Bexley YAC Dig Lesnes Abbey
May 2026
We catch up with Bexley YAC who tell us about their involvement in an exciting archaeological dig at Lesnes Abbey in southeast London with Digventures! Branch leader Fran tells us more…
On the 25th April North Kent YAC (formally Bexley) joined DigVentures and Lesnes Abbey in a community excavation. The team were investigating a possible wall and ditch with possible associations to the Abbey buildings, that had shown up on geophysics.
Planning for this started last year, with a meeting on site and then online meetings with DigVentures. We agreed that we would take any children that turned up on the day in the trench if we had spaces. This was really popular and gave lots of other children the chance to try archaeology, we also gave them leaflets on how to join.
We have a large group, so we split into two and the younger members spent the morning in the fossil pit looking for 50 million year old sharks teeth we found lots to take home. We also lent tools and helped any other children who came to look so they could find teeth as well.
The older children in the group are working on their BJAR passport skills. Harriet from DigVentures was very keen to help with this.
We had a brilliant day. We had 17 YAC members, 5 leaders and we lost count of the number of drop ins we had both in the trench and the fossil pit.
