Alice gets star find of the day again with this little bone point from Trench D on the beach:
Gavin meanwhile went in search of a roughly rectangular feature that showed up on his and Michal's contour survey, done with the EDM and involving much wading through chest high iris, nettles and thistles whilst being eaten alive by the cleggs. After a bit of work with the brush cutter and strimmer by your humble diarist, during which amazingly not a single clegg appeared, what appears to be a stone platform appeared out of the undergrowth, starting at the boundary dyke and proceeding seawards in the general direction of the top of the Swandro mound:
Down by the boundary dyke some substantial stonework appeared at both sides, which on closer examination i.e. firkelling about under water and slime,
turned out to be a culvert underneath several courses of stonework, presumably over a since silted up ditch:
It's a bit of a mystery what it's doing there, as there's no obvious reason to want to access the shore at that point, since it brings you out right on the highest point of the Swandro mound. The earliest estate map we have is from 1851 and doesn't show any tracks or features in the area, and the platform that extends out from the culverted section seems to be quite large and substantial. It is possible that it relates to something that was happening on the Swandro settlement mound rather than to historic agriculture, but this is unfortunately not a mystery we're going to solve this year, as we would need to open another trench and we just don't have the time.
Anyway, just to finish off with a nice pic of Jackie (working) and Michal (posing for the camera). It's my own fault, I was rushing round at the end of the day trying to get a few pics before heading for the ferry, and Michal always likes to try out a new pose if he sees me coming, not sure reclining on the site like a gentleman archaeologist is quite the image he was aiming for, but there you go:
