After a couple of days of baking heat today's weather took a bit of a turn back to normality, starting out fresh and sunny, then the wind picking up a fair bit, followed by thick drizzly mist and finally heavy rain. In other words a typical Orkney summer day. Alice and Lucy were hard at it in one of the roundhouse rooms, with Alice sampling and removing one of the many large hearths we have on site.
Just over the wall woolly hats were the order of the day, Mikhal has a particularly fetching one, sold as a souvenir of the wrecks of Scapa Flow, but applicable for how you feel after a while moving sandbags:
Alice's reward for carefully excavating her hearth was to have to plan the hearthstone underneath, complete with myriad cracks.
There's yet another hearth underneath this one, so that will be first order of the day tomorrow, provided that the site isn't full of water after the downpour at the end of the day - thankfully started about 30 minutes after we left.
On a final note, there's just been a survey done by VisitScotland showing that the archaeological sites were the main reason people visit Orkney, and our local paper the Orcadian reported this using a photo of Swandro as the illustration - fame at last!