Dig diary – another slice of the anomaly and the axe that wasn’t

Monday, July 13, 2026 (6:38 PM)

Mattocks out to removed the overlying layers of the south-west quadrant. (📷 Sigurd Towrie) — Mattocks out to removed the overlying layers of the south-eastern quadrant. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

Day Six
Monday, July 13, 2026

Another sun‑soaked, full‑tilt day at the Ness has drawn to a close.

Team North‑East — now bolstered by Time Team’s newly arrived Dani Wootton — shifted over to the south‑eastern quadrant and began peeling back the overlying layers. As expected (based on the GPR results) another stretch of the circular anomaly emerged, complete with an apparent orthostat set against its inner edge.

Paul and Dani discuss the emerging archaeology in the south-eastern quadrant. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

The path of the circular anomaly in the north-eastern quadrant (top) and it beginning to emerge in its south-eastern neighbour. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

That upright now joins two suspected orthostats already noted in the south‑western quadrant, all seemingly tucked against the anomaly’s interior. Intriguing, certainly — but we’re still a fair distance from knowing what this arrangement actually represents.

Paul and Ray working over the circular anomaly in the south-western quadrant. The cut for one of the orthstats is pictured foreground left. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

Over in the south‑west quadrant, Jan pressed on with planning yet another cluster of ard marks before gathering a fresh batch of environmental samples for processing at the UHI Archaeology Institute. Nearby, Sigurd continued working through the rubble along the trench’s western edge – material that’s increasingly looking like a simple dump of stone outside the anomaly and also running up along the trench’s southern side.

The plan tomorrow is to strip off the overlying layers on the adjacent “rubble section” to see how these two spreads connect.

There was a brief jolt of excitement this afternoon when Sigurd began uncovering what looked uncannily like a large, polished stone axe. Alas, however, that proved not to be the case – just another piece of rubble with an axe-like long edge. Better luck next time.