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Star find today: Klaudia's Dragon's Egg

Another day of bitterly cold NW winds but followed by an afternoon of brilliant sunshine, which definitely lifts the spirits. More of the lower beach is being removed to reveal the lower casement wall of the tomb, where Klaudia made the find of this rather fine dragon's egg, pressed into the top of the surviving archaeology by the sea and really looking for all the world freshly laid:

OK, in reality it is of course a whopping big hammer stone, but Klaudia has a penchant for all thing Gothic and/or Norse god related, so decided it was a dragon's egg. I did dare her to write that on the small finds bag but she decided that she-who-must-be-obeyed-in-the-finds-hut aka Hollie probably wouldn't see the funny side. It was close to our possible Bronze Age cist - found last year but sadly empty - so I tried to claim it as grave goods, since it's not uncommon to find stone tools or even just water worn stones deliberate placed either in or around BA cists, but that was maybe stretching it a bit, although admittedly not as far a stretch as claiming we had dragons at Swandro - I mean come on, we're in Orkney, not Wales after all!

Elsewhere work continued at the bottom of the beach, seen here with the tide in:


The clean up after the deturfing on the NW side of the site is showing that there's a lot of damage - just underneath the turf is storm beach i.e. pebbles, plastic and detritus thrown up by the sea, you clear that away and you're straight down onto the top of the Iron Age walling. Alan drew the section for us to show the nice contrast between pebbly beach and archaeology:


Sampling was underway of the floor surfaces in the Iron Age roundhouse, that's complete now so we can start going down a bit see what's going on, so Rose and Bonnie took the opportunity to pose for the camera for their 15 minutes of fame, amazing how much more cheerful everyone is with a bit of sunshine rather than driving rain:



We also had a fair few visitors to site, and the first year placement students - from the University of Bradford and City University of New York - were taking it in turns to do the site tours. If you've not been out to see us then please do come if you can - all the details are at: https://www.swandro.co.uk/visit and here's hoping you bring the sunshine with you!

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