Back on site for the final season
Hello everyone! A very warm welcome back to our regular blog for The Cairns excavation project.
It’s wonderful to be back on site to share our findings from the Iron Age site with you during summer 2026! We also very much encourage visitors to come and witness the site and the excavations for yourself if you’re able to do so. We’re very happy to receive visitors across our digging season from 10am to 4pm each weekday until July 17.
Today, our work on site was largely about finishing the tidy-up; removing the final covers from across the big trench and the broch interior and getting to know the new members of a team that includes staff and students, mainly drawn from University of the Highlands and Islands, as well as lots of new volunteers.
Amanda, one of our supervisors, took the team through the health and safety measures on site and then we got cracking on shifting the plastic and tyres. The day developed into brilliant sunshine and a nice heat, and here are some images of the day.
By the end of the day, we’d removed all the covers in the trench, except some of the protective sheets in the broch floor itself, and had tidily positioned all the tyres (which we use to weigh down the plastic in-between seasons) around the excavation area.
This is the perfect moment to give you the lowdown on what we’ll be attempting to achieve on site this season, our final digging season: the culmination of twenty years of working on the site!
Back in the Broch
This year we’ll be spending a lot of time in the broch, not surprisingly as it forms something of a centrepiece to the excavations.
We’ll be endeavouring to excavate and sample all of the floors and occupation deposits within the various partitioned zones, or rooms, of its interior. We will return to the west and the south-east rooms, which previous work has shown were especially busy zones of the broch interior.
These rooms had long-term histories: sequences of multiple hearths and very rich floors/occupation deposits. Each of these spaces seems to have served as the busy hub of two suites of rooms, a west-north suite and a south suite that were strongly physically demarcated from each other.
In the west room
As we return to the west room of the broch, we will be hoping it lives up to its previous track record as one of the richest and most informative areas of the entire broch interior.
The deposits have been rich in animal bone, environmental material, and some remarkable finds. Beautiful glass beads, metal rings, and pins are some of the more memorable artefacts to have come from the west room.
This is also a space that has yielded masses of animal bone and especially red deer and cattle.
Last season we found that the earliest hearth encountered, in the centre of the west room, was the most formal and substantial of the sequence of hearths excavated here.
The hearth itself was accompanied by a stone-lined sub-rectangular feature full of ash scooped or swept from the hearth cleanings.
In the south-east room
The second major area that we’ll be completing is the south-east room. Its hearth was a complex affair – an indication of the longevity over which it was the focus of the room and also the fairly frenetic nature of change and modification, repair, and renewal.
This hearth also had a stone-lined ash-box but, unlike its counterpart, it was originally created by scooping a large shallow bowl into the clay-earthen floor of the room. To one side of this scoop a stone-lined feature, which may be a large socket for hearth furniture, was framed using two reused saddle querns set on their edges: a lovely feature. Talking of the clay floor here, we’ll also begin excavating this in earnest and gridding it out for sampling, so we can assess the location and distribution of activities in the room.
We’ll be excavating all across the broch this season and we think there will be plenty of surprises in store.
Structure O and Structure T
Immediately outside the front door of the broch lay Structures O and T.
Structure T appears to be a village building strongly associated with the broch, while Structure O increasingly appears to have been a paved yard – an unroofed space that may have been part working area and partly an avenue that led through the village buildings and up to the front door of the broch.
Unlike the long central passageway that led up to the front doors of other Orcadian broths, such as Gurness in Evie, or Howe, near Stromness, we think our Structure O passageway would have approached the broch at a more oblique angle. Our work in Structure O this year will establish exactly how it related to the broch and the rest of the contemporary village buildings.
Structure T is a cellular building positioned directly against the outside wall of the broch on its north-east side. We strongly suspect this was a village house contemporary with the broch. We’ll be going all-out to reach occupation deposits and excavate the floors and living details of the building to establish how similar or different life in the village building was to that inside the broch itself.
Structure B2
We will also be resuming our work in Structure B2, a sub-rectangular building that post-dates the broch. Structure B2 is what we refer to as a wag or at least a wag-like building. It is later than the broch and appears to have been in use from around AD300 to AD600.
Our work in this building will fully reveal the floor deposits and the central hearth of the building. B2 is part of a complex of at least three wag-type buildings and was at least partly contemporary with the intense metalworking and feasting that was taking place on the northern part of the site.
Two years ago, the building yielded fragments of engraved Roman vessel glass and the finds last year included lots of pottery, an Iron pin, and a wonderful, decorated quern of an unusual “side-slotted” type.
A soft floor was found to surround the central hearth of the building and this is a relatively rare survival for the Later Iron Age, so it presents us with the opportunity to explore the activities that went on inside the building c.AD300-500.
‘The Cells’: Structure U1
Last but not least, we can consider Structure U1. This area lies on the south-east margin of the main trench, in an area known as “the Cells”. A big surprise last season was the depth and preservation of these structural remains, which survive to above average human head height. Even more surprising was the discovery of an intact and still-roofed chamber set within the walls of Structure U1.
Next to the chamber, framed between two large upright slabs was a triple-decker cupboard with beautifully constructed niches. We also reached a slabbed floor at the base of the walls of Structure U1.
The depth, position, and architectural style of U1 and its cupboard, very much indicate that it was Middle Iron Age in date and very likely a broch-period village structure. Each of the other cellular structures we have uncovered here (U2, U3, and U4) are subsequent modifications and reorganisations of this original building, developing over a period of centuries.
This season, we’ll fully excavate the portion of this building that sits within the main trench (much of the building is on the edge of the main trench and sits, unexcavated, in the next field over to the south-east.
There is also a highly intriguing question as to whether Structure U1 is in fact part of another nearby cellular building (Structure J) as they resemble each other in shape and style. This would make one very large village building on this side of the broch and allows us to understand Structures U1 and J much better.
Concluding thoughts
Overall, then, the key areas of attention this season represent a continuous zone of investigation running across our main trench from west to east. We’ll undertake smaller scale explorations of a few other areas and features as we go. In the main, however, we’ll concentrate our intensive focus on the broch and the heart of the site and key areas outside it to complete our investigations after 20 wonderful years!
We’ll keep you posted on how we get on….
Martin Carruthers
Site Director, The Cairns
