Solway: A Wet Weekend’s Walking
This weekend Ellie and Natalia headed down to the Solway Coast to meet some brave volunteers and look at some sites between downpours. On Friday, we met local county archaeologist Andrew Nicholson and coastal ranger Nic Coombey, who took us to a few fantastic sites...
Loch Paible Final Week
Our third and final week Throughout week 3, the moon was getting bigger - which meant that as each day passed, the sea started to creep up on our trenches. At the beginning of the week, the high tide reached the lowest of our trenches; but by the end of the week, all...
Loch Paible Week 2
Digging on a beach certainly isn’t easy! Last week, we battled spring tides, which filled our excavation trenches with water twice a day. However, the pattern of tides changes quickly over a month - and in the second week the reach of the tide was 2 metres lower than...
Orkney: our wettest, windiest and busiest ShoreUPDATE yet
Hello from Orkney, where we’ve spent an amazing couple of weeks exploring eroding coastlines, and encountering world class archaeology in the best company of our SCHARP volunteers and new friends. It’s been the busiest, blowiest and wettest ShoreUPDATE trip yet, and...
Wind, waves and eroding heritage on the Western Isles
The SCHARP team are all out and about on the Western Isles at the moment; Tom, Natalia and a small team of archaeologists are in North Uist, excavating an eroding peat shelf at Loch Paible with local volunteers from Access Archaeology, while Jo and Ellie are in Lewis,...
Exchanging local knowledge in the Forth
Saturday saw the SCHARP team deliver a ShoreUPDATE training day in Falkirk, in the grand surroundings of Callendar House. Notwithstanding the regular gunshots outside the window (just the starting pistol for the races of the Scottish National Cross Country...
ShoreUPDATES on the Solway Firth
Last week we had another taste of the beautiful, historically fascinating shores of the Solway Firth. Our first ShoreUPDATE day in the area was in Stranraer Museum where volunteers got to grips with the Sites at Risk Map and used it to explore the local coast, aided...
ShoreUPDATE, Cromarty Firth
Firth foreshores may not be as dramatic or as exposed to the waves as open coasts, but there are treasures to be discovered along their muddy shores. On Tuesday, members of the North of Scotland Archaeology Society got to grips with ShoreUPDATE in what couldn’t be a...
Exploring the heritage of the Inner Forth
We're planning several ShoreUPDATE events around the Forth, and since there's no substitute for firsthand knowledge of an area, the SCHARP team spent a day exploring the landscape and heritage of the Inner Forth. There are lots of interesting sites around the river...
Happy New Year!
We hope everyone had a great festive period! We had an inspiring day yesterday in great company with the chair of Save Wemyss Ancient Caves Society and laser scanning and photogrammetry specialists from across the UK to discuss project ideas for the caves. As the sea...
Our first ShoreUPDATE training day
On Saturday we ran our first training event with young people from St Andrews student archaeology society. This not only provided us with a chance to practice our planned activities on guinea pigs and get some feedback, but gave us all a chance to go and explore the...
Fieldtrip to Wemyss Caves
At the end of last week, we went on a trip down the coast to a series of caves on the beach at East Weymss. The caves are best known for housing a spectacular array of Pictish carvings, and we were overwhelmed by what we saw. Jonathan's Cave (named after a 19th...