Another typical Orkney summer day, with intermittent heavy squally showers interspersed with blue skies, so you could either wear waterproofs all day and sweat in between or not and get soaked in between. Luckily Jackie found the star find of the day during a dry spell, and here it is, our mystery stone with a hole in it:
On first sight you think it's a broken quernstone, but the holes are in the wrong places, too close together, wrong wear patterns and wrong sizes, so it's not that, and pivot stones don't usually go all the way through, and it being broken is not helping, but it's a nice find anyway.
Jacke also had a couple of nice bits of worked antler out of the same area, where she was excavating the area around the large hearth in structure 6, which also has a nice chunk of whalebone in it, which just shows up in the bottom right of this photo, but that's not been lifted yet.
Meanwhile our sieving team were keeping their spirits up despite the showers, which Allison (on the right), who's come all the way from Hawaii to join us, said made a pleasant change from the weather she's used to at home. Ellen (on the left), also from the USA and a regular returnee, only comes back each year if we promise her that she can work on the sieves. Aidan in the background is our star tour guide, here filling in on the sieves between tours:
Finally right at the end of the day, after working a bit of overtime, and despite the increasingly wet weather, the hearth and floor in structure 6 were ready for a quick photo:
Forecast for tomorrow is allegedly dry & sunny, I'll believe that when I see it!