Springtime is here!

Equinox has happened (we had a belated bonfire due to it being rainy on the night) and the light has come back and the clocks went forward last night and the springtime snows are in full force!

Half the people I talk to tell me that it never snows here and that this is very unusual and the other half tell me that this is nothing and that I should expect more snow than this in future...  After last winter where we had three very mild frosts and that was it I think that it's going to take us a few years to figure out what winters are really like here...

Archaeology

Have been meaning to write about this stone for a while now.  Danny and I found this on a walk out to Start Point lighthouse not long after first moving here.

After spending far too long looking at photos of stones with holes in them on the internet, we decided that it was a fishing weight -- and eventually I got round to take my stone down to the Orkney Museum to show it to an actual archaeologist -- and it seems like we're right!

This is what they had to say:

The perforated stone that you found by Start Point lighthouse is a weight of some kind. It could be a loom weight, but at around 750mm at its longest point it seems a bit small for that. I think that it is more likely to have been used for fishing, either as a net sinker or, to my mind, I think it is a weight for a ‘long line’. This was a very long line with many hooks attached, hundreds and even a thousand or more, which was dropped into the sea from a small boat. The hooks were pre-baited the night before. The age is difficult to know, as these things were used over a very long period of time, from at least the Viking Age to the early 20th century.

So it's entirely possible that we've got a 2500 year old fishing weight sitting on our dining room table...!  Pretty cool....