June 20,2017
Michael Sharpe
Day two saw a real improvement in the weather, and continued digging in the three trenches on the south side of the hill. After a while, the diggers abandoned their trowels in favour of spades and even mattocks, because investigations with the corer indicated that there was at least half a metre or more of homogeneous sand to go through before we would hit anything interesting. By the end of the day, Trench C was getting towards one metre down, and the soil was beginning to change. There were even some stones, and fragments of charcoal beginning to appear. Fingers crossed for tomorrow. Soon we hope to have some evidence of just what sort of ditch this was. Was there a timber palisade? Will we find stonework? Pottery?
Our geophysicists, Mary and Christine, with some help from volunteers, carried on with surveys of the slopes on the eastern side of the hill. These surveys will connect with some done earlier and may give us some ideas for areas to target for excavation. They have also set up the Total Station surveying instrument so that we can positively locate the geophysics grids and our trenches.
As well as the enclosing ditch, it would be wonderful to find evidence of human activity within the enclosed area. Other hilltop enclosures have contained small settlelments—round houses and grain stores, for example.
We had our first tour as well, with about eight local people coming out to learn more about the history of Cluny Hill.
Our volunteer Amber’s first day digging
My name is Amber and today was my first day on the Cluny Hill dig—my
first day on a dig altogether, in fact! I’ve just left secondary
school and I’ll be going to Aberdeen University in September to start
studying archaeology and history, so having a dig like this right on
my doorstep is absolutely wonderful. As soon as I found out about this
I was eager to volunteer, and luckily the team organising the dig were
so friendly and welcoming.
As soon as I arrived at Cluny Hill today I was given a trowel and a
spade, and was pointed in the direction of a shallow trench that had
been started yesterday. This trench was clearly on a part of the hill
that seems to flatten out slightly, before dropping back down again on
the other side. This seemed a little daunting at first, but everyone
showed me what to do and soon I was happily digging away at the sandy
soil. Obviously, with this being in a forest, it felt as if every
minute or so I was coming across a tree root that needed to be chopped
– thank goodness for the penknife that I had borrowed! Before long,
Leanne came to work beside me and gave me so many tips on studying
archaeology and volunteering. It turned out to be surprisingly
relaxing to be working hard in a trench at the same time as talking to
people with a passion for what they were doing, and many years of
experience that they could tell me about.
After lunch, I tagged along on the tour of the hill that was open to
the public (which I would highly recommend!) and got to grips with the
history of the area, what it is that we’re looking for with our
trowels and why we’re digging here. In the afternoon I was back in the
trench, where we switched from trowels to spades and mattocks, at the
recommendation of Dave. He found that the soil that we were digging
doesn’t appear to change until around 60cm under the ground! In
Leanne’s words, it’s like a ‘space race’ now between the three
different trenches as we’ve all switched to spades to get down to the
interesting soil! We’ll see who reaches it first…
Cluny Hill Dig 