The investigation took place on a small island at the mouth of the Drowes River, just 40 metres south of where Bundrowes Castle once stood. Though the castle itself disappeared at least 150 years ago, likely cannibalised for building materials by locals, the archaeological team led by Stephen Gilmore discovered intriguing evidence of past occupation beneath and around a derelict 17th-century cottage on the site.

The excavation revealed multiple layers of history compressed into the island’s soil. In the first trench, diggers encountered a well-preserved cobbled surface, possibly an old farmyard or roadway, carefully laid with beach stones up to 20 centimetres across and embedded in grey clay containing fragments of red brick. More intriguingly, a second trench near the cottage uncovered what appeared to be medieval midden material; a sticky, grey layer rich with charcoal, periwinkles, mussels, and limpets, along with animal bones and a curved piece of iron that might have been a knife blade. Two small pottery sherds found earlier in the investigation proved too worn to date definitively, though they could be either Neolithic Western pottery or everted-rim ware from around 1500 AD, potentially contemporary with the castle’s occupation.

The cottage itself yielded its own mysteries. Built with surprisingly shallow foundations laid directly on topsoil, its walls incorporated well-dressed stones that seemed out of place in such a modest structure, suggesting they might have been salvaged from the nearby castle ruins. Beneath the cottage’s western end, excavators found traces of an organic, charcoal-rich deposit containing pieces of hand-moulded brick, likely dating to the 18th century. While the dig didn’t uncover the dramatic medieval finds the team might have hoped for, it painted a picture of continuous occupation and resourceful reuse of materials, with each generation of islanders literally building upon the foundations of their predecessors.