Come wind, come weather

The westerlies have returned.
The trade winds started to blow again last week, in mid June, and brought with them the torrential rain, our own mini-monsoon, that ruins so many sport events and outdoor gatherings planned with no thought of the weather cycle.
It happens with remarkable regularity, year in year out, but, cocooned as we are from the elements, we are hardly aware of it.
The buffeting winds and squally rain did not deter a group of archaeologists on a dig on one of the mounds that are scattered over the high moor above the village. The moor is where an outstretched limb of the Lammermuirs eventually descends to dip its toe in the North Sea at St Abbs and is as exposed a spot as one can find. Living there must be like living on the deck of a ship.
Folk did live there and still do.

The dig team assisted by "locals"

The dig was on a “settlement” that had just been de-scheduled from the list of ancient monuments probably to save the expense have to fence it off and it would appear to have been an exercise in checking to make absolutely certain there was nothing of significance on the site before leaving it to the depredations of the rabbits and the sheep.

Not much of interest, an external ditch, not really defensive, probably just to keep livestock out: a few spots where there was evidence of levelling out bumps in the bed-rock or of infilling depressions, to make a level floor; a water cistern cut into the rock. Not much, just folk making themselves a little more comfortable. An Iron Age farmhouse, probably occupied by people of the Brythonic tribe the Romans called the Votadini. A farmhouse then, just a hundred yards from the current farm house, a good place to live, high and dry above the marshy, wooded valley bottoms, a place with wonderful views of the coastline, a stream close at hand and the ability to exploit every resource from the fish in the sea to the game on the moor with the fertile ground to farm between the two, it would have been occupied for generations.

The modern farmhouse, on the right, is only a few yards away after 200o years


The only significant find was a huge post hole, one of four that would have supported the centre of the circular roof. It was extremely large and deep and the reason for all the effort to embed it so deeply in the bedrock floor was there for all to see or, rather, feel. It would have needed a firm setting to withstand the wind and keep the roof from blowing into the North Sea.

Those Iron Age people would have been only too aware of the return of the westerlies.