More Snails from Henlade
some of the snails from Henlade
In this post, I discussed some snail shells I had recovered from a site I was excavating at Henlade in Somerset. The shells aren’t part of the excavation archive, as they don’t come from known archaeological contexts, rather they are more modern, and collected purely for my curiosity.
This time I concentrated on some very patchy deposits, probably the base of more old hedgerows, to the east of the hedgerow I examined previously. Here I collected 6 more shells of Trochilus hispidus L., 9 shells of Aegopinella nitidula Draparnaud 1805, 10 shells of Discus rotundatus Müller 1774, a shell of Cepaea sp. and a single shell of Cornu aspersum Müller 1774. C. aspersum was not among my finds when I first reported from the site, but it is a particularly tolerant species that can exist across a range of habitats, so it doesn’t really carry any interpretative value. What was cool about the C. aspersum shell is that it was full of clay, and visible within the clay was another shell, which turned out to be a very juvenile snail, not identifiable beyond family (Zonitidae)
The shell within a shell
The shell within... (with a British 20p coin for scale)
