Excavation blog by Ross Dempster

This is our sixth day of excavations on the site, and it proved quite cold and windy compared to the glorious sunshine of last week. By this stage, much of the rampart has been exposed by trowelling and it is now ready to be recorded using context sheets and section drawing. Using the exposed sections of the rampart and the test pit from the previous CFA excavation, each member of the excavation team was able to get a chance to learn how to complete a section drawing and fill in an archaeological context sheet. This will prove to be valuable knowledge and experience for future excavations.

As well as section drawing and filling in context sheets, work continued in the lower part of the trench where we believe we have found the rubble core of a second rampart. Hopefully, further excavation will reveal more of this second rampart which can then be photographed and drawn. The public continued to be very interested in the excavation and many were keen to find out more about the project and the general archaeology of the park

Survey blog by Annika Larson

The survey team split into two groups again today to finish our surveys in preparation for when we switch over to excavation later in the week. One group went back to the parade ground near St Margaret’s Well to do more magnetometry, whilst the other group continued the surveys at Dunsapie Fort.

The group at Dunsapie fort split into two further groups so that we could carry out both a total station and plane table survey of the annex of the fort, which sits on a slope below the main fort. The total station team mapped out several ramparts around the annex, whilst the plane station team focused on mapping out one area that contained ramparts as well as some small roundhouses that are unfortunately mostly hidden by tall grass. Unlike other days, we did not switch tasks in the middle of the day and instead focused on getting as much surveying done as possible. Despite a little rain and some technology issues with the total station, by the end of the day we had a mostly completed survey of the main archaeological features of Dunsapie fort.