Today we started out with our guide for the day crawling down a manhole for a stormwater drain to grab a bunch of naturally accumulating yellow boy from the area aquifer. It precipitates out at the drain exit creating a wonderful red/orange slop. This was also right next to his garden that had the biggest strawberry plants I have ever seen. No connection though you can be sure..the strawberries are the product of years of experience from his former career as a farmer and great looking compost. He also happens to compost everything…even soils.We also visited areas where resettlement projects took place in the 1800's tht resukted in small subsistence farm operations called crofts. These were very obvious over by Loch Ussie (below image).
Sat. I am helping with a regional training for a soils instructional schematics that Stirling has developed to assist archaeologists in describing soils. It is called SASSA and would be of great use in the United States. The program on Sat. is being run for regional hobby archaeologists (you would think they are professionals with the knowledge and experience though).Our regional guide who has been instrumental in setting up the program with Stirling on Sat. was a fabulous guide of the history of the area. We looked at ruins extending from Bronze age settlements to the Victorian. Many of these have been greatly disturbed by regional forestry planting operation that used D9 Caterpillar sized dozer with giant chisel on the back to rip a fragipan that extends across many areas of the region. Operators of the units were not from the region and often drive right through the ruins as tey were plowing the area before tree planting. The result in the area has been severe disturbance to many old ruins. Today this does not happen since firms are required to hire an archaeologist to flag ruins prior to operations.
The amount of organic material in the region is amazing. No wonder plants grow so well here. Fabulously rich soils with wonderful loam to sandy loam textures.Wow...we saw organic lamallae today. Very cool for a soil scientist. These are waves of organic material that have moved down through a sandy soil material in sharp demarcations. Very pretty and interesting.
One of the evening stops did result in me picking off 70 nasty little ticks that might harbor lymes disease. Yes they have it here too. So I have been double checking the last several hours and all clear so far.
Today we spent time near Loch Ussie. The area is encompassed by typical glacial dead ice topography so one will see eskers, fluvial drainage channels, etc. In the area to we saw an old craggen (man made small island in a Loch as a defense), a vitrified wall (right) that was part of a fort (the wall was fired wood and stone). The wall was really interesting. I posed a method of creation that they had not heard of before and thought might work. The wall was first built of stones and timbers and then somehow burnt so hot that the material turned to slag. In Pennsylvania we see this a lot near our old furnaces. I thought that perhaps the people had packed the walls with charcoal on the out side and then fired the structure to get the temperatures high enough to create the virtification. One for the Mythbusters! You heard it here first though.Dinner was back in town this evening at the Red Poppy. Very tasty lamb and fried brie with some Chilean cabernet. Not bad after the chilly Highlands…perhaps not the stuff of Sean Connery but who said I was Sean Connery. Off to find Conner MacCloud of the clan MacCloud…
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