Thrumster Broch Project

A classic broch tower is a cooling-tower-shaped drystone-built structure, unique to Scotland, and iconic of that nation’s Iron Age.  Over 200 of the roughly 700 brochs in Scotland are to be found in Caithness, which in consequence has the highest regional concentration of brochs. In the popular imagination, however, brochs remain most commonly associated with the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland. The broch at Mousa, Shetland, is the tallest at 13m, and is certainly the most famous. Relatively few brochs in mainland Scotland have been excavated in recent years. In Caithness, however, community groups have begun to excavate examples of these impressive and complex sites. This will begin to redress the geographical bias and expand the information base, helping to shed light on the people who built, rebuilt, used and reused them.

Thrumster Broch, a few miles south of Wick, was, like Nybster Broch, subject to 19^th century interventions, but in this case for aesthetic reasons: the roundhouse formed the focus of an elegant landscaped garden in the Regency period. It had long and reasonably been assumed that the entrance to the broch lay to the south, whence it has been completely removed by the insertion in the Victorian period of a summer house. The surviving wallhead over the rest of the broch’s circuit was raised or lowered as appropriate to create a smooth, grassed, penannular walkway. Given the evidence for Regency and Victorian landscaping and building, it seemed unlikely that in situ deposits would survive either inside or outside the broch; therefore July 2011’s excavations focussed on the wall itself.

Having never been formally excavated, Thrumster Broch was widely believed to be a ‘probable solid-based broch’ (MacKie 2007 part II, p448) but work in July proved that this is not the case. Both the inner and outer walls of the broch consist of three concentric circles of drystone walling. The enclosed spaces were in some areas filled with rubble. An intra-mural cell and galleries accessed from the interior of the structure were also discovered.

In excavating the gallery in the trench in the north of the building[2], an entranceway with a very worn threshold was revealed. This entranceway had been built through the core of the broch wall, and was subsequently sealed by the two outermost walls. This, and other evidence, suggests that the broch wall is in fact a composite structure with chronological depth.

The most surprising structural discovery in the complex broch wall was that of a blocked entranceway in western side of the broch (T3 on the plan). Paved with massive slabs, the 1m wide passage through the 4m thickness of the broch had been filled with rubble in a sandy matrix, as had the gallery to its north. This remodelling may have been undertaken to counter the effects of subsidence on the broch. Cracked and shattered stones consistent with this postulation are clearly visible in the inner wallface in the north-west of the broch, showing where the structure was subject to insupportable stress. It is tentatively suggested that this, the broch’s original entrance, and adjacent galleries were filled with rubble in an attempt to stabilise the structure. The entrance was then relocated to the southern side of the building, where it remained until the gardeners of the 18^th or 19^th century remodelled the monument. This relatively recent remodelling means that almost all evidence of the original floor surface has been destroyed in the interior of the broch. We did however discover two layers rich in charcoal, peat ash and Iron Age potsherds. These ran under the innermost wallface and abut the next wallface and will help to clarify the relative chronology of this complex wall structure.

During excavations at Thrumster, we surmised that the broch must have been dismantled to ground level to enable the insertion of a new entrance. However, recent work by CAT and the Archie Sinclair Fossil Trust with AOC suggests otherwise. STONEworks Early Architecture Project, conducted in September/October 2011, involved the construction of section of a broch at full-scale. A mechanism intended to force the collapse of the broch was inserted into the build. The results suggest that it would in fact have been possible to remove quite large areas of stone from the broch wall without causing the structure to collapse.

Evidence for the use of the broch survives with the cells and galleries at Thrumster and hold the promise of insights into the lives of the people who built and used the broch where the interior could not. The intra-mural cell in the north-east of the building contained deposits extremely rich in archaeobotanical evidence. A single context contained over a thousand charred cereal grains including probable barley, wheat and oat; pottery (base, rim and body sherds); charcoal; animal bone, including pig, sheep and rodent; and a single fish rib. Moreover, decorated pottery of two discrete types was recovered from the cell (pictured). Decorated pottery from the later prehistoric period is very rare in Caithness, so to find two strikingly different types on one site is rather unusual.

Evidence of prehistoric life, however, is not the only interesting thread of Thrumster Broch’s complex story; we also found intriguing clues to the Regency/Victorian use of the garden. In the centre of the broch, we discovered large fragments of a probably late Victorian vessel with a white glaze and a sponge-applied pattern of leaves in a green hue. Fragments of this rather pleasing bowl were surrounded by stones and covered with a single stone slab. Beneath the vessel was a large iron strap solidly riveted onto the bedrock, which had been quarried by blasting to a depth of well over a metre. It is likely that this strap supported a flagpole; there are no other records of this grand garden feature. The deposition of the bowl in the space left by the flagpole gave rise to various theories among volunteers and archaeologists alike.

Ancient sites excavated and altered by antiquarian enthusiasts have long been considered unworthy of re-excavation. Thrumster Broch has provided ample evidence to refute this view. We should view these relatively recent phases of activity as another chapter in an ancient monument’s story, one just as worthy of archaeologists’ attention.

There is a pleasing parallel in the communal effort that must have been employed in building, reusing and maintaining these impressive sites, and in the community’s excavation of them many centuries later. We have barely begun to investigate Caithness’ brochs. Over three thousand person hours have been volunteered to this end so far; perhaps with a few thousand more we may begin to understand these enigmatic sites and those who lived, worked and died there.

Thrumster Broch Community Excavation generously funded by Highland LEADER+, Heritage Lottery Fund, Scottish Natural Heritage and Highland Council.

AOC’s post-excavation specialist Jackaline Robertson recently processed the soil samples taken at Thrumster in July. She was assisted by numerous volunteers, keen to learn about what happens to the many buckets of soil that we keep from each excavation.

Of the forty or so samples taken during three weeks at Thrumster Broch, the most interesting according to Jack were the samples taken from context 051. This context was found in the cell excavated mostly by Meg and Gordon. The material retained from this sample included:

• over a thousand charred cereal grains, including probable barley, wheat and oat;
• pottery (base, rim and body sherds);
• charcoal, including roundwood fragments;
• animal bone, including pig, sheep and rodent;
• a single fish rib.

The absence of shell and limited recovery of fish remains is of interest as this suggests different attitudes towards the exploitation and/or disposal of marine resources.

Most excitingly, a large sherd of decorated pottery was discovered in context 051. This is the second sherd of decorated pottery discovered at Thrumster, but is of a different type to the first, which was also discovered in context 051. Decorated pottery from the later prehistoric period is very rare in Caithness, so to find two strikingly different types on one site is extremely unusual.

Sherd of decorated pottery discovered during wet sieving of sample from context 051

The piece of decorated pot found during excavations

Friday was the last day of the dig at Thrumster and like all last days it came with mounting feelings of anxiety for our revered leader. Are the surveys complete, is the site record complete, where oh where is the drawings record, etc. Hopefully, having converted significant parts of the site to a paper record, we hope that the record is good enough to serve as an act of ‘preservation by record’ of those features and relationships we have destroyed in the usual way by excavation. Posterity relies on our thoroughness in this matter and we, as professionals and semi-professionals in archaeology must accept as our principal duty the preservation in fact of all of the nation’s heritage and where this is not possible, the preservation of its information content by record, acknowledging that the latter is always an inadequate second best. Pushed to extremes, this might discourage all excavation whilst we await that golden age in which methods have evolved sufficiently to guarantee the total recovery of all information from each excavation. However, excavation is a pragmatic skill which can only be developed and advance by doing it. If we were to shirk this duty, it is hard to see how any future generation could possibly develop improved methodologies in the absence of real field experience. What a pity then that so many university courses do not provide field training for their archaeology students.

However, back to Thrumster. By midday it was obvious that an early conflagration had contributed to the formation of a black layer overlying the bedrock in Trench 2. This was extensive, very rich in charcoal and ran under the innermost wall. It had been overlain by a light brown soil into which lots of small flat slatey stones had become trampled. This also underlay the innermost wall. Some archaeologists (Andy Heald and Graeme Cavers) have argued that the innermost wall in a broch is always secondary, whilst other, including our revered leader, have denied this. Here was an unique  chance to explore this problem. We swiftly removed a small area of inner wall to reveal that the brown and black layers run all the way under the inner wall and abut the main load-bearing wall of the broch. Horribile dictu! Andy Heald and Graeme Cavers are right! Still, it probably will not happen again for quite a while.

Some of the team in the sunshine

Whilst this further humiliation of the revered leader was underway, another experiment measured the horizontality of the courses of building stone in the outer wall. In the lower levels, the courses were horizontal to within 6 cm but in the upper wall could be out of level by up to 34 cm. Closer examination of the walls suggests that the lack of horizontality in the upper walls, even in courses that were clearly designed to bring the burgeoning structure to levels, is due to modification of the wall after its primary build. We should really measure the dip (and strike?) of every stone in the wall and map the results three dimensionally to give us a 3-D mapping of structural variances which we could try to correlate with changes to the broch building.

In the background, the work of infilling the voids we had excavated and of preparing the monument to survive our ministrations steamed ahead. Our operating principles were that we leave the monument in a state that was not a hazard to visitors and not a danger to the fabric of the monument itself. Thereafter, we followed the ethical guidance of international charters, ICOMOS, UNESCO and HS on the treatment of monuments and sites. Worried that random refilling of the long gallery might fail to provide adequate support for the failing masonry on the inside wall (i.e. the gallery wall closes to the interior of the broch) we built a series of three supporting and buttressing walls across the width of the gallery, all over a terram geotextile sheet. Our glorious leader spent some of his own money to add modern coins in areas in which it might not otherwise have been clear to future scholars that we had already excavated. This work continued on the Saturday and was hot and heavy. No one was surprised when the glorious leader left to prepare his public lecture for that evening to echoing to cries of ‘work-shy layabout’ and that ilk. His mild-tempered responses were those you might imagine.

It was a great to see an audience of 40 to 50 souls who had sacrificed their enjoyment of the county gala in Wick to hear the concluding lecture. The excavations have proved quite photogenic with large structural elements clearly displayed. Even our revered leader could not make a complete hash of it.

When people gather together an work in some common cause which offers no profit to any, something rather special happens. Something larger than the sum of the parts grows amongst them. There is a genuine joy in achieving a goal together that transcends even the cynicism of our tired age and leaves the participants that little bit richer in life experience, friendship and a sense of wellbeing. Smug sods, you may well say, but it is real, regardless of what else we might say. So with the sweet sadness of parting mellowing one and all, we, the professionals on the project, would like to thank you, the professionals who worked with us, chided us, goaded us and forced us again and again to address the difficult issues. The success of this project is all we can offer you in recompense but we think that this might be enough. If archaeology teaches anything it must be that life is transient and all man’s work impermanent. In the broch as in the joys of its excavation the worm of ending was already present in the bud and time, the great mocker, moves on regardless of us and our concerns. But something may stand, some written strand that scholars may consult in one hundred or one thousand years hence and then the broch and our efforts may live again however briefly.

…Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith, being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow;
And yet, to times, in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

Thank you all.

The day began still and calm, and within the first half hour, the team on site had donated about four and a half litres of blood each to the national midge population, which this morning congregated on the site at Thrumster. By mid-morning, however, a little breeze had sprung up and the wee beasties departed, except for those that lingered in the deeper cuttings. Gordon and Alastair in particular suffered repeated midge attacks in their deep slots.

Midge nets were essential (and fashionable) today

Work in the entrance saw the removal of a blocking deposit from its inner end and a sadly fruitless search for the northern doorjamb at its outer end. Colin and Islay then got down to a magnificent paved surface of enormous stones, each of which spans the full width of the passage and runs under the wall on either side. We can only imagine the intimidating effect of the gaping maw of the broch’s western entrance passage, but even in its ruinous state, it is an impressive piece of monumentality. The long gallery north of the entrance has been excavated to its paved floor over most of its length by Alastair. Some of the paving slabs in this gallery also seem to run under the main broch wall.

Gordon has reduced the soil levels in the wall chamber in Trench 4 to a paved surface, again with massive paving slabs that clearly run under the inner wall of the cell. It is possible, but not as yet demonstrated, that this small cell, whose floor is set 40-50cm above the floor of the broch, is a tertiary modification in this area, the secondary modification being the pushing through of a second entrance to the broch, probably in the Pictish period. Regrettably, time will not allow us to explore this hypothesis further in terms of the structural evidence on site, but radiocarbon samples collected from this trench may clarify the issues by providing dating evidence.

In the interior of the broch, and under the sterling leadership of local volunteer Rhona, work continued in the reduction of the strongly heterogeneous Iron Age floor deposit. Resorting finally to a German boxed section, we have discovered a black greasy layer, rich in charcoal, underlying the mixed Iron Age deposit. Ephemeral stone settings in the heterogeneous deposit seem continuously to be on the verge of revealing their true nature. However, following successive soil-stripping passes over the area, that true nature is as elusive as ever.

Quiller-Couch, writing about people’s preoccupationg with the true nature of the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and the baker’s visit which prematurely ended it, said in frustration that the poem like a cow’s tail, only lacked length to reach the moon. Ambiguity is a leitmotif of art, and is anathema to science. But archaeology, straddling uncomfortably the gradually widening gap, necessarily must strive with the ambiguities inherent in the physical remains indicative of human behaviour. Ho hum.

The second law of thermodynamics suggests that entropy is maximised over time and that chaos is the natural end of all things. In information theory, however, we see something closer to punctuated equilibria because in new or exploratory situations chaos increases to some maximum until a new insight reveals all to the observer. Then order emerges without our having to do violence to the evidence. Thrumster Mains is different, chaos just maximises and we have only two or three days left in which our equilibrium can be punctuated. Ho hum!

Today, we backfilled the central hole. I forgot to relate last night that volunteer Arran had noticed at the base of the central pit the remaining traces of a shot hole – a drilled hole in rock into which dynamite or some other explosive is packed to shatter the rock. My carefully constructed logic chain, asserting that no one erecting a flag pole would make such a big hole, had not considered the use of explosives to make the hole. I guess flags were then as explosive an issue as they now, sadly, seem to be.

The day was given over to recording wall faces and planning features uncovered earlier. Excavation continued in the central area and in the northwest quadrant, there seems to be a halo of surviving prehistoric archaeology close to the innermost wall. We went traditional and had a row of kneeling diggers working over the area again and again. Laborare est orare, and today some of our prayers were worked on as more Iron Age pottery, a bone scoop and masses of animal bone emerged in this area.

In the entrance, Islay discovered a threshold-like stone just outside the door jambs and this adds to the entrance furniture we would expect in a broch entrance. However, there are clearly stones, including some large stones lying in soil under the broch wall. Some of these intrude into the subfloor of the entrance passage itself. In the round, these observations imply that there was a man-made (person-made?) structure in the area of the entrance before the entrance was constructed. This contributed to the instability in the entrance area, to which we have already alluded.

AOC’s Dr Graeme Cavers arrived on site today and undertook some laser scanning of the interesting masonry of the inner wall and the exposed wall ends in the southeast. He introduced a new possibility to the site which is that the core walls, making up the gallery walls, could have been constructed as a primary monument and that the inner and outer wallfaces were then added in their aggrandisement. This is not impossible, given the available evidence, but the lack of co-linearity of the wallfaces in the several wallhead trenches does challenge it somewhat. Nonetheless we will for now accept this as our operational hypothesis and test it further in the remaining days.

I have entitled today’s diary 6174 because if one rearranges the digits of any four digit number to give the maximum and minimum values possible with those digits and then subtracts the lesser from the greater and continues again, one invariable ends up with the digits 6174. When our ancestors defined the integers (Hawking, citing Kronecker,  says God created the integers, but we shall ignore that for now) it is unlikely that they anticipated this strange effect. When the broch builders vaunted their erections, it is similarly unlikely that they intended all the consequences we now observe in excavation. In broch studies as in life it is important to avoid the strange attractors.

The first two thirds of an excavation are usually taken up with getting to grips with the deposits of modern material that cover every site and revealing the ancient materials that are the focus of the project. Then the pleasurable but somewhat pressured process of excavating sensitive materials and recording everything in great detail begins. This is the most essential and the most frustrating part of the project. Today was the beginning of the end-game.

Today also some interesting finds emerged; a spindle whorl from the interior deposits we imagine may even pre-date the broch, and a rather splendid stone lamp, from the infill of the gallery near the southeast terminal of the broch wall. Further pottery sherds emerged and there is extensive but diffuse evidence of burning in the interior of the broch close to the wall in the west.

Within the wall thickness, we have been forced to accept that there was not a complete gallery along the whole circuit of the wall but that separate cells were built at intervals along it. There are clearly two styles, and qualities, of building displayed in the walls of the intra mural cells. The better build comprises walls of coursed masonry in long thin slabs. The alternative is poorly coursed building in large irregular blocks. The contrast is greatest at the terminals of the chambers which are corbelled upwards in smooth or very raggedly curved profiles, respectively.

We await with eager anticipation the arrival of our master surveyor, Graeme Cavers, who is due tomorrow and will spend some of the time allocated to him for survey in assisting us to complete the main survey of the broch and the detailed surveys of the chambers. He will be joined shortly thereafter by Andy Heald, to assist with the wrap up of the project on the ground.

Undergraduate geology student Beth today discovered the most important stone on the site. A small stone low in the wall to the east had been split at an angle across its bedding planes and the upper part was thrust forward and to one side by about 2 cm. Beth argues, with some justice and much force, that this indicates the scale and direction of displacement and by inference, the resolution of forces within the wall at this point. Cezary completed the sampling of the pre-, and post-broch soils which we hope will allow us to date the monument with confidence. Catherine asserts that not only is there an ogham/rune stone on site but that the pig tusk found by Islay today is made from horn. By the way, does the presence or absence of a hollow section at the root of a pig tusk indicate gender, and if so, which is which? If you know, let us know.

Meanwhile, we continue to root for wordy truffles in the reeky woods of our own minds and to pit our inadequate powers against this noble tower’s Walls of Illium.

And so to bed.

It looked like the forecasts would be right when we left for site this morning but the weather improved as the day progressed and we had a nice day overall. Long hard toil by Gordon and Colin saw the central pit emptied of its stone slabs. On lifting out the last two slabs which were certainly not the largest ones, we discovered that they were barely manageable by three hulking men. Very dense, hard and heavy, these were metamorphosed (altered by geological forces) sandstone slabs which seem alien to this place. Each slab, including the two just noted, had been carefully matched to the deep cut in the bedrock into which they were tightly packed. After their removal, a shallow soil layer remains for examination and sieving tomorrow.

No progress to report on the Regency entrance area on the southeast side but further cleaning there has begun to reveal the footing of the central wall elements, overlying small stone slabs resting on bedrock. Now also, Islay has begun to take down the deposits near the internal wall in the west quadrant to seek clarification of the features there which seem to dip under the wall and into which the wall, in turn, seems to have subsided. East of and outside the broch wall, work on sampling the profile has reached the pre-broch levels and we are hopeful of recovering sufficient charcoal from them for a radiocarbon date or two.

Curiously, given the general paucity of pre-broch soils from previous excavations, each of the other two external sections, on the West and the North, have also revealed pre-broch soils and those from the North side have been sampled; the West’s soils will be sampled tomorrow.

Round the circuit of the inner wall, our revered leader has used nails and bright yellow string to outline different areas of masonry build; it looks different but he still looks confused. Only one trench has, to date, consistently produced large volumes of Iron Age pottery, and it continued to do so today as Meg beavered away in Trench 3.

Volunteer Meg the pottery queen with a large rim sherd

Noon saw a lively debate on the poor quality of modern parenting, unanimously agreed between those whose main interests now lie with their grandchildren but even the younger team members agree that children are now a lot less free to explore their world than were their parents. Everyone on site agreed that we had, by and large got it right, but we do worry about everyone else.

Afterthought

Some scholars seem to seek the glorification of the past by being enthusiastically impressed by the ability of Iron Age peoples to build towers 40ft high in dry stone masonry. They, the Iron Age peoples, were competent builders with a well developed intuitive understanding of the engineering of large structures. There is no reason to imagine them as a priestly or scholarly class imbued with arcane knowledge or a reverence for golden means, much less as proto-academicians. They were people, people who ‘..lived, felt on…’ but now they lie in Thrumster’s fields. The past does not need our condescension, just our compassionate understanding.

Today the work already undertaken began to pay off as excavation moved into Iron Age deposits. Over thirty prehistoric potsherds were recovered from genuine Iron Age contexts, much of it recovered by local volunteer Meg. The complex history of building, maintenance, repair and collapse within the broch continues to engage and to some extent baffle us.

Gordon plunged into the centre of the broch and demonstrated that the mystery object of earlier reports forms a circular loop into which a flagpole was probably inserted and then returns to the other side and is stapled to bedrock again, the two flat stapled sections forming an angle of 60° or thereabouts.

Gordon with the fully exposed object, believed to be the brace for a flagpole in the Regency/Victorian period

Catherine continued to wage relentless war in support of her identification of various marks and scratches on stones as being either ogham or runes, both ancient forms of writing, the former Celtic, the latter Norse. The balance of opinion on site remains that if these signs represent a form of writing, the hand that guided the pen was the hand of God or alternatively the brute force of geological nature. Catherine refuses to be convinced.

Following the introduction yesterday of Cambridge and Reading undergraduates to the arcane arts of levelling, 12 year old Bethan today took up the challenge with considerable success, and followed this up by drawing some elevations of walls. Look to your laurels, Tracy Emin.

In the heat of a wonderfully sunny and still afternoon, a tiny shrew ran across the site, and, following a dying swan performance, promptly died. This gave rise immediately an animated discussion to the shrew’s right to die with dignity and without the undue interference of officialdom.

Views remain divided.

Today we mellowed under crepuscular skies which failed to shield us from the ultra violet and we ended the day as a group of lobsters; the revered leader displayed a bright flushed purple hue. The weather for most of the day was ideal for digging, UV notwithstanding.

Some rather badly decayed bone had been recovered from the extension eastward of Trench 9 and today, further pieces discovered early in the morning indicated that we might be dealing with human bone. Finds of two large parts of a jawbone and then of a cranium confirmed this. The skull appears to be that of an adult (male?) and most of the facial bones are missing. It has been inserted in a deposit of post-medieval soil infilling the gallery of the broch. However, recent excavation, or rather the reinvestigation of excavated human bone from earlier excavations has revealed a pattern of the disposal of Iron Age and Norse burials in and about brochs. We currently interpret the find as the reburial by landscape gardeners at about 1810 of an Iron Age burial in their backfilling of the broch’s wall gallery. But we await radiocarbon dating.

AOC's John Barber explains to the volunteer what can be learned from the human remains discovered

The finds of human remains were reported to the police, as required by statute, and two officers of the Northern Constabulary attended on site to inspect them before we removed them. We are grateful to them for their attendance and for their informed and intelligent interest in the dig and in our archaeological work.

Meanwhile, sampling by tapestry excavation in the long trench continues and Beth and Caesar have taken Kubiena Tin samples as well as larger samples for wet sieving and floatation from the first two soil deposits under the landscaping infill of 1810, or thereabouts.

Clearing out of more of the debris in the gallery between the entrance and T9 has revealed what may have been the focus of structural stress, leading to a partial collapse and ultimately the sealing off the the entrance and the adjacent gallery. This is exciting stuff, at least to us, because it implies that the occupants of the broch were capable of making reasoned responses to structural problems as they arose. Further evidence for the intelligent modification of the structure continues to emerge and the biography of the site is beginning to look a lot more complex than we might have imagined. Certainly this data will be of value in refining the experimental building at 1:1 scale of a segment of broch at Spittal by the Archie Sinclair Fossil Trust later this year.

Discussion has begun on the best way to preserve and present the monument after we finish excavations next week. We will keep you informed as this clarifies but in general there is a desire to make the features of the broch visible and intelligible to visitors whilst protecting the more vulnerable fabric of the site and avoiding a high-maintenance commitment into an uncertain future. Some challenge, but we shall give it our best shot.

Barbara of the Yarrows Heritage Trust brought home-made cakes and biscuits to site today and they were as lovely as the dear Barbara. Thank you, and thanks also to all those who help on site and to those who hold us in their hearts and minds. Our own thoughts turn to the person whose remains we disturbed today and we hope that he/she will forgive our ‘forced fingers rude’ even if not before the mellowing year. These ephemeral remains of humanity prompt thoughts of Ohmar Khyam or Thomas Kinsella’s translation of Sean Eoin MacGillegunna’s Bonnan Bui (The Bittern). The fleeting moments of our lives are made all the more valuable by their transience and the best we might hope for is compassion from those who in turn disturb our bones. Respect bro!

Today the sun beat down upon us in unrelenting fury. We burned, crisped and fried. It was wonderful.

On the broch, work continued in recording and sampling the deep external section in Trench 6. Nothing new was discovered but this is the essential, painstaking and most vital part of our work. We hope to be able to date the broch construction, maintenance and destruction from charcoal and other organic materials within these layers. It is nonetheless tedious for being essential.

The bulk of the work continued on the wall head and the return of Colin saw acceleration in the amount revealed. If we take the entrance, newly revealed, to be due west of the broch centre, and set at 6 o’clock, then we opened the wall head all the way from 6 to 9 o’clock and revealed first a solid block of masonry abutting the entrance passage, then the corbelled end of a gallery that stretches thence, over the rest of this quadrant. The gallery narrows perceptibly as it approaches the western entrance and this may mean that a stairway lies in it at this point. Tomorrow will reveal all.

At the 10/11 o’clock position the second obvious entry into the wall has proved to provide access to a cell which is sealed off from the gallery referred to above. The relationship between this and the gallery in Trench 9, at the north of 12 o’clock position remains to be revealed. It has become clear that the Trench 9 gallery has been modified in that its entrance has been blocked by the innermost wallface and its rear wall also appears to have been modified, but more of this anon. This is somewhat boring stuff for a blog but will no doubt be passionately argued by those who love brochs and are intrigued by their architecture. Saddos to a man/woman/small dog.

This evening we walked back through the trees and the rays of brilliant sunlight dappled the ground before us. Dust motes and flying insects danced in the rays of light revealing the complex three dimensional geometry of wood and light in the cathedral space of the trees. All is well with the world.