By Alice Beasley, Project Archaeologist

For the past 8 years I have been travelling to the island of Rousay, Orkney to participate in an excavation on a multiphase site at the Knowe of Swandro run by the University of Bradford in collaboration with the William Patterson University and the City University of New York as a student training excavation. Thanks to the powers that be here at Allen archaeology my time in Orkney continued out of university and into my professional career. The site consists of a Neolithic burial chamber surrounded by Iron age, Pictish and Viking settlement.

The site is constantly under threat from coastal erosion and, despite covering the excavation with nearly 40 tonnes of stone every year, damage is being done. This summer I had the pleasure of working near the chambered tomb attempting to record and remove the rubble built up against it in the Iron Age. We have a lot of evidence that the tomb has been altered during this period ( https://www.swandro.co.uk/dig-diary/dig-diary-saturday-21st-july-photo-clean-frenzy) when a large round house was built right on the top of the mound probably recycling stone from the tomb itself.

After finding a new wall on day 1 I carefully excavated a collapsed roof above layers of rubble riddled with voids and pottery all built up to support a rather crudely made wall that was probably part of a cell like structure tacked onto the outside of the tomb. Nothing on this site is simple which is one reason why I like it so much, walls appear then disappear into other buildings, and are refaced many years later, some buildings have been dug out and smaller ones built within, and others have been completely backfilled and built on top of. All this information adds up to give a very complete history of the site. I get to spend all day working on a beach with amazing views and the infamous changeable Orkney weather, which this year has been very kind to us.

Part of the wall structure

It would be very remiss of me not to mention the Pictish smithy, a fantastic partially subterranean building, home to a copperworking smith using Viking technology for the alloys and leaving his (or her) sooty handprints on the stone anvil. Almost every day amazing artefacts are found be it a painted pebble, worked antler or an almost complete pot. I would highly recommend visiting the website set up by the Swandro – Orkney coastal archaeology trust website www.swandro.co.uk for more in depth information including a dig diary!

The very exciting Pictish smithy!