The promised excavations are finally underway. The head is in favour of a Viking chief's settlement, the traditional view is an early Viking monastery, but they don't rule out something previous http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/scotland_aod... continues...
Coming up on the road from south to Stem Howe with a low autumn sun delineating the various shapes made by the knowes and picking out features on them. The whole is so much sculpted that it is no longer a moraine, if ever it was. Seem to be various levels too. Thought this to be only the upper part but this is an ilusion of time passing sentence on the steeper bits. Partway up the southern edge where it nears the the road the harsh sunlight brings into relief a low ridge, only a couple of feet across a few inches high, forming an edge to the mound as if to stop visitors falling unawares. This looks to stop just where the most man-alters bit starts. I notice it begins at the top end of a twisted rectangular hollow or depression, which doesn't look to be from antiquarian investigation, though possibly a long scoop.
It has been asserted that there are further levels of the broch unexcavated but six foot is all that was found. This is not a greenfield site. Beneath the floor they found clay, vitrified sand and Neolithic potsherds (Grooved Ware and rough Rinyo-Clacton), and the Royal Commision found similar pottery in the kitchen midden [Grooved Ware has been found at Evie Sands by the Broch of Gurness]. Somewhere back on a hill south of the Toab road the descriptio of a tumulus, HY50NW 9, excavated by George Petrie in March 1850 (a 2m cutting from the east edge to the centre) gives us an idea of what likely preceded the broch. This conical barrow stood five feet high and thirty feet across inside a three foot wide shallow ditch. A ring of large burnt stones ran about the periphery of this clay mound. Halfway in the clay darkened and hardened. In the centre Petrie found a "considerable heap" of burnt bones and charcoal bits embedded in the clay in a three inch thick layer. He found no stones there and no tools in the barrow. Perhaps the five vanished Howies of Bossack (at the quarry that is now a tip) were similar. Petrie also dug one of the low flat-topped mounds a few feet away and found a NNE/SSW short cist containing earth and clay with some burnt bone at the bottom, with a celt deposited outside the NNE end. Could this be the nature of the presumed dwellings between Dingishow and the Deerness shore - they have been dismissed as the results of sand quarrying but the 1798 Statistical Account specifically refers to them as "hillocks of stones".