Following brief interruptions due to the weather, the Swartigill community dig is now progressing well.
Project Officer, Rick Barton, is managing the site and takes up the story so far:
Monday was a bit disrupted by the snow, but we got a good afternoon’s work in and made some good progress defining the rest of the rubble and possible structural features in the north end of the trench. As you can see in the photo, there are numerous possible wall lines and linear features showing through.
These could be revetment walls, secondary structural features or just very well organised rubble at this stage, but I think you’ll agree that it’s looking more and more complex all the time.
On Tuesday we opened up the slit trench to the east of the site from 2015 and continued excavating a sondage to the south of the main conglomeration of features.
Interestingly we are starting to get some structural features coming through in there too. The bit of wall-like structure that you saw in the north end of the slit trench in 2015 looks like it is in a rough alignment of stonework heading toward the north-east and seems to match up very well with the resistance survey in this area.
This is the wall-like structure that you saw in the north end of the slit trench in 2015 looks like it is in a rough alignment of stonework heading toward the northeast and seems to match up very well with the resistance survey in this area.
This is interesting since it suggests that potentially, the geophysics is right and we may have a large sub-circular feature appearing in that area.
We spent most of Wednesday cleaning the site for photographs, and I placed geo-ref points around the trench so we can use aerial shots for planning the rubble in the centre of that jumble of features.
So, the plan for today (Thursday) is to start removing the rubble and really examine the mineralised soil and underlying colluvium/alluvium that seems to be covering everything, so we can really start to see what’s happening to the south and south-east areas of the trench.
Written by Rick Barton 2017. Photographs by Robert Friel.
The Swartigill excavation is a joint community project involving the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute and Yarrows Heritage Trust.
