Deturfing and extending the trench
After days of glorious sunshine, the first day of the 2025 Spurness dig dawned damp. The forecast promised an improvement and, sure enough, by the time we reached the site at the south-western end of Sanday the rain had cleared and the sun put in an appearance.
The 2018 excavation revealed what appeared to be an Early Bronze Age structure that appeared to straddle the Neolithic-Bronze Age threshold – an under-investigated period of Orcadian prehistory.
But there were intriguing, but puzzling, elements to this building – not least that what were clearly outside walls at the north-western end morphed into interior walls at the south-western section of the trench.
The goal of the two-week dig is to expose the structure in its entirety to clarify the relationship between the walling and reveal the full extent of the building’s architecture. Another element is the question of whether the building was constructed around an earlier standing stone.
After Chris had put the UHI Archaeology Institute students through their induction/health-and-safety briefing, the first order of the day was deturfing – a task that I’m sure is not high on any archaeologist’s list of top-ten activities!
A spade is used to cut neat lines in the turf, which, in ideal conditions, can then be peeled back, removed and stacked, ready to be put back when we backfill at the end of the excavation.
But our site is in field on the western side of the Bay of Stove – complete with tussocky clumps of grass and vegetation. In short, not ideal conditions. On top of that, the trench had become well and truly overgrown in the seven years since we were last on site, the roots of the restored turf digging deep and spreading wide to create an almost impenetrable carpet over the underlying infill.
To tackle this, mattocks – think pickaxes with a spade-like business end – were called into action but even they were struggling with the vegetation, which clung on doggedly.
Landowner Adam Towrie to the rescue. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)
But our knight in shining armour was en route and it was with great delight that we spotted landowner Adam Towrie heading southward in his digger. He soon stripped back the worst of vegetation and uncovered our new south-western trench extension.
That done it was down to cleaning back the exposed infill.
Cleaning back the trench. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)
At close of play, as we battened down the hatches in preparation for the unwelcome arrival of Storm Floris, Professor Colin Richards was delighted with the progress so far.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better start to the new season and have made excellent progress. We’ve got a great team in a marvellous location and, as usual, some spectacular and very interesting archaeology.”
