits Berkeley Castle 

As all of the archaeology students at the University of Bristol will know, Berkeley is not only an incredibly well respected professional research project but is also our training dig. As such, the social media team has been keen to get interviews with our first year excavators to see what they’re looking forward to during their time at Berkeley, what they hope to find and what their first impressions have been. It’ll be interesting to see how those impressions develop over the coming weeks! The castle has been an absolute hive of activity today with students and JCBs and film crews that has helped to produce an awesome atmosphere for the start of the 2014 excavations. It’s been really exciting to see how the castle can be transformed for the (many) period dramas that get to shoot here and our eagle eyed readers will have seen the castle in an episode of Father Brown earlier this year. We can’t wait to see what this future production will be like.

Talking about the social media team, we’ve moved home! We’re no longer in the office space of the Jenner Museum but have been offered a space by the Berkeley Castle Estate Office who have been amazingly supportive of both the excavation projects and our social media interests. We have lots of exciting plans and projects to be getting on with so remember to follow us on twitter and Facebook to keep up to date with all our antics.

Social Media is back!

And last, but certainly not least, we at Berkeley have been absolutely gobsmacked by the finds we have been seeing so early on in this year’s excavations. All will be revealed and more is certainly to come so we hope that you’ll keep coming back for more over the next few weeks.