What is it with Sundays? Last week we had thunder, lightning and flash flooding, today it was just the torrential downpour that hit us just before lunch. Mind you it had been forecast, no matter which weather app anyone looked at they all agreed we were going to get hammered, just a slight variation timings. There'd also been a fair bit of rain overnight so everything started off pretty soggy.
We had light rain at first, we were hoping to get Trench F cleaned up for a photograph but it was way too slimy to attempt a photo clean, so instead made a start on planning the visible remains of Kaland's longhouse from the earlier excavation, using this as a teaching opportunity since none of the students had ever planned anything before, although Lindsey is of course also going to work his usual photogrammetry magic.
Having arrived late to site (there's no first boat on a Sunday, or rather there is but the usual first boat which leaves Tingwall at 8.20 and is my regular commute doesn't go on Sunday, so it's the 10.45 instead) I found them all hard at it, so took the opportunity to hop in with my trusty machete and clear the nettles and thistles away from the back of the wall between the two parts of the site. The other side of this wall is pretty interesting (now visible thanks to the sterling efforts of Gavin, Mikhail and Ryan together with a final strim), it looks like it's built on a much earlier, possibly Viking, wall and likely using a fair bit of stone from the same:
The other side of the wall is too narrow to strim, as it's backed by a barbed wire fence, but my machete came in handy, although I'm not sure the others thought that me and a machete were necessarily a good thing:
And yes, before you ask, machetes are still legal in Scotland - I just had a bad moment thinking that perhaps they'd banned them since they seem to be banning everything pointy at the moment, and I really don't want to be bringing the site into disrepute by having to explain this to the Sherriff - so I Googled it and found various lists of banned stuff and machetes aren't on them. Apparently they're thinking of banning scary machetes in England but haven't yet and anyway that's England not us. Not sure how you define a machete as scary, I would've thought any machete would be pretty scary if someone was waving it in your face, the really scary bit when you're using one is remembering to keep all bits of yourself out of the way when you're whacking weeds down. Also remembering to drop the machete before swatting clegs, that's really important!
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