Newsletter – Issue 146, January 2004
Outings
We will be visiting the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh at 2pm on Wednesday, 25th February. It has a wide range of fascinating exhibits illustrating the history of Surgery over the last few hundred years. I have been told that since I am a fellow of a sister college I can take you in as guests. This means that we will not have to pay for admission.
To give ourselves some leeway I suggest that we meet at 1.45pm outside the college. It is the large building on Nicholson Street that looks a bit like the Parthenon – but it has not lost its marbles!
Previous Projects
As a sort of New Year resolution I tried and, as with most New Year resolutions, failed, to get all our outstanding previous projects written up by the end of 2003. (Outstanding as per the dictionary definition of ‘not yet complete’ as opposed to the alternative definition of ’eminent, remarkable’). Copies of the following are now lodged in the EAFS library: –
Cramond Walled Garden, Lauriston, East Bonhard, Hopetoun, Cramond (beside trench H) and the interim Penicuik report.
Newhailes will follow shortly followed by Pittencrieff.
The copies despatched to Historic Scotland have produced the comment ‘Yours is very much the sort of information needed to help understanding of geophysics on Scottish soils’. I am taking that as reasonably complimentary!
Dig at Eddleston
EAFS members joined with the Peeblesshire Archaeological Society to excavate on the cropmark site that we had previously covered in a ground resistance survey.
Trevor Cowie’s report on the results states, ‘Although differences may be due to the former presence of an enclosure bank, definite traces proved decidedly elusive’. This is a good archaeological euphemism for ‘we did not really find anything’ and is in line with my statement on the last EAFS News ‘the printout was not the clearest ever produced’ – well you can’t win them all.