Papa Westray Project Diary, The Opening Days

The first week of the community archaeology baseline assessment project in Papa Westray is now over. 

The ORCA team had to contend with bitterly cold weather, snow, hail and finally sunshine in the week as they worked with the community volunteers surveying and recording the eroding archaeology present around the coastline of the island. Our  work placement student from Bradford University, Frank Forrester, continues the story.... 

Frank and Rick start the survey on the shoreline.

"I arrived at Papa Westry airport at midday, before being picked up by my two colleagues and driving to our first site, Cott/Shorehouse. This site has a series of exposed structures jutting from the coastal section, under a mound that is visible from the surface above. The costal section has a heavy mixture of modern material, as it is situated next to a farm. I was put to work sketching the section, so that it can be used to better understand the site for the writing up of the report. Afterwards I worked with community volunteers to collect some samples that were prominent within the section.

​This is important because hopefully we can use these samples to obtain dates from the site, which will give us a greater understanding of the age of the Cott/Shorehouse site. Rick later surveyed in these samples once they were tagged so they could be related to the survey. "

Frank continues,"On our second day we moved onto the second site, Kings Craig/Whitehowe. This site has a deep coastal section ranging from 1 to 5m deep, with the deepest section being below the current Whitehowe farmstead. The archaeology that is visible, ranges from the glacial till at the bottom, through shell middens, agricultural soils to possible Norse structures. The majority of the site was too high for us to be able to take samples and some were covered by pushed over soil. However, from the sections that were accessible we were able to take samples, with volunteer help, which will help give us a better idea for dating the site."

Check out the next blog post for Days 3, 4 and 5 .....when some exciting finds began to be unearthed.

The project was funded by Historic Environment Scotland.