The Cairns Day Three 2017

Today’s fine weather allowed us to get going with preparing various parts of the site for excavation, and getting stuck in to trenches Q and M.

I started this morning re-homing the lintel stones from the souterrain. These were taken out at the end of last season in order to allow the excavation of floor deposits within the souterrain passage this year. This morning a small team of strong-armed diggers moved them to safer pastures outside the work area. Here they’ll be out of harm’s way (and visible if you swing by for a visit!).

Our reward for this hard work was the chance to get in the broch itself – so hard hats went on and the work began to get the broch ready for the serious excavation to come. The team moved out some slabs and stony fill in order to get down to the exciting floor layers below.

Elsewhere on the site Therese and Charlotte cleaned up the furnace in Trench Q, and in the process found some articulated bone – a hopeful sign of even more interesting finds in this area.  In the finds tent Kevin and Kathryn reported surprisingly large amounts of pottery coming from all areas of the site – more than has been found in previous seasons – as well as a Skaill knife (a stone blade used in butchery and scraping hides, etc.).

Thankfully the rain largely stayed off during the day, allowing the team to make some progress and build momentum on site – we’re now really getting excited for the coming weeks.

Today’s blog was written by Hannah Boyd – a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh and a newbie to The Cairns community. This is Hannah’s first time digging at The Cairns and she’s excited to get the chance to work on a broch site – particularly such a rich and interesting site as this!