We canna take much more of this Captain

Team Swandro
4 minutes ago
2 min read

This heat is getting ridiculous, boiling hot even first thing with everyone slathering on the sun cream and reaching for their sunhats, no breeze at all down on the site and we all reached melting point very quickly. Alan was forced to don his sunny weather headdress as he recorded the umpteenth section for us:

With everyone sweaty and sizzling, Basil continues to amaze us by still wearing his standard outfit of waterproof trousers (over his ordinary trousers!) plus woolly hat and gloves. He assures us that he's not too hot, he must have the most amazing body thermostat, his only concession to the weather is wearing sunglasses:

In addition to the heat we were getting eaten alive by the cleggs who were swarming everywhere even right down on the beach. John was sporting his anti-clegg defences in the form of a clip on dragonfly (minus wings, which it lost in an unfortunate incident involving the site sieves). Apparently these are good at discouraging cleggs as they mistake it for the real thing and clear off, since dragonflies are voracious predators and a clegg is a tasty morsel for them. He says it worked and he remained unbitten all day.

We had a visit from both the current (Paul Sharman) and the retired (Julie Gibson) Orkney County Archaeologist today, much appreciated as Paul brought us a load of Jaffa cakes for afternoon tea break. He'd also visited our friends at the nearby Skaill Farm dig - they got Jammy Dodgers:

Here's Allison, all the way from Hawaii where she's a professional archaeologist, but on very different sites to ours. Also much hotter than here, but our weather has caught her out as was expecting a nice cool break from the heat back home:

To try and make the site a bit more workable in the morning despite the baking heat required the watering can, after which tarpaulins were put down to encourage a bit of moisture to penetrate the surfaces. Not something you have to do very often in Orkney.