Back to The Cairns broch . . .

A team of archaeologists, led by Orkney College lecturer Martin Carruthers, returns to an Iron Age settlement site in South Ronaldsay next week.

The 2015 excavation — the ninth season on site — at The Cairns begins on Monday, June 15, and ends on July 10.

An open day is planned for Friday, July 3.

Overlooking Windwick Bay, The Cairns is a massive archaeological jigsaw puzzle, with a sequence of Iron Age buildings, representing centuries of use, clustered around a massive, well-preserved broch.

While brochs tend to be regarded as utilitarian structures meant to look imposing from the outside, it is now clear that, at The Cairns at least, the grandness of the stone tower’s exterior was mirrored in the interior.

The builders went to some lengths to make the inside of the broch as impressive as the outside.

The solid base of The Cairns broch meant that the builders could have built a higher, more-imposing tower. However, the inclusion of the cells, and the structural limits they imposed, suggest The Cairns broch was perhaps not very high.

But, however high it was, an impressive, spacious ground-floor space was clearly part of the original plan.

At the end of the 2014 excavation, two-thirds of the broch’s interior had been cleared (see picture right) — the floor layer that represents the “last gasp of activity” inside the broch, sometime after AD 200, just before they filled it with rubble.

The goals for 2015 are to extend the understanding of the chronology and the nature of activities inside the broch building; to complete the excavation of the souterrain; and to assess the nature and history of deposits and artefacts from the in-filled enclosure ditch that surrounds the site.

The excavation blog is available at www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/thecairns.