Site book, second season

SITE BOOK, SECOND SEASON. J. E. MERCER, RECORDER.

Conditions. We are recording ahead of a clearance and not instead of one. The contractor gives us the ground in strips and takes it back on a schedule that was agreed by people who have never lifted a burial. I say this once, here, and will not say it again in the entries.

Method. Every interment is planned, photographed, and described before lifting. Where the schedule does not allow all three, the description is made and the omission is entered. An omission entered is a fact. An omission not entered is a lie that takes twenty years to find.

Entry, 12 June. Row 4. Nine interments, all recorded. Grave goods: none. Coffin furniture consistent with the dates on the stones above, where stones survive.

Entry, 3 July. Row 7. Eleven interments planned as eleven. On lifting, eleven. The plan drawn on the 3rd, checked against the photographs on the 8th, shows twelve. I have re-counted the lifting log four times and the log says eleven. Both documents are mine and both were made on the ground.

Entry, 9 July. Row 7, resolved as far as I can resolve it. The twelfth position on the plan is drawn, dimensioned, and given a number. There was nothing in it. I have entered it as an empty cut, which is what the plan shows and what the ground did not.

Entry, 14 August. I want it in the book that I asked Hollis and Pryce, separately, to count Row 7 from the plan. Hollis: twelve. Pryce: twelve. Neither of them was on the site in July. Neither of them counted the ground, because the ground was gone by then, and that is the whole difficulty with recording ahead of a clearance.

Entry, 2 October. Season closed. Three hundred and forty interments recorded. One position on one plan for which there is no interment and no explanation that I am willing to write down as though I had one.