Serendipity and Archaeology do mix!

On Thursday morning (that’s Day 9 to LOM training dig enthusiasts) we received a forwarded email from an amateur photographer, Dean Barkley, who carries out low level aerial photography using a quadcopter rigged with a digital camera and was keen to work with archaeological sites.

With a remarkable stroke of coincidence Dean lives in Manston, a short distance form our site and we took a chance on emailing him to see if he would like to visit and photograph our site. Dean visited on Friady morning to show us the equipment but we faced the slight problem that our site was directly under the flight path of Manston airfield, as you will have seen from previous posts. Flights with such an aircraft would not be allowed in the flight path without permission. The good news was that after negotiating with Manston Operations, the control tower did give Dean permission for a flight on Saturday morning which resulted in some stunning images of the excavation. It made all the hard work to clean the site for our final photographs worthwhile and rounded off two weeks with a spectacular flourish.

One could say it put the icing on the cake, but that talent lay elsewhere on Friday and provided us with a few preliminary spectacular flourishes!