After a week of wet and windy weather, great progress was made in Trench J, and across the entire site, under bright sunshine today.
Day Eight in pictures…part one
Click on a thumbnail for full-sized picture. All photographs by Jo Bourne.
Dig Diary – Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Day Seven A damp, but exciting, day… We ended yesterday’s diary with a defiant challenge to the weather gods. Now that we’re all home, clean, warm and in dry clothes again, we can look back and say that the conditions on site were nowhere near as bad as forecast. Yes, …
Dig Diary – Monday, July 8, 2019
Day Six Back to its happy self What a difference a weekend makes. On Friday of last week we were soaked, chilled to the bone and generally emitting extreme misery. Today we have bright skies, strong sunlight and a gentle breeze. Is everyone happy? Not a bit of it. Site …
Dig Diary Extra – A timber structure at the Ness site?
Before another day of incessant rain forced us to call a halt to proceedings, work had started on extending Trench T to expose more of the enigmatic Structure Twenty-Seven. The second trench extension on the cards this season is planned for Trench X, where the discovery of a series of …
Dig Diary – Friday, July 5, 2019
Day Five Rain rain go away… Modern archaeology interacts with many other disciplines and our colleagues at the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute are developing an international reputation for their work linking evidence for climate change in the past with strategies for coping with its modern equivalent. …
Dig Diary – Thursday, July 4, 2019
Day Four Beaten by the weather Orkney’s weather is unpredictable to say the least but even hardened Orcadians were dismayed at the summer-time (allegedly!) conditions unleashed upon us today. It rained. And rained, and rained and rained. Then it rained some more. It’s still raining. The continuous sheets of precipitation …
Video – Digging cancelled due to weather
Day Four of the 2019 season. The weather hasn’t been kind to us at all so far this year, but was so bad today that all digging operations had to be cancelled.
Dig Diary – Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Day Three Plagued by wind and rain… In most of Britain the sun is shining. In the United States some folk are suffering a heatwave and in Europe the frazzled survivors are emerging from caves and shelters in search of water. In Orkney it is raining. And raining. And raining. Oh, …
Dig Diary – Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Day Two Water, water everywhere… After the excitement and manual labour of day one, day two was just manual labour. There were tyres and sandbags to move and the swathes of protective covers had to be carefully removed from the trenches. Although the weather was considerably kinder than yesterday, the …
Video – Uncovering Trench P
Day Two of the 2019 excavation season and work continues removing the protective covers from the Neolithic structures in Trench P.