Another day's hard labour removing the stone we carefully put down in 2019 to protect the site, Gavin's dry stone walling technique is coming on apace, and we'd got a huge pile of stone by the end of the day so real progress being made:
We did notice a very strange thing though, we are removing the stone infill from the entrance passageway into the Iron Age roundhouse, and, although the stone walls that we'd built up alongside the passage to protect the real thing had largely survived intact, the stone infilling of the passage had been removed by the sea, and replaced with very small beach pebbles, seaweed and other detritus, which you can clearly see under the feet of the folk in this shot:
We definitely put huge rocks in there in 2019 - I know, I was there! The sea has just sucked in and out over the last three years and sucked out all the chunky stones, leaving us with pebbles. This makes for really hard going as scooping out seaweed and shillet is a lot harder than hoicking out big rocks. We did have a small find though - a really rather fine example of a plastic anteater, I was all for taking it into the finds hut and giving it a number but was overruled:
The team are working well together and our stone path (aka the yellow brick road) is now nicely covered by sand to make a decent route to site for everyone, and they're all so keen that you only have to tell them once that tea break's over and they're all up and raring to go:
Julie's been hard at it too, getting up to speed on the recording front after three years away is no easy task, and it's strange that we all keep talking about 'last year' when we mean 2019 - it's as if the intervening Covid years haven't happened & we're all picking up where we left off:
We continue to have a steady flow of visitors to site which has kept the Star attraction (please excuse the dreadful pun) busy all day on meet and greet duties - funny how many people want to hug the site dog before seeing the archaeology but there you go. She was pretty exhausted by the end of the day, but took it all in her stride:
And finally some good news - Chloe who was stuck in Iceland for a week has made it at last and was on the last boat into Rousay today, so will be on site tomorrow - welcome back Chloe, we've saved some stones for you!
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