East Kirk of St Nicholas dig 11 - 15 September 2006 - Week 33
East Kirk of St Nicholas dig 11th to 15th September 2006– Week 33
Judith Stones, Keeper of Archaeology, writes…
No digging for me last Saturday (9th), as we were delighted to have well over 1000 visitors to the church and the dig on Doors Open Day. We did non-stop tours all day. It was wonderful and quite overwhelming to see so many interested people.
There was a lot for them to see, and, as usual, a number of puzzles that we don’t understand yet. We’re still doing a lot of work in the ‘structure’ (good non-committal archaeological word, that!) which is attached to the north wall of the late 12th/early 13th century east end. I showed you a photo of it last week, but here’s another view, with its east wall in the middle ground (Mhairi in the check shirt is sitting a little in front of that wall and Gemma is walking (fast!) away from it in our direction). Its west wall runs across the photo, just beyond the two steel uprights.
It’s that west wall which I now show you in the next picture, below, because it’s confusing us a bit at the moment.
The higher part of it, below the lighting tripod which you can see in the background (left), is bonded into the north wall of the late 12th/early 13th century east end (behind the steel support), but nearer us there seems to be a wider piece of wall added on, with what may be a step, just beside the left part of the 2-metre ranging pole. It looks as if there was some kind of change of building plan here, possibly with the intention of strengthening the wall to take another storey? I have romantic (and doubtless totally wrong-headed) notions of the step leading to a staircase within the thickness of the wall, but a much more practical suggestion is that the structure at this bottom level was entered not from the church but from outside in the graveyard (down steps of which this was the lowest one). For we’ve found some traces of a flagged floor within the ‘ structure’ and it’s well below what we think is the level within the church at this point, so we may be in a sort of basement, with the sacristy on a floor above?
I mentioned last week the abundance of small objects found within the demolition rubble of this ‘structure’, including a very well preserved piece of copper alloy chain, which I’m now able to show you.
As with all these finds photos, the scale is in centimetres. Another remarkable find this week has been a tiny gold ear-ring.
Kevin, who found it, has been an archaeologist for 25 years, and this is the first gold object he’s uncovered. It’s the second gold item from the dig – it’s very unusual to find such things, but this site is full of the unexpected.
In the next picture you’re looking west along the north wall of the late 12th/early 13th century east end.
I hope you can see the cavity just beyond the wall face in the foreground – that’s where they cut away part of the north wall in the 15th century to insert the foundations of one of the great pier bases which held up the roof of that later east end. They just cut a big hole and stuck in huge stones (which have been painstakingly taken away by the team over the past few weeks). There’s a more detailed photo of the hole coming next, taken from upstairs in the gallery.
This week Ali Cameron, the dig director, has managed to capture a few good action shots of Sandra McKay, one of our photographers, in the process of taking some of the many fine pictures I’ve been showing.
She has to perch herself and her tripod in some very awkward places – and the initial record pictures of finds have been done in an improvised ‘studio’, as the next picture illustrates.
For further information and comment, please contact judiths@aberdeencity.gov.uk: 01224 523658.