Pre-dig week in Scotland

With family in Scotland this week. Drove up from Leeds yesterday, had lunch in Jedburgh, afternoon at Stirling Castle then drove west/north across to the coast just south of Fort William. The A82 passes through some beautifully desolate moors, especially dramatic in the evening light with low clouds and drizzle. The photo is of Buachaille Etive Mor taken from the road. Had a fairly quiet day today, easy hike at Cuil Bay, watched Andy Murray lose valiantly at Wimbledon, then dinner and cards to finish.

Across the pond

We landed in Manchester this morning, got the train to Leeds and will be spending a week in Yorkshire before heading north to Scotland for another week. After that we'll spend the weekend at the Twice Brewed Inn before the family departs and the digging week begins on the 16th. Hoping for the weather to return to normal; the UK as a whole saw the wettest June on record, including some flooding around Vindolanda. Work in the North Field has progressed well despite the soggy conditions and frequent lost days, looking forward to working there again.

Blog restarted!

It looks like I'm going to be digging again in July 2012, so I'm dusting off the blog and posting again. We decided to make the trip over to the UK for our summer holiday in 2012, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to go back to Vindolanda. The excavation application process opened up at noon GMT on November 1st (here) and the 645 digging spots disappeared within a few days. I raced to submit the application and was lucky enough to get in for the week of July 16-20, after the end of our family trip. I'll be posting the occasional update before then, but we'll have to wait until the summer for things to really heat up.

Last digging day

A beautiful morning and an early start, trying to make it to the site by 9am. Another digger stopped and offered me a lift, so I was there before 9 and the site was empty. Shortly the rest of the crew materialized and I set to work on the extension to my rectangle, with Sheila alongside, continuing what she had started on day four.

Soon it became clear that the ditch had indeed been found, but 90 degrees to what had been assumed, meaning that Sheila and I were almost certainly not in the ditch... An almost complete lack of finds for the first 90 minutes -- a sizeable hunk of ROman brick being the only execption -- contributed to a sinking feeling that the expected plethora of interesting finds in the ditch was not going to materialize in our zone. Adding to the anti-climactic mood, the bright but windy morning gave way to a heavy shower around 1:30, so we escaped to the safety of the tea hut. After a few brief returns to the trench followed by further showers, we made it back permanently by around 2:45, leaving only 45 minutes left to dig.

After we did our final trench tidying shortly before 4, we took team photos (on other people's cameras, hope to get one later) and then we had the option of guided tours of either the current work in the vicus with Justin Blake, or an update on progress in the fort with Andy Birley. Having heard little about the vicus I chose to go there and we had an interesting 15 minutes listening to Justin summarize the vicus project and talk about the recent finds (one that I can't describe here, but will undoubtedly make the news sometime in the next few weeks or months) and current theories about the relationship between the vicus and the fort. We all went our separate ways, so I took the chance to take some final pictures around our site, having had to keep the camera in the tea hut most of the day. Here's the real ditch, the edge being approximately where the line is:

While waiting for mum to meet me I took some shots of the views around the fields beyond Vindolanda, with the storm clouds still hovering:

After meeting up with most of the team in the bar at the TBI, mum and I went for a quick drive down the military road and back via Steel Rigg. The near-sunset views were simply breathtaking. Here's almost the last one of the evening, just north of the wall:

So the blog comes to an end. Thanks to Beth, Charlotte, Jane, Mark, Jonathan, Sheila and Kevin for an unforgettable 5 days. The TBI was also a great place to stay, maybe I'll be back again...

Day four on the dig

Another day with an ideal digging temperature, this time probably ranging from the low 50's early on to the upper fifties when the sun came out late in the afternoon. We had our first light rain, lasting from a couple of hours during/after lunch, but it was never heavy enough for me to get my rain gear on. As usual, I started my morning walk to the dig site at around 8:45, here are a couple of shots of the 1.5 mile walk, one taken about half a mile from the TBI, the other about half a mile from Vindolanda. A great way to start the day:

Not a very eventful day, I was left to finish off the west side of "my" rectangle, which turned out to be about 3 inches of soil with pottery, followed by about a foot of solid, thick yellow clay where the Victorian drain was. The stone "feature" still seems to have some kind of form to it, (including a large, bizarrely-shaped slab of mud-stone), but its still not clear exactly what it is, although clearly not the wall of a building. Kevin and Beth put in some hard labor deturfing a section another 3 or 4 meters out from the edge of my rectangle (below), and once it was exposed Sheila transferred onto there, which should contain an extension of the ditch. You can see her early work on it in the centre of this image, with the last remaining piece of mostly clay still to go for me in the lower right corner:

I had a quiet day in terms of finds, with a Vindolanda-standard assemblage of Samian ware and various earthenware pieces, including a nice piece from the base of a bowl of some kind. An offcut small piece of lead sheet, unfortunately with no inscription, made an interesting change from pottery though. Too tired to get any find pictures! Mark had a nice piece of roof tile, Charlotte and Jane got a nice thick red broken slab of tile that might have once lined a chimney (Mark is inspecting it above).

After working through the tea break and going right up to 5 o'clock I just managed to take the original rectangle down to the uniform level we were looking for, so I should be over in the presumed ditch with everyone for the last day of the week tomorrow.

Soon after arriving back at the TBI the heavens opened for 15 minutes, so our luck with the weather has only one more day to hold out...