The Wayfaring Path

When I last wrote I was feeling very anxious about my time on Lindisfarne, and now it’s been two weeks and a massive rollercoaster of a time. In essence, I LOVE the island, I LOVE the dig, but I really REALLY don’t like living in a bunkroom. But nothing is perfect, right?

Warning: I’m complaining a lot in this next paragraph, so feel free to jump straight to the following one!

I’m aware there are bigger problems in the world, and I totally felt the pressure to suck it up and just get on with it, but the longer I’m in the hostel the more exhausted I get. The people are lovely – the staff and other diggers are so interesting and are super nice people – but I just don’t want to share a room and bathroom at this stage of my life. I’ve noticed a sensitivity to noise increasing as I get older (and, weirdly, as I’m starting to lose my hearing a bit), and the walls here are paper thin, so not only can I hear my roomies, I also hear everyone in the rooms either side… and beyond, in the case of the very loud snorers! And it’s just too much for me to be sociable all day and then be surrounded by people all evening and all night too… it’s run my battery down past zero and I realised I just couldn’t do it for a month.

So I’ve decided to leave a bit early, and donate my remaining days so some of the locals can come and be involved in the dig, which is a brilliant solution to a problem I was feeling really stink about. I absolutely adored my two days digging in the trenches, and I really love the work in the Finds room too. When I booked the dig a fortnight at home felt like it went by in the blink of an eye, but what I’ve realised is when you’re doing physical and novel work like this a fortnight is actually quite a long time, so I feel like I’ve had ages here already (in a good way). I’m going to be meeting Regan in Andover, and I even get to see Dad and Gail when they’re in London, which I wouldn’t have been able to do, so that’s just fab! So it’s all worked out brilliantly, and I know for future digs that 1-2 weeks is a good amount of time, and that I need my own accommodation, or to share a house with one of my new archaeology buddies…. but my bunkhouse days are definitely behind me!

My two dig days were in the first week – Monday and Tuesday. I reckon I probably had the two best days weather-wise, but it was very early in the dig (day 3 and 4) so we were still very high up in the site so weren’t really finding much. I had a good time with the mattock, it’s a great tool, you can clear quite a lot of dirt quite quickly! I was suuuuper careful with my back and managed to get through both days without any serious harm, thank goodness! They gave us good training, and I took lots of stretch-breaks.

The bit I was working on had lots of darker patches that looked like burials, plus I kept finding loads of the lovely wee quartz pebbles that people used to place on the graves, so we knew there were burials but sadly I didn’t have enough days in the trench to find them. I did find a random toe bone, but that was the closest I got to a ‘real’ find. But I had such a great time, I loved being part of it and the thrill of potential discovery was very real, even if it came to nothing for me! Today someone who has been coming here for ten years and not found anything found TWO name stones! In one day! Lucky guy! He was stoked, and seemed like a really nice bloke so I’m really glad for him.

Two days was probably a good amount of time in the trench for me as it’s very physical labour! I laid down for a rest each lunch time and straight after work, and tried to keep stretching and hydrating. But of course I didn’t drink enough water and ended up with a crashing headache on the Wednesday. If I was to do that every day for a few weeks I’d end up either completely broken or super fit, I’m really impressed with those who are on site every day, especially in some of the crazy wind and rain we’ve had lately.

Wednesday last week was my first day in the Finds room, and apart from the horrible headache I had a great day. Total change of pace to being in the trench, it’s pretty sedate and chatty and everyone is friendly and interesting to talk to. They started us off on the easy stuff – quartz pebbles and bits of animal bones and pottery. As there wasn’t much coming out of the Lindisfarne trenches yet we were working on finds from other digs this summer – so I’ve handled a fair bit of Roman pottery now, which is so amazing! I was so blown away seeing it in museums at the start of the trip and now I’ve handled it, cleaned it, and then later weighed and counted it too!

After a few days I ‘graduated’ to cleaning human remains, which was so interesting and quite an honour, and I really appreciate how respectful everyone is with the skeletons. They leave them in situ as much as they can, and only lift a body when they want to get scientific analysis done, or if they need to get below the burial layer. The excavation of human bones is done very slowly and carefully, with soil samples taken at the same time. In the Finds room each person’s remains are kept together as much as possible, cleaned at the same time, and once all the analysis is complete they’ll be re-interred on the site. We are also leaving all the quartz pebbles behind too, as they were brought here very deliberately to mark graves of loved or revered people. (I’ll not be posting any photos of human remains publicly, at Dig Venture’s request, and also cos that’s just not cool).

After a few days I was keen to try something different and so they put me on weighing and quantifying the finds, and entering them into the spreadsheet. It’s funny, a big part of what I was looking forward to was being away from a computer and doing “real” work – but I pretty quickly gravitated to the spreadsheet and have now been working the laptop for a good few days! So I’ve realised I’m just a bit of a computer nerd and that’s ok 🙂 I really like working through all the trays of finds and getting them entered into the system, as they aren’t really much use just sitting there without anyone knowing what’s there. It’s not a job that many of the other volunteers really want to do, but I love admin work, and it suits me well. And there’s no competition for it, so that’s good!

I think the main thing I like is that it requires a lot of concentration, which means I’m not sitting and chatting all day, as I was when I was cleaning the finds. The chats are lovely, but if I’m talking all day and then in a social situation all evening, and then not sleeping well then I get very tired very quickly. So by reducing my social interaction during the day and going for long solo walks after work it’s helping, but I’m still struggling. Archaeology is way more social than I expected!

Another thing I was looking forward to about the island was living according to the tides – it’s a tidal causeway that can only be travelled over at low tide, so twice a day the island is cut off. The island businesses generally run their hours by the tides and that all sounds great – until I realised our hours do NOT change with the tides and the coffee house that was open at 9am on Monday isn’t open till 10:30am the next day! So that took some getting used to. It’s amazing how many people come over, the place is crawling with them! And lots of excellent dogs! And then they all vanish and the island is peaceful and serene again.

In my first week I got up early – my body clock was still waking me at 6am – and I shot some lovely footage and even went to morning prayers at St Mary’s church (more by accident than design, but it was still really lovely to be there in the ancient church!). I really adore the old churches, especially the ones where there’s still services happening so they feel alive and part of the community. I love the glass and the art and artefacts, and I really appreciate that there are things in the church that are still being used and revered rather than sitting behind glass in a museum.

In this second week I’m sleeping later – the weather is changing fast and it’s getting a lot colder in the mornings. It’s light later too – really noticeable even in such a short time here. As I write this I just have one more bunk sleep and then I’m off-island on Friday morning. I’ll get a lift up to Berwick-upon-Tweed, take the local bus down to Newcastle, have a night in a hotel, and then on the train to Andover on Saturday. So I’ll see Regan in just two sleeps! Yay! (Update: It’s Sunday and I’m here and it’s so lovely to be together again!)

Ooo speaking of hotels – I had the most wonderful thing happen the other day where a friend who had mis-booked a hotel gifted me the room. It was glorious! Overlooked the abbey ruins and the trenches and felt luxuriously spacious for just me. A double bed! Nobody else in the room! Nobody snoring! My own bathroom! I treated myself to a meal there too, as the bunkhouse meals are pretty carb-heavy and I needed a change. SUCH a great 14 hours! The Crown and Anchor do really great food, and it’s a lovely wee pub that locals and tourists alike crowd into, most of them with dogs in tow! It’s a small space and the first night I went in there, there were EIGHT dogs in the quite tiny bar!

It was this same friend who very kindly took me along for the ride to visit the Poison Garden and Bamburgh Castle on our day off at the end of the first week. The gardens were amazing, and the tour guide in the Poison Garden really brought it to life for us, in a vaguely Sergeant Major kind of way! We didn’t have a heap of time to look around Bamburgh but I got to see The Last Kingdom costumes on display, plus take a good look at some of the many many hundreds of amazing artefacts all in an incredible building – the largest inhabited castle in the UK I think.

So, the island… not only is it a beautiful, wild place; it also has a really cute little village. Lots of old fisherman’s cottages turned into lovely homes – everything made of stone and with lovely ruins and old churches. There’s not a supermarket or anything like that, but the post office will sell you a tin of beans and a nice quiche! There’s a few cafes but if you time it wrong you’re out of luck, so it’s quite different to being somewhere with everything you want whenever you want it. But it’s not too hard to get used to, and we get three meals a day at the bunkhouse, so there’s no reason to go hungry. There’s three pubs, and I’ve had a drink in all of them! Not much of a pub crawl, and I did it over a fortnight!

Last Wednesday night was the most beautiful sunset, that seemed to go on for hours. I had walked up to the northern side of the island, to the navigation triangle at Emmanuel Head. I was out for about four hours in the end, the sky just kept getting prettier and prettier! (but it was very windy!) I took so many photos! I’m going to make a calendar for 2026 of Lindisfarne photos as it’s truly the most photogenic place. I’ve not covered every inch of the island, but I’ve walked over an awful lot of it, and I think I’ve visited every little shop now. I’d love to come back to Northumberland again one day, maybe with a car so I can explore more.

There’s also the priory ruins (it was so amazing to dig in the shadow of the priory!) and a couple of museums, plus the castle too, which I did a super quick whiz around at lunchtime on my last day. The original structure was a fort in Tudor times, and was rescued and redeveloped as a holiday home in the early 20th century – but a lot of the furniture inside is many hundreds of years old. It would have been SUCH a cool place to be invited to, and it sounds like there were lots of amazing dinners and weekends there. Jealous!

Thursday was my last day in the Finds room, and I had a real mix of a day – I cleaned some Roman pottery, then helped two of the students with the ‘flotation’ – essentially breaking down and filtering samples of soil from the site. It was nice to spend the time working together – there’s a group of students on the dig who all seem like great people but they tend to travel in a pack so it’s been hard to get to know them. I really enjoyed chatting with them over the very ‘Heath Robinson’ contraption and hearing about their studies. How exciting to be just starting out! In the afternoon I carefully weighed and counted all the fragments of a skull and packed it into a box. You certainly end up saying weird things when you’re working on a dig like “I hope I find a body today!” but it’s all par for the course I suppose.

I think perhaps it’s a bit unusual to have so many human remains on a dig – I’m not sure, and I assume every site is unique – and I wasn’t upset by the bones and was quite happy to work on them. When they are in the trays or bags they feel quite different to how they are in situ, however. I’ve seen lots of photos of skeletons in textbooks and such, but seeing them in the ground was very moving – unexpectedly so, although thinking about it I think it’s only natural to find it affecting. Seeing how they are lying, how their hands are placed, the angle of their legs – it’s all so very human and weirdly intimate. I’m not sure how I’d have gone doing an excavation of a skeleton, but I like to think I’ve have been good at it.

I hope to be able to do another dig one day, I really loved being part of it and I feel I’ve been useful. I’ve met some amazing people and learned so much – about archaeology and also about myself. I’m keen to see if I’m able to volunteer on digs in the Wellington region, but I’m not sure if non-university people can do that. I think I’ll start with volunteering at a local museum too. I’ve decided that any further study is on the backburner for a few years (unless I win Lotto and can do the Stained Glass Conservation course!) and it’ll be fun to do some work locally, and hopefully come back to the UK every few years and get involved on digs. I think more companies will start using this crowd funding business model – it’s a winner really… having people pay you to then come and work for free! I hope the team have lots more awesome finds, and it’ll be great to see the conclusions they draw from ten years of digs on the Holy Island. But for me, it’s time to be moving on.

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I’ve gotten a bit out of sync with my videos and this blog, so here’s the York Minster video, with some of the fun stories I heard when I was there the other week. I hope you enjoy it, I loved making it! Below is the “family-friendly” version, if you want the original (with Noah’s willy in it) you’ll need to click here.