Jason had never done as much physical labor in his life and by the third day was stiff and sore, but got a break that day as the professors and senior postgrads all concentrated on the newly found corners of the two forts. The bottom extended maybe ten yards further than the upper one, and the digging to determine the nature of the structures they had revealed slowed as the afternoon wore on. Jason was too tired to give his full attention to what they were finding, but then the next morning, feeling a little more rested, he paid closer attention to the finds and the conclusions being drawn. Finds of armor fittings, horse bits, and other material left behind during the construction of the lower fort led to a firm dating of the late first century and almost certainly a mixed force of legionaries and cavalry, probably a cohort of infantry and an ala of cavalry.

      The upper fort was more ambiguous. The corner had been built up with a wooden tower from the post holes left behind when the tower was burnt down. Careful excavation throughout the day resulted in a few hard to define burned bits and pieces and a shield boss, the date of which was hotly debated, with Professor Schmidt favoring a seventh or even eighth-century date with Germanic provenance. At the same time, Professor Armstrong thought it was fifth or sixth-century Romano-British. The shield boss was so damaged and too nondescript for any certainty in its identification, and the rest of the bits and pieces too badly burned to be easily datable. Several of the large pieces of charcoal that had been tower timbers were sent off for lab tests, but the team only had a limited budget for those sort of expensive dating methods.

      Normal digging resumed the next day as efforts were made to find the western side of the forts and the southern ends. After two days of carting muck and finding nothing exciting, they finally found the southern end of the lower fort. They found the southern edge of the upper fort the next day a good distance further south. The corner there was also found to have had a wooden tower on top of a substantial base, and this tower had also been burnt to the ground. It took another two days to find the western edge of both forts, which finally gave them some idea of the size of both. The older, lower fort they now revised to hold at least two infantry cohorts and the cavalry cohort or an even larger force, while the upper fort had clearly held an even bigger force given its rather large dimensions.

      Gradually more and more bits and pieces from the upper fort came to light. Some fittings looked Saxon, found near the middle of the east side, where they were now undertaking a slow search for a gateway. A coin was found that, after some work, proved to be from the reign of Valentinian the Third, which dated the upper fort to at least the late fourth century. It took several days to finally zero in on a gate on the east side as it was actually off-center to the south, not to the north as everyone had expected when nothing was found in the center of the wall length. The gate had been a substantial structure, with wooden towers on a sod base, and the left side was not quite as burnt down as all the rest of the remains. A mass grave was found just inside the gate where a large number of bodies had been thrown in a hole and then burnt before being covered with a mound of dirt.