The Bishop's house
Back out in the Palace grounds it's a race against time. The archaeologists are trying to accomplish as much as possible before our time here runs out.

In Trench 4 on the lawn Raksha Dave says 'we came down on a much later wall lying on top of some sixteenth century stuff and a rubble layer. But, we've found a wall running all the way through the trench, and off to the right.' Apparently this feature is likely to be the East range of the Bishop's house, which appears on the Milne plan of 1663. The discoveries just keep on coming!

The focus of the TV crews has moved back around to the Bathhouse, where Duncan Lees of Plowman Craven is demonstrating the incredible surveying power of the 3D laser scanner.

In the tennis court trench nearby, hopes that Time Team would be able to uncover the burnt remains of Queen Mary's real tennis court have faded. The tenement foundations have obliterated any trace of earlier structures. But there's still interest here; I'm told that an elderly lady has come down to have a look at the building her Grandfather used to live in; she's been watching the archaeology here progress for several hours.

Anyone for tennis?
We know that a real tennis court existed on the edge of the Holyroodhouse site just next to Queen Mary's Bathhouse, historian Dennis Gallagher told me yesterday, because it appears on seventeenth century maps by people like Edgar and Slezer. It's also visible on the famous Rothiemay map of 1647.

Real tennis was actually played inside a building – a low gallery with sloped panels on the walls for the players to hit the ball off. By the early eighteenth century this building was being used as a theatre, perhaps the first in Scotland, and it staged late restoration plays, which apparently scandalised the Presbyterian clergy of the time.

The tennis court is recorded as having been burnt down in 1771, after which tenements, and a courtyard tellingly called 'Tennis Court' were built here.

After another large and tasty lunch with archaeologists, historians, crew members and the other many and varied people involved in the Big Royal Dig, I wander over to Trench 7, otherwise known as the Tennis Court Trench, to see what's going on.

Alan Radley is down in the trench between two low walls, wielding his pickaxe. He says that they've uncovered the foundations of the tenement buildings that stood on this site until the 60s. These features have been recorded and they are now going deeper, in search of the tennis court that is supposed to be buried here. 'It all depends on how deep these foundations go', Alan says. 'If they're really deep they may have destroyed the tennis court completely'.

Alongside Alan, competition winner Jennifer Wood is taking a breather. 'I'm really glad that I've got to do a bit of digging,' she tells me, as she shows me some of the finds from this trench. It's mostly fairly modern stuff so far; a small glass medicine bottle from the 1950s, a Macleans toothpaste tube, and a spirits bottle from the 1920s with its cork stopper still in place. There's some liquid inside, but I doubt anyone will be volunteering to try it!

On the way back to the office, I stop off at the flowerbed trench. John Godbert is recording the exact position of the thick walls and cobbled courtyard from the James IV complex. This trench is extremely impressive now that it has been cleaned up. I ask John why features like this remained when the James IV tower was destroyed. 'This is just the very bottom,' he says. 'All the rest was robbed and reused elsewhere'.

Money, money, money
Some nice objects have emerged from the ground in the past day or two. I chatted to David Caldwell, who has the rather grand title of Keeper of Scotland and Europe in the National Museums of Scotland, about what's been found.

The highlight from the lawn trenches yesterday was a rather nice Double Tournois, a French coin dated 1634. Our example was issued by Gaston, brother of Louis XIII, and a man with another impressive title; the Usufruitier of Donbes. This basically meant that he enjoyed the fruits of the region – he collected the taxes and so on.

The double tournois was approximately the same size and weight as a local Scottish coin called the Bodle, which was worth about tuppence. David believes that the double tournois, the bodle and the similarly sized Dutch Doit, were used interchangeably as part of the local currency.

A jeton, or counting piece, from the mound trench has now been cleaned up. It was probably made in the early sixteenth century in Nuremberg.

David also told me about a lead bag seal, found in the mound trench, which would have been used to close bags of goods, such as cloth. Ours dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. A late medieval book clasp, used to keep parchment books in good condition, has also been unearthed.

What's going on in the trenches?
Out on the lawn, archaeologist Tom Whalley is busy in Trench 2
This soil is going into a small bucket next to Tom, and not onto the main spoil heap next to the trench. He tells me these soil samples 'will be wet sieved for environmental evidence. The heavy stuff sinks to the bottom and the light stuff floats to the top.' The light stuff; things like pollen, grain and small animal bones, will 'help us to build up a picture of diet, activity and local environment at the time the cloister wall was built'.

In Trench 3 next door, Barney Sloan is removing handfuls of oyster shells. Barney explains 'We haven't quite unpicked the sequence yet. It's really complicated. Our current thinking is that we've got a rubbed out south wall of the refectory, which later becomes the Great Hall. We know this happened because documentary evidence tells us that the Canons had to move out of this area. There's a massive drain with a capping stone and two smaller drains leading into it. Over the top of all this is seventeenth century kitchen waste.'

There's clearly a lot still to do in this area. I'd better leave them to it.

A view from Arthur's Seat
Not many capital cities can boast a volcano right in the middle of town. Okay, so it's been extinct since it erupted about 350 million years ago, but Edinburgh's Arthur's Seat still makes for a great vantage point from which to place Holyrood into its context with the rest of the city.

As I crawl up what seems to be a near vertical slope, I wonder why I ate such a large breakfast. But eventually I climb to a suitable spot and sit down to catch my breath. Behind me is the 823 ft summit – there's no way I'm going all the way up there today. Off to my left I can see Edinburgh's distinctive Old Town skyline, dominated by the Castle. Built on a rocky outcrop, actually a volcanic plug, there has been a stronghold here since the seventh century.

The Castle is at the top of the Royal Mile. The Palace of Holyroodhouse sits in front of me, right down at the bottom in an area called the Canongate, meaning canon's gait or monk's walk. The Canongate grew up outside the protection of the city's Flodden Wall, which was built in 1513 after the battle of Flodden between the Scots and the English, in which James IV, builder of the tower that we found in the flowerbed trench, was killed.

This part of Edinburgh is much changed in recent years, with the construction of the controversial Scottish Parliament building across the road from the Palace, and a number of other major developments like the white tented Dynamic Earth and the new Scotsman newspaper building.

From where I'm sitting I can already see archaeologists buzzing around the site, ready to get cracking on what should be another exciting day of discoveries. I'd better see if I can get down from here without breaking a leg to see what's happening!

Round-up: more finds and what to look forward to tomorrow
It's been another cracking day here at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We've opened up more trenches than you can shake a stick at, the major goals of the Big Royal Dig are well on the way to being achieved and it's been gloriously sunny all day.

I've just paid a last visit of the day to the finds tent, where the team showed me a tray of animal bones from trench three on the lawn. These included pig, sheep, cow and even dog, and were probably kitchen waste which had been swept up and dumped in a midden. Two large architectural moldings were retrieved from the cloister trench, and might just have been from around the window or door frames of the original twelfth century abbey. I was also shown a few small fragments of window glass, which may have been from the same period.

Tomorrow is our last day, and the focus is going to shift over to Queen Mary's Bathhouse and the Sixteenth Century Royal Privy Garden. We're all really excited about what else this unique site has in store for us.

Goodbye for now!
Pete

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