It’s quiet…too quiet. Yes this blog has been silent for the last month because I’ve been away from home and didn’t want any of the cat burglars or nervous insurance underwriters who follow it to know. On the first of May, Dig Alderney’s team of volunteers started to excavate a large Roman building. We’d explored the north-eastern part of it in 2018-19 and wanted to find out what was happening at its south-east and western ends.
It rained, then the sun shone, and the wind blew in from the sea as it often does on the island of Alderney. We could see the French coast just nine miles away from the dig site and the Romans were here because coastal shipping could use the bay at Longis as a refuge. Pirates would know this too, so in the late fourth century the Empire built a fort to protect it. Just before the pandemic stopped operations, we began to find proof that an extensive settlement once spread across the common behind the fort, built over the top of an Iron Age cemetery and now buried under a metre of sand.
After three weeks of getting hot, wet and dusty (often at the same time) we found parts of three rooms of the building. To one side was a pavement, to the other was two courtyards – or one courtyard with a dividing wall. What surprised us was the very late date of the coins and pottery we found- this building was fourth century like the fort. What alarmed us was the very high water table after two wet winters. At only 1.2m below ground, this was exactly where the Roman land surface had been, turning the dig into a muddy exercise involving pumps, sponges and bucketing out.
Once showered and almost clean in the evenings, I commandeered the table in the dig house and wrote up the project as we went along. First comes the ‘archive report’ in which every piece of relevant information about the dig is written up in exhaustive and pretty tedious detail. It records the site for posterity, because excavation is destruction; a site is a cake that can only be eaten once. Later this data will be distilled down into an article that people might actually be interested to read. Meantime there has been a stream of press releases to write, daily social media posts and enquiries from journalists to answer.
The site is in a wifi blackspot and mobile phones chime ‘welcome to France”, but from the dig house I could keep in touch with my publisher Level Best over the progress of editing Blackshirt Rebellion. More news to come on that soon. A specialist non-fiction press is also in contact about the definitive book on the Roman fort excavations, which I’ll return to once I return physically to my desk.
And for relaxation? Ahead of the UK Crime Book Club panel on Archaeology and Crime on June 8th I read Susan Parry’s Death Cart, followed up by an advance copy of Fiona Veitch Smith’s The Pyramid Murders. I am of course starting work on the next writing project (top secret) of which 20,000 words has been written in various hotels, trains and airports over the past two months.
Just for variety I escaped the dig for a few days to attend Crimefest 2024, which involved four flights of which one was cancelled causing much angst and anger amongst my fellow passengers. Crimefest was its usual merry mix of panels, in-person interviews and socialising with fellow writers and has already been covered in many blogs. The sartorial challenge was that I had packed for a four-week trip, mostly on an archaeological excavation, with only a 20kg luggage limit that had to accommodate all my drawing and surveying gear, trowel and battered hat. My ‘smart casual’ was rather more ‘scruffy casual’, accompanied by scabbed knuckles and gravedigger fingers for added verisimilitude as an archaeologist.
So now it’s back to reality. Or perhaps digging and writing and writing about digging from a hotel dressing table is the reality.
For more on the excavation follow the Dig Alderney Facebook page.
Read more about UK Crime Book Club Live Here.