Excavations at the Royal Bull’s Head Inn, Toowoomba, Queensland

The Royal Bull’s Head Inn is an historic hotel, built in 1847, which is currently managed by the National Trust. We conducted preliminary excavations of the Bull’s head Inn in May of 2014, with a view to determining where we should open up a larger scale operation. The overall aim of the project is to try to understand the original configuration of the buildings. In May 2014 we opened a 1x1m square and found a lot of 19th and early 20th century glass and some well-preserved blue-ware crockery. Since then, we have conducted ground penetrating radar explorations with Kelsey Lowe (University of Queensland) and Aaron Fogel (Griffith University), which has also been extremely useful to us, in terms of planning our next round of fieldwork to be conducted in October 2014. This will be exciting, as we are involving school groups from around the district – at the rate of one class per day (I’m not sure if this makes us gluttons for punishment in a children-times-infinity kind of way; time will tell).  Hopefully the sorting tables in our field lab will keep them occupied.

If you’d like to do a bit of reading on the Inn, follow this link.

Until then.