The incident room
I managed to sneak into the incident room in between the camera crews to have a chat to Jane Clark, Archaeological Conservator with the National Museums of Scotland.

Using her microscope and a number of small pick-like tools, Jane is delicately cleaning some of the surface dirt and corrosion from the objects found on site.

'What I'm doing will help show detail and allow objects to be identified, she tells me. 'But a lot of these finds look more robust and strong than they are. This is the first stage to making them stable.'

'For metal it's important to keep it very dry. If it's wet, or if it's handled badly it will corrode more. Gold is very easy, it's very stable, but copper alloy is more difficult. It's important to keep it as dry as possible, so I'm packing it in acid free tissue and inert materials, then sealing it in silica gel.

'Later on these things will be sent off to the lab, X-rayed and conserved further. This is just the beginning of a much longer process'.

Trench stories
Archaeologist Alan Radley is deep in the Royal flowerbeds, at the bottom of the James IV Tower trench.

He explains that yesterday they found the East wall of the Northern part of the tower at about one metre down. Working around a water pipe (which incidentally isn't from 1680 – that's elsewhere on site), he's now found the outside of the wall, and is cleaning it up.

The wall is about two metres thick, faced in mortar pointed sandstone, and filled with a rubble core. In the last hour or so he's found something even lower – possibly the tower foundations.

In the trench next door, Kerry Ely is busy uncovering a drain. He thinks it's the main drain from one of the tower's many apartments. He is also beginning to see evidence of a floor surface emerging from under the soil. Kerry tells me that his next target is to try and find the hexagonal stair tower shown on historic plans of the area.

And in another development, debate has broken out over the identity of the fourth design on the beautiful seal matrix from the mound trench. It was assumed to be a bird, possibly a pelican pecking its chest. However, Linda Hendry, enthusiastic and well educated site visitor, tells me that she thinks we've been looking at it upside down, and the bird is in fact a clarsach, or Scottish harp.

It's nice to see that Time Team's presence at Holyrood is stimulating some interesting debate!

Pete catches Kenny in Queen Mary's bathhouse
Queen Mary's Bathhouse is an ancient and tiny building right on the periphery of the Palace site. It may have been one of the towers in the Palace's 16th century precinct wall. Venturing through the low doorway into a dank and gloomy interior, I find Kenny Macfadyen inside, sketching an analytical plan of the building.

Rumour has it that Mary Queen of Scots used to bathe here, but no one knows whether that's true or not. Kenny says that's what he's here to find out! He's already managed to ascertain that the floor level was raised quite a lot, and that the building has been subjected to numerous changes over the years.

Outside, and across a busy road, surveyors Tom Wren and Joseph Severn are laser scanning the building in 3D. 'Millions of measurements are being shot from our laser scanner at the building. Each is a coordinate, a point in 3D space', Tom says. They show me the laptop. Over about six hours they've built up a point cloud, a map of measurements just 6mm apart. The detail is remarkable.

'The technology has only existed for about four years', Tom tells me. 'I suppose you could call it cutting edge'. Once they've finished, the data they've collected can be taken into a software package like AutoCAD. 2D elevations and sections or a 3D wireframe can be generated. One of the guys working back in the office next door to me will be adding textures and modelling it up for use on one of the Channel 4 transmissions later in the weekend.

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