The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [126]
At least, that’s what I told people it was. For all I knew then, it could have been a modern ball-bearing.’ When he flashes that conspiratorial bad-boy smile, he’s almost unbearably sexy.
‘Ed! Indy!’
Martin has come to a halt below us.
‘You found something?’ shouts Ed.
‘Looks like it.’
Ed waits for me to clamber over the wire fence, then follows me down the slope through the trees towards Martin’s red anorak. He’s at the bottom of a steep bank, a metre or so high, using his stick to probe between the gnarled roots of an old beech.
‘Not nighthawks, then?’ I sling the camera bag over a bush, and jump down to join him.
‘Careful, petal. Don’t want to cause any more damage.’
The hole is impressive. Or, rather, holes, plural–I almost fell into another. Two burrow sideways into the crumbling soil of the slope: the largest, framed by tree roots, is wide enough to admit an Alsatian. A third cavity, smaller, is sunk into the plateau near the lip of the bank. All three have disgorged spoil heaps of fresh earth, mixed with dead bracken and grass.
‘That’s a relief,’ says Martin. ‘Definitely not nighthawks. Badgers, bless ‘em–too big for rabbits. My guess is this will be the work of a young male who’s been kicked out of the main sett, striking out on his own. There was probably an entrance to an abandoned outlier here, stopped up years ago by foxhunters. But the soil’s soft, and this lad’s dug it out again to reoccupy it.’ He pulls a trowel out of his satchel, and scrapes at the bank further along. ‘Very soft, in fact. Badgers are lazy buggers. They prefer places where something or someone has already done the hard work. Could be only the tree roots that have loosened the soil, but I’m inclined to think there was some sort of earthwork here.’
‘Lend us your trowel, will you?’ says Ed, looking at the nearest spoil heap. ‘Ind, why don’t you do the honours? There…’
He passes the trowel to me. Delicately, I flip over a clump of dried-out bracken. Under it, shining greyish-white in the dull light filtering through the trees, is a perfect, leaf-shaped flint arrowhead. Magic.
By the time Ed’s phone rings, we’ve amassed a small pile of finds.
‘Did you locate it?’ comes Michael’s voice, loud enough for us all to hear. ‘What’ve you got?’
‘Loads of stuff,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll pass you over to Martin.’
‘Animal bone, mostly,’ Martin tells him. ‘Probably pig, but I’m no expert. There’s even a couple of tiddly bits that could be human, small bones, finger or foot, but this really isn’t my field. Some of the bone’s charred, but not all. Worked flint, including a pretty little arrowhead that’s definitely Neolithic. At the least I reckon there could be a hearth site. Needs a proper dig because what we’ve picked up is a real jumble, obviously, having come out of a badger sett, but–’
Michael’s ‘What?’ explodes out of the phone.
Martin winces, holding the handset away from his ear. ‘Well, what did you think it was going to be?’ he asks, when he can get a word in. ‘Come on, Michael, you can’t be serious nighthawks would’ve been preferable…OK. Right…No, we only touched the spoil heap. We’ll leave it and come back.’
‘What’s the problem?’ asks Ed, as he hands back the phone.
Martin sighs. ‘I never paid enough attention to law. Michael has reminded me the badger is one of the most protected species in the British Isles. It’s illegal to damage any part of a badger sett that’s in current use. Might be possible to get a licence to dig, on the basis that it’s so close to a scheduled ancient monument, but Michael isn’t sure. He thinks it’s probably too far down the hill’
Before we leave, I borrow Martin’s torch to lie flat on my belly and peer into the hole under the tree roots.
‘And before you ask, no, I won’t let you have the stick to poke about inside,’ he says. ‘We’ve probably earned ourselves about four hundred years apiece in prison just for shining a torch up there.’
Ed pats my bottom. ‘Come on up. There’s nothing else we can do today’
‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask, clambering to my feet