Orkney Riddler

Pot-Holes Not to be confused with pot holes on the public highway....... One of the last companies I worked for was Cotswold Archaeology who, in 2008/9 were contracted to run the excavation of sites that were found in the path of a National Grid Liquified Natural Gas pipeline running across the Gloucestershire countryside. The planners of the route of the pipeline had managed to avoid any major archaeological sites leaving some fairly dog-eared ruins for the team that had been assembled for the work, to excavate and record. There was a rambling spread of roman features, pits, kilns and the like in one location, and nearby there were a couple of large round features,  one of which I was set to excavate and record This was a feature of five metres diameter,  and I had enough experience to know that it had not been constructed by the hand of man. This was a natural feature, and I had no idea how it might have happened.  As I dug it though I was aware that there were mysterio...

 Longtown Castle   It was 1978 when I worked at Longtown Castle,  a motte and bailey medieval castle on the Welsh border in Herefordshire. The job was simple enough, dig out the destruction rubble in the floor of the keep, around 30 cubic metres of rubble. The castle is on a ridge that carries an ancient track way from Abergavenny,  north to Hay- on-Wye.  A deep valley runs parallel to the Longtown ridge, and beyond that was the Black Mountain, a high ridge, also connecting Abergavenny to Hay- on-Wye.  The scenery, topography, and geology are difficult to ignore here, and I would sit in the site hut, sipping teaz and looking out and wondering how the valley and the ridges on either side of it were formed. Anything I might have learned at school suggested that the valley must have been formed by either a glacier sliding along it, or by water flowing along it. Neither option looked feasible here. The valley was roughly 10 kilometres long, 1 kilometre wide, an...

After my second season at Grimes Graves, in 1974, the director G.de G Sieveking asked for volunteers to work a small excavation he had planned in North London. The place was in Acton, at a school,  the Haberdashers Aske School. The property was changing hands and would become the Japanese School in the new term.  Mr Sieveking had been given permission and support to excavate part of the grounds of the school as it was known that a knapping floor was present in the area yielding an unusual style of knapping technique,  the Levallois technique.  The flints that we were hoping to find were large and sort of triangular. The site of our excavation was just outside the window into the head teacher's office, and as we had not been told about the circumstances of the change of hands of the property it felt slightly sacriligeous to be cutting into turf that we as children, not that long ago, would have been forbidden to walk on. The turf was tidily cut and carefully stacked f...

  Erratic Boulder In Dorset Barrow I explained that Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole were all on or near a plateau of gravel. This plateau that must be dated to some time in the last million years has been cut through in many places, and as a result the area is dotted with steep roads. These hilly roads are notorious. Richmond Hill in central Bournemouth, Sea Road in Boscombe, Gravel Hill in Poole. As a cyclist in the area, these hills were a bugger to cycle up, and a quick thrill to ride down. Separating the Bournemouth plateau from St Catherine's Hill,  north of Christchurch,  is a wide valley joining Ringwood in the North with the south coast at Bournemouth Bay, close to Hengistbury Head.  The River Avon wandered through this wide valley, and in the 1960s the powers-that-be decided to build a dual carriageway along it, linking Bournemouth to Ringwood.  The whole route was farmland,  and when the machines started to strip the soil to lay the footings...

 "My" Dorset Barrow was on Candord Heath, close to Poole. It was on the edge of a gravel cliff that extends from Wimborne, along the south coast to St Catherines Hill, north of Christchurch. When I, and the diggers I was working with, were excavating the barrow, I camped in my tent alongside it to make sure that the boys that hollered in the valley below during the day, did'nt trample my beatifully cut section across the barrow during the moonlit nights. Aa I think I may have said, the barrow was a round mound right at the edge of a low cliff edge. At a distance from the mound was a gravel bank around it, and beyond that a ditch with a sharply cut base, "v" shaped. The mound was made up of cut turves from the surrounding area that may have been stacked against a post that slotted into a post hole that was found at the centre of the barrow. There was enough carbon in the posthole to date the barrow to 1000BC. Someone had spent a long time in prehistory sitting on...

 I first went digging in 1964. My first "proper" excavation was in 1968 when I assisted in the excavation of a mesloithic site on Hengistbury Head in Dorset. I was a "Digger" from 1973 to 1984, and a miseryguts from 1985 to 2007 when I worked on pipeline excavations for 2 years. I directed the excavation of a Dorset Barrow in 1975, in which I completely removed it from the face of the planet, and found not a bone, nor a pot, nor a sherd, nor anything that might represent the idea that the barrow was a funerary monument, as i was lead to believe. I don't think I ever recovered from that, and I have questioned every archaeological theory ever since. I came to Orkney first in 1980, and having all my living relatives here in Orkney, I moved to Orkney in 2019. Here, I started researching Neolithic Britain, and Orkney. Not satisfied with the idea that people had boats in Neolithic Britain that could cross the English Channel, I researched everything that I could to pr...