Orkney's hidden stone circle?

Hello, and welcome to the Time Team podcast with Helen Geake and Martyn Williams, and it's a busy old podcast this week.

I have been to see our very own Meg Russell on a site in Dorset.

You'll learn about some exciting discoveries at an extremely important place for English history.

And later, Jackie McKinley's gonna be here.

She's, uh, she's packing, ready to go to Orkney, where the Time Team dig at the Ness of Brodgar is already underway.

And right now, Time Team members on Patreon can watch our brand-new film about the geophysics that we did at the Ness, and that ends with some remarkable geophysics images.

It's very, very exciting stuff, Helen.

Yes.

Now, John wouldn't tell us anything about what he had found, so I had no idea what I was going to see when I opened up the image, and what I, in fact, saw was a very geometrically perfect circle.

There seemed to be about a dozen or maybe 15 stone settings or, or at least blobs that look like you could have put a, a stone in each one.

Now, they don't seem to be evenly spaced, so there might be more that we haven't been able to see at this resolution, but there do seem to be kind of two main gaps.

Now, either one of those could be an entrance maybe.

Remarkably, also, there's an anomaly right in the middle, right in the center.

What is that? Once you can drag your mind away from this very perfect circle, you can see some smaller alignments that look a bit like smaller circles and less perfect circles.

As far as I can see, this is an extraordinary and perfect set and something that we never knew about before.

I mean, this is gonna be years of work to try to work out exactly what every bit of this geophysics means.

Yeah, well, you can certainly tell why John was so keen to get Time Team to Orkney to dig that site.

It could, by the way, be nothing.

We just don't know, and that's the most exciting thing about it all.

I think all of us before have been tricked into, uh, particularly circular things.

The trouble with an area that feeds cattle is that you get circular cattle feeders, and it doesn't take very long for the cattle around the circular cattle feeders to produce something that is very obvious in the landscape, in an aerial photograph or on the ground, but this is geophysics.

I mean, geophysics doesn't lie, does it, Martin?

[laughs] Well-

And if John is excited, it's gotta be something real.

Well, that's it.