Sunday, April 23, 2006
ST.NICHOLAS CHURCH, EAST HOLM SETTLEMENT HY50SW 14 at HY51040063
Going along the road to the South Isles and at the narrow triangular junction of A and B roads take that indicated as leading to Toab rather than St.Mary's, and continue on past the war memorial junction (alternatively coming up from the South Isles as you pass the last Churchill Barrier take the RH junction along the B9052 and hang a right at the war memorial) and past the Little Howes continue past that for Deerness. Just past Vigga take a right again at the junction. St.Nicholas Church is at the bottom of the hill by the beach, and appears on the 1:25,000 (Explorer 461) as "cemetery". The early stuff is the summit of the small hillock directly back of the kirkyard.
The church site dates back to at least 1570, but the presence of a -mohr placename in the area indicates a probable dedication from a much earlier time, that of the so-called "Evening Star" missionaries. The present building is distinctly to one side of the summit and drystone walls have been discovered in other areas. Outside of the kirkyard wall, at HY51010065 a circle of stones was once thought to be a broch, but no longer (?? a lleyn precinct). However one of the drystone walls discovered was dicovered nearby, at HY51010066, and produced roughly 40 trailer-loads of stone, including a red sandstone having six cupmarks. Unfortunately the latter disappeared after the material was removed to the shore at HY50880075, lost to the waves one assumes.
Alas when I paid a visit on Friday it was to discover that the possible structure outwith the present compound was gone - many stones present but not even an arc remaining. I may only have missed it by a matter of days, as the field has recently been subjected to deep and vigorous ploughing - I saw several stones of the order of a metre across and close to the border a whopper one foot cube. As this part of the field is composed of a steep hillock over a large submerged section it must have been considered too marginal before this time. I expect the farmer will shortly remove all material that he considers extraneous - bye bye site ? There is some burnt material, which looked to decrease in size but increase in quantity the further downslope one looked. Browsing the edge I could also see are fragments of pottery, of which there could be some larger sherds. From my time at The Howe I recognised what I took to be prehistoric pottery of slightly rough composition, wall in the region of 1cm, mid earth brown with a much darker outer surface. Some of the fragments were burnt/red. And there were stone tools of various types and sizes, some of quite dense material. I picked up a piece of sub-rectangular (very unlinear) stone just because it looked interesting, never expecting it to be anything but geological, only to find that it fitted my hand perfectly (fractionally bigger in length though) and a curve along one edge accomodated my Mount of Venus (or ball of the thumb) most wondrously and the thumb crossing the surface nicely. What I was amazed to discover near the border was an entirely unexpected piece of slag maybe for inches across and a couple high. So perhaps another ironworking site like Snusgar or the Knowe of Verron (also perhaps to be associated with a Mohr monastery in the vicinity) ? Went back towards the fieldgate and skirted the (hopefully) temporary pond around the bottom of the hillslope, looking for the possibility of burnt mound material without luck (actually I suspect a good place for one of these is by the burn uphill on the road a little). What I did find where two broken pieces of red stone speckled brightly through out. They were probably part of the same object, an end piece about three inches long and a middle section an inch or so longer. This latter resembled a "french stick" in cross-section in being a very well-rounded semi-circle.
From the point of view of material remains the ploughed area is fabulous. Even if all someone did was remove the objects in the ploughsoil without regard to co-ordinates there would be enough to keep a team busy for years in my opinion. As to whether the exposed stuff will stiil be there for any length of time - I ha'e me doots. What a loss.
2)When I paid a second visit the farmer had been over the field again.
Perhaps because of reduced contrast with the ploughsoil I had difficulty seeing the pottery fragments or the larger building stones (the foot cube is gone completely, but that anything is left after 40 cartloads of stones removed is something). Unable to find the bone joint or the object fragments from the bottom of the slope by the pond. Found some bone fragments near the summit of the hillock and down the opposite side of the hillock to the fieldgate. Kept close to the border of ploughing.
The plough has this time uncovered a significant area of very different potsherds. These mostly come from two patches (or a single larger one), each of several metres, in the region of HY50980065 on the slope towards the fieldgate. The sherds have very thick bases but with walls in the region of half-a-centimetre, very thin looking. To the naked eye the composition of these would appear to be only rather fine clay, making the pot stiff but not very strong (unfired ?).
Having taken shelter in the kirkyard I found a cropmark indicative of a small structure that as far as I can tell is to do with the wall reported at HY51050064 (though my cursor on Canmap indicates HY51060062), its interior laying virtually across the path and of almost the same dimensions, its presumed walls going across the path and along the edges of the cemetery banks. The entrance (??incurving) seems to be at the eastern side. The curving section of cemetery bank west of the church appears to indicate original broch-type dimensions on the order of ~30m (the Orkney Antiquarian Society chairman observed excavations in the Holm Churchyard and had no doubts as to it being one - "The Orcadian" of March 29th 1923). The arc runs from HY51000062 to HY50990063. If there was a circular feature a slight chord was taken out of the eastern end by the path, in contrast to the eastern end where a larger section is missing. A low wall runs about a metre from the west side of the church, composed of orthostats except at the top end, HY51030064, where a stone appears to exhibit lowenkratzen (I think that is the Continental term for the linear gouges such as seen at St.Magnus Cathedral).
Going along the road to the South Isles and at the narrow triangular junction of A and B roads take that indicated as leading to Toab rather than St.Mary's, and continue on past the war memorial junction (alternatively coming up from the South Isles as you pass the last Churchill Barrier take the RH junction along the B9052 and hang a right at the war memorial) and past the Little Howes continue past that for Deerness. Just past Vigga take a right again at the junction. St.Nicholas Church is at the bottom of the hill by the beach, and appears on the 1:25,000 (Explorer 461) as "cemetery". The early stuff is the summit of the small hillock directly back of the kirkyard.
The church site dates back to at least 1570, but the presence of a -mohr placename in the area indicates a probable dedication from a much earlier time, that of the so-called "Evening Star" missionaries. The present building is distinctly to one side of the summit and drystone walls have been discovered in other areas. Outside of the kirkyard wall, at HY51010065 a circle of stones was once thought to be a broch, but no longer (?? a lleyn precinct). However one of the drystone walls discovered was dicovered nearby, at HY51010066, and produced roughly 40 trailer-loads of stone, including a red sandstone having six cupmarks. Unfortunately the latter disappeared after the material was removed to the shore at HY50880075, lost to the waves one assumes.
Alas when I paid a visit on Friday it was to discover that the possible structure outwith the present compound was gone - many stones present but not even an arc remaining. I may only have missed it by a matter of days, as the field has recently been subjected to deep and vigorous ploughing - I saw several stones of the order of a metre across and close to the border a whopper one foot cube. As this part of the field is composed of a steep hillock over a large submerged section it must have been considered too marginal before this time. I expect the farmer will shortly remove all material that he considers extraneous - bye bye site ? There is some burnt material, which looked to decrease in size but increase in quantity the further downslope one looked. Browsing the edge I could also see are fragments of pottery, of which there could be some larger sherds. From my time at The Howe I recognised what I took to be prehistoric pottery of slightly rough composition, wall in the region of 1cm, mid earth brown with a much darker outer surface. Some of the fragments were burnt/red. And there were stone tools of various types and sizes, some of quite dense material. I picked up a piece of sub-rectangular (very unlinear) stone just because it looked interesting, never expecting it to be anything but geological, only to find that it fitted my hand perfectly (fractionally bigger in length though) and a curve along one edge accomodated my Mount of Venus (or ball of the thumb) most wondrously and the thumb crossing the surface nicely. What I was amazed to discover near the border was an entirely unexpected piece of slag maybe for inches across and a couple high. So perhaps another ironworking site like Snusgar or the Knowe of Verron (also perhaps to be associated with a Mohr monastery in the vicinity) ? Went back towards the fieldgate and skirted the (hopefully) temporary pond around the bottom of the hillslope, looking for the possibility of burnt mound material without luck (actually I suspect a good place for one of these is by the burn uphill on the road a little). What I did find where two broken pieces of red stone speckled brightly through out. They were probably part of the same object, an end piece about three inches long and a middle section an inch or so longer. This latter resembled a "french stick" in cross-section in being a very well-rounded semi-circle.
From the point of view of material remains the ploughed area is fabulous. Even if all someone did was remove the objects in the ploughsoil without regard to co-ordinates there would be enough to keep a team busy for years in my opinion. As to whether the exposed stuff will stiil be there for any length of time - I ha'e me doots. What a loss.
2)When I paid a second visit the farmer had been over the field again.
Perhaps because of reduced contrast with the ploughsoil I had difficulty seeing the pottery fragments or the larger building stones (the foot cube is gone completely, but that anything is left after 40 cartloads of stones removed is something). Unable to find the bone joint or the object fragments from the bottom of the slope by the pond. Found some bone fragments near the summit of the hillock and down the opposite side of the hillock to the fieldgate. Kept close to the border of ploughing.
The plough has this time uncovered a significant area of very different potsherds. These mostly come from two patches (or a single larger one), each of several metres, in the region of HY50980065 on the slope towards the fieldgate. The sherds have very thick bases but with walls in the region of half-a-centimetre, very thin looking. To the naked eye the composition of these would appear to be only rather fine clay, making the pot stiff but not very strong (unfired ?).
Having taken shelter in the kirkyard I found a cropmark indicative of a small structure that as far as I can tell is to do with the wall reported at HY51050064 (though my cursor on Canmap indicates HY51060062), its interior laying virtually across the path and of almost the same dimensions, its presumed walls going across the path and along the edges of the cemetery banks. The entrance (??incurving) seems to be at the eastern side. The curving section of cemetery bank west of the church appears to indicate original broch-type dimensions on the order of ~30m (the Orkney Antiquarian Society chairman observed excavations in the Holm Churchyard and had no doubts as to it being one - "The Orcadian" of March 29th 1923). The arc runs from HY51000062 to HY50990063. If there was a circular feature a slight chord was taken out of the eastern end by the path, in contrast to the eastern end where a larger section is missing. A low wall runs about a metre from the west side of the church, composed of orthostats except at the top end, HY51030064, where a stone appears to exhibit lowenkratzen (I think that is the Continental term for the linear gouges such as seen at St.Magnus Cathedral).
YINSTAY SETTLEMENT HY51SW 2
I took a closer look at Yinstay and can confirm most of what J.W.Cursiter said about the area. The first time I went I saw stones in a recently ploughed field almost diagonally opposite that of the souterrain site.but only paid a cursory glance as I did not know at the time that this was the field referred by him as adjacent. The farmer is ploughing a third of this field at a time. Its southern boundary running roughly E-W not many yards N from the cairn. Today the middle section was being ploughed and is very dark earth. However this does not appear to have any extraneous material. Upon closer viewing of the now dry ploughsoil (HY50881034 to 51021031) from the southern section boundary I could make out some burnt stone and small nuggets of what appears to be pot. The modern cairn also appears to contain at least a couple of burnt stones as part of the infill. This is 2.0m across and 2.0m at its greatest height in an arc facing the road, but only survives to any height for less than a third of the circumference, rapidly tailing off. There isn't much of the red sandstone remaining but the outer wall is certainly mostly built up with broch-style blocks, some obviously carved (especially one with a well chamfered corner), though that this came from its field rather than another in the area is to my mind doubtful. I looked for signs of the souterrain by a field corner but what looked like a prospect (HY50841032) for where the discoverer broke through is at the fence a few yards to the north of the cairn, where by a tall toppled stone there is a slight depression of a few feet in length. Coming down to the road I noticed a water-filled depression (HY509103) that looked like something, but there isn't anything I can point out and it is some distance away.
I took a closer look at Yinstay and can confirm most of what J.W.Cursiter said about the area. The first time I went I saw stones in a recently ploughed field almost diagonally opposite that of the souterrain site.but only paid a cursory glance as I did not know at the time that this was the field referred by him as adjacent. The farmer is ploughing a third of this field at a time. Its southern boundary running roughly E-W not many yards N from the cairn. Today the middle section was being ploughed and is very dark earth. However this does not appear to have any extraneous material. Upon closer viewing of the now dry ploughsoil (HY50881034 to 51021031) from the southern section boundary I could make out some burnt stone and small nuggets of what appears to be pot. The modern cairn also appears to contain at least a couple of burnt stones as part of the infill. This is 2.0m across and 2.0m at its greatest height in an arc facing the road, but only survives to any height for less than a third of the circumference, rapidly tailing off. There isn't much of the red sandstone remaining but the outer wall is certainly mostly built up with broch-style blocks, some obviously carved (especially one with a well chamfered corner), though that this came from its field rather than another in the area is to my mind doubtful. I looked for signs of the souterrain by a field corner but what looked like a prospect (HY50841032) for where the discoverer broke through is at the fence a few yards to the north of the cairn, where by a tall toppled stone there is a slight depression of a few feet in length. Coming down to the road I noticed a water-filled depression (HY509103) that looked like something, but there isn't anything I can point out and it is some distance away.
