Britain at Low Tide – Behind the Scenes
The second series of Britain at Low Tide (Channel 4) features two episodes filmed in Scotland, and the programme is a great opportunity to show off some of our stunning Scottish coastal archaeology. But how do programmes like this get made? The first episode features...
Scotland’s Coastal Heritage at Risk: A Model of Volunteer Involvement in the Research and Management of a Threatened National Resource
This article was originally written for the January 2018 edition of the Society of American Archaeology's magazine the Archaeological Record, and is reproduced here so that non-members can read it. Joanna Hambly, University of St Andrews Introduction Climate change...
Uncovering the hidden heritage of Higgins Neuk
Last month saw us return to Higgins Neuk for our third season of investigation. Building on 30 years of historical research by John Reid, we were on the hunt for Scotland’s 16th century royal dockyards. John has made a convincing case that the second of the two...
A medieval Royal dockyard at the Clackmannanshire Bridge?
If you crossed the Clackmannanshire Bridge one weekend in early October, you might have seen clusters of people, conspicuous against the green and brown of the salt marsh in yellow, hi-visibility vests. Guided by experts from the Universities of Stirling, Oxford and...
Submerged forests and fishing heritage in the Western Isles
In May, we were happily again in the Western Isles discovering new places with new friends and revisiting familiar sites with old ones. We were lucky to spend time on Barra with Calum McNeil, local genealogist, retired fisherman, boat builder and font of knowledge...
Pettycur’s 17th century storm-wrecked harbour revealed
In October 2015, shifting sand at Pettycur beach near Kinghorn in Fife revealed the outlines of a stone structure on the beach. The site is well-known locally. A cannon was discovered here in the 1990s, and small parts of the structure periodically emerge from the...
Storms reveal a shipwreck burial, a new broch and a wheelhouse in Channerwick, Shetland
We start our story in December 2012, when winter storms exposed a male human skeleton awkwardly squashed into a too small grave at the foot of the coast edge in Channerwick, Shetland. Investigation of the remains was commissioned by Historic Scotland, and radiocarbon...
A broch blog
Brochs are amongst the most spectacular of eroding coastal archaeology, and in the course of SCHARP, we have seen and recorded quite a few of them. Many thousands of these towers of the Iron Age would once have been an impressive sight along the coasts of Northern...
Recording Loch Ryan’s flying boat base, RAF Wig Bay
The RAF Wig Bay ShoreDIG got underway in March with the survey of the remains of the flying boat base. Set up in 1942, this was Britain's main wartime base for the maintenance of flying boats. It specialised in converting American-built Catalinas to RAF standards and...
Wemyss Caves 4D continues…
The Wemyss Caves are once again at the centre of a digital whirlwind. Thanks to funding from Fife Council, Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund, teams from the York Archaeological Trust, (YAT), SCAPE, and the Save the Wemyss Ancient Caves Society (SWACS)...
Findhorn Bay Zulus
Scattered along the Culbin edge of Findhorn Bay lie the remains of at least 35 large wooden fishing boats. These are extremely rare survivals of the once common mighty Zulu herring drifter. Today only a single Class 1 Zulu survives in the Scottish Fisheries Museum in...
A blog post from Uist – the view from SCHARP volunteers.
The visits to Uist by team members from the SCHARP and ACCORD project to carry out training in their respective surveying techniques a few weeks apart in the early autumn of 2014 proved a useful juxtaposition of events for Access Archaeology members Simon Davies,...
Remembering the Flying Boat Base at Wig Bay, Loch Ryan
The latest ShoreDIG at Wig Bay, Loch Ryan, has its roots at the start of the SCHARP project. It was nearly two years ago that the SCHARP team first visited Wig Bay, Loch Ryan for one of the first ShoreUPDATE training events of the project. This is a landscape of the...
The Newshot Ship Graveyard Part 2: A very special vessel
Amongst the mud punts and the schooners at Newshot Island was one very unusual looking boat. Made of metal, the vessel, when seen from above, had a distinctive chamber at the back (to get a better view, click here and zoom in on Eddie Martin’s aerial image). The Clyde...
The Newshot Ship Graveyard Part 1: The Mystery of the Burned Schooners
While looking at Google Earth, a sharp-eyed SCHARP volunteer spotted numerous wrecks on the foreshore of the Clyde near the Erskine Bridge. A search on Canmore, the national online database of buildings and archaeological sites, revealed that the “remains of several...