It's been a busy day on site with reopening continuing apace, we hauled all the sandbags and stone filled bags out of my favourite bit of the entire site, the weird underground structure excavated in 2019 (some of the bags were stone filled as it was so wet down there that sand was pointless). Had a huge amount of fun getting wet and dirty, and amazingly all of the stone bags were in good condition so we'll be able to shove them back in at the end of this year's dig
The corbelling was looking pretty good too, it's a shame we won't be able to get it emptied, owing to the whole problem of it filling back up as quick as you pump it out, as we found in 2019
We had various visitors on site today, including Fionn McArthur from Start Point Media, who was out to film for the Orkney.com website, along with his colleague Jamie who brought his drone out for the aerial shots.
Elsewhere on site more clearing off of the lower section of the beach continued, and we had the site looking quite respectable by the time we were visited by three HES Inspectors.
They were very enthusiastic, and they were especially interested in the way that the sea has been eroding the site, sucking out the infill between the stones and leaving the big rocks behind but destabilised:
We also had a steady stream of visitors throughout the day, despite the weather turning quite cold and damp in the afternoon. We could really do with the weather warming up a bit, the cold and damp is getting a bit monotonous, and it's quite easy to get chilled when you've been working hard then stop for a few minutes. Maybe tomorrow we'll see the sun again!