People occasionally ask ‘what’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever discovered? I used to have to think back a decade or two, but no longer. It was last month, May 2026.
This year’s dig is over and I’m home, fully scrubbed clean, with bruises and scrapes fading. My friends and I have been digging on Alderney every year since 2007, with an understandable break in 2020. Our initial focus was on the Roman fort at the Nunnery, which I’ll be writing a blog about in the autumn. Chance discoveries in an electric trench led to our attention shifting to nearby Longis common, sandy scrub that fills a bowl behind the sweep of Longis Bay.
Last year I wrote about ‘Life on the Dig’ and it was much the same experience, based within the Nunnery Roman fort again, with a gorgeous view of France at dawn. Except this year it wasn’t quite as gorgeous; murky mornings, rainy spells and cold wind took the fun off several days. Strange to think we were just a week away from a record-breaking heatwave. I was hoping for a dry spring as our 2024 excavation on the common struck the water table at the same point we found the floor of a Roman building.
The Dig Alderney team divided its efforts this year. My task was to carry out a test-trenching exercise on the common with two or three colleagues assisting. We know there is a Roman settlement there but are not sure exactly what it was, or how extensive it was. Other questions included how deep below the surface did the remains lie, and where was the water table this May? We attacked the problem methodically, planning small ‘test trenches’ at specific points where a ground penetrating radar survey had indicated there might be structures under the ground – ‘geophys’ for Time Team fans.
The common sits on sand several metres deep, interrupted by layers of human activity going back in time. Part way down in the first two trenches we came to a nicely preserved medieval ploughsoil, complete with marks left by the plough. Below that was ‘dark earth’ replete with Roman pottery. Dark earth is often found spread over a Roman site, a final layer of rubbish and decay after the buildings were abandoned. Unfortunately we also found water, little over a metre down, which at least answered one question.
The third trench was slightly higher up the slope, it still had the ploughsoil and the dark earth but below that was the line of a Roman wall. Water flowed in to spoil our delving deeper but we now know the depth and direction of the wall if we come back in a dry summer. All three trenches added points on the map we’re building up of this settlement.
We were very excited to retrieve a sherd of Merovingian Frankish pottery from the dark earth. This is incredibly rare in the Channel Islands and shows our ‘Roman’ site continued to be inhabited into the sixth century. It would have been the highlight of the dig, but….
Trench six (we skipped two) was much further upslope, again chosen on the basis of ‘geophys’ but with hope we wouldn’t hit water so early. No ploughsoil this time, but the dark earth seemed humped over some Roman structure now destroyed. Scattered stones were removed one by one but gave no clue as to what had once been there.
One stone stuck stubbornly through the dark earth and our youngest team member was cleaning the soil away from around it. I retold an old digger’s anecdote of my second excavation as a student when I was clearing a layer containing a stone that size and unwisely tried to prize it out with my trowel – I broke my trowel, and it turned out to be a huge block of masonry. By the next day the yarn felt eerily prescient.
Down and down went the stone. The dark earth was gone, coming onto what looked like a floor of hard-trampled sand and debris. By now we started referring jokingly to the ‘menhir’ sticking 20 centimetres proud of the Roman surface. I was working with three of my long-standing colleagues and we all took turns in trowelling down the sand in front of the stone.
Wait…is that a face?
Perhaps it is in the eye of the beholder, but our stone appears to have a face. It’s looking downhill, to the south-east, to the sea. The lower parts of the stone have been squared off, the edges have been trimmed but the front and back looked natural. Joking subsided – was this actually a menhir, a standing stone? Without getting too carried away it could have been no more than a boundary marker if not something as unromantic as a gatepost.
After the hard sand was gone, we were into soft wind-blown sand with Roman pot finds fading away, then just one piece of Iron Age pot, then finally we hit water. We established the stone stood to at least 1.2 metres, but had not reached the base, which was clearly somewhere down in prehistoric levels. Its back was left unexcavated so we – or future archaeologists – can return in a dryer month.
Had there been a face before the centuries took their toll? Had the stone been selected because its natural shape vaguely resembled a face? A left eyebrow, a nose and a suspiciously straight mouth can be discerned, with damage where the right eye should have been. Lower down is perhaps the suggestion of a belly. The very top of the stone may have been pecked to give a dished appearance, perhaps stylised hair or a crown. If this is a statue-menhir it’s an incredibly rare discovery for modern times. Alderney keeps on surprising us.
We were very excited, yet tempered this with cold scientific logic. The face may in fact be a trick of the eye, the product of tired imaginations on the final day of the final test trench. It deserves further investigation with a larger trench in a dryer season, knowing now what we’re looking for. The top of the stone is approaching a metre below ground level and on private land so there was no more we could do but precisely record its position, protect it, then bury it in sand once more. The mystery is back below the ground, waiting.
Please note; this is not a formal archaeological report on the discovery and images are copyright Jason Monaghan. We will be writing up the report for publication in the coming year and doing further research.
The larger part of the team went uphill to the site known as Whitegates with Dr Phil de Jersey to investigate the extent of prehistoric activity there – these excavations are described on the Guernsey Archaeology Youtube channel. More images from both projects can be found on the Dig Alderney Facebook page.
And now for the fiction. Jeffrey Flint never found a menhir, but it didn’t keep him out of trouble…
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