Geophysics day three – thumbs up from Time Team stalwart

That’s us at the end of day three of the Ness 2025 geophysics project and we’ve made great progress.

Chris finished his magnetometry scans of the site yesterday but had his gear out again this afternoon to return to an area outside Trench P. This was to help us clarify some intriguing spotted in the resistivity scans. More on that in days to come.

Talking of resistivity, about 90 per cent of the field containing Trenches J and P is now complete and we’re delighted with the results. It’s still early days and more work needs to be done with the scan data before we can say too much, but the results so far look to have answered a major question and revealed some very interesting new features.

Watch this space.

We were delighted to welcome Time Team’s John Gater back to site today.

John is an old friend of site director Nick, both having worked at the Pool and Toftsness excavations in Sanday, in the 1980s, and, more recently, when Nick was a researcher at the University of Bradford.

John was responsible for the initial phase of geophysical surveys and popped in this afternoon to cast his experienced eye over the scan results so far.  I think it’s safe to say he was fairly excited!

The first of our geophysics open afternoons took place this afternoon, part of our National Lottery Heritage Fund-funded Past, Present and Future outreach project.

The trainee geophysicists were taken through their paces by Paul and Chris, surveying a section of the site overlying the southern boundary wall – the “Lesser Wall of Brodgar” – before seeing the fruits of their efforts unfold before their eyes.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the second group to site next week.

Tomorrow we will finish the resistivity around Trench P, completing the jigsaw, before moving over to Trench T and its environs.

We’ll keep you posted.