The Night I Was Eaten By a Pig

Just before the summer holidays of 1996 I was told I urgently needed to make up course credit before Michaelmas. I was required to do six weeks of fieldwork in order to enroll in my third year at Cambridge, which was a bother as I had by that point done fully none. Fortunately, one of my supervisors kindly agreed to let me join an archaeological field project in Denmark for four weeks, followed by two weeks of data inputting back in Cambridge.

The first I knew of this project was when I arrived back in Otley after a 36-hour coach journey home from Prague, only to find a telephone message waiting for me that I was due to be picked up in a mini-bus the following morning and shipped off to Denmark. I brushed my teeth, repacked my bag and after a brief nap was back out through the door on a 36-hour journey to Scandinavia.

It transpired the dig was being held on the small pig-farming island of Als, a rather desolate and isolated place that smelled, quite naturally, of pig shit. The dig was a cross-venture of the Universities of Durham and Southampton, and Jason Freeman was the only other person to come along from Cambridge. From Day 1 there was an obvious schism between the two main camps: Southampton archaeologists were crustys, who liked drinking cider and rolling their own cigarettes; while Durham archaeologists were yah-hoo henrys, who liked drinking wine and talking about their yacht club and ponies. I didn't fall into either group and so tried to be pleasant to everyone, which wasn't easy as they fought like bastards.

We were housed in a small sea-side youth hostel in the tiny hamlet of Hardeshøj, which comprised just two buildings: our hostel and (thank goodness) a pub. I was lucky enough to get a dormitory with only two others: Jason, the ultra-right religious nut I already knew; and Tim, a rather quiet yet dashing ginger gay. Over the course of the trip we together became so impossibly bored that I started holding eating compeitions with my dorm-mates in the middle of the night.

Jason and I would creep down to the kitchen and challenge ourselves to see how much yoghurt we could eat in one sitting. It was a matter of pride that we would together finish every last drop of yoghurt in the fridge, which was a sisyphean task as - seeing how popular yoghurt had been the night before - the trip organisers would order yet more each day. Tim and I would also and separately creep downstairs late at night (Jason hated Tim, unfortunately) for a special Danish fry up. Tim would take charge at the range, heating up a frying pan on each hotplate and then throwing a little bit of absolutely everything into the pans, and then seeing what turned out to be edible. Surprisingly little did, I'm sad to report.

The daytime food was also pretty awful, as the organisers had made the assumption that most of us would be vegetarian, whereas in actual fact only two people in the entire group were. Everyone had to take it in turns to stay home and cook (a great privilege, as it meant you weren't out digging in the dirt), but sadly it transpired that meat eaters in their early 20s are not the best people to ask to prepare dishes based solely around lentils. I recall my own concoction - sausage and lentil casserole - met with particular revulsion.

All this eating was, of course, just a small part of a day which was largely spent toiling in the fields. I spent the first half of the project digging what was believed to be a Bronze Age grave site. They had identified the spot the year before (this was a 30-year project to map the entire archaeology of the island), and the leader was certain that the large flat stones identified were marking graves. It was with some disappointment, then, that our excavation slowly revealed over the fortnight that they were ancient paving slabs with nothing of any consequence beneath them. It was all the more disappointing as this was not a rapid discovery. In archaeology one descends through the dirt a millimetre at a time, often with little more than a sturdy toothbrush to do your work. This was possibly one of the most mind-numbing activities I have ever engaged in.

An even more mind-numbing activity filled the second half of my stay on Als, when we were taught the beautiful art of fieldwalking. Each morning we were driven to a freshly-ploughed field, lined up one metre apart along one boundary and handed a plastic bag. Upon the leaders' instructions, we would then take a single and very dainty step forward every five minutes, spending the intervening time peering at the soil beneath us and trying to determine if we could see anything of much importance.

Fieldwalking was of course tedious when you didn't find anything (it is, after all, just mooching over dirt for 12 hours), but it was even more tedious when you did make a discovery. If you found anything at all, you were required to bag it up and then make a series of notes about its precise location. I could not bear this level of fastidiousness, and so I soon learned that upon finding a flint handaxe or arrow head the easiest possible solution was either to kick it under a convenient sod or - should the opportunity present itself - roll it into my neighbour's patch for them to deal with. The archaeological record of Als probably still show a series of perfectly blank corridors cutting across otherwise artefact-heavy fields.

Thinking back, I recall I did something similar during my excavation work. I had become very trowel-heavy in my frustration, digging through my trench at a centimetre an hour - a fair gallop in archaeological terms - and so was not paying much attention and one day found myself hacking through a piece of ancient pot. I realised that trying to explain the damage I had caused would only lead to a lot of trouble, so I simply hacked the pot into very tiny pieces and threw the lot onto the spoil heap and hoped no one would notice.

We were allowed occasional toilet breaks - the 'facilities' were the far side of the hedge - plus a coffee break in the morning, half an hour for lunch and then a tea break in the afternoon. It was during these periods that we discovered one of the few forms of stimulation during our day: the electric fence. We would take it in turns to hold onto to the wires and giggle as the charge tickled its way through our palms. This is possibly the lowest level to which I have ever stooped.

Naturally, not everyone was as negative as I. Indeed, some of them actually enjoyed archaeology. It was therefore perhaps a shame that of all the days a Danish journalist might visit Hardeshøj to cover our project, they chose to come on a day when I was home on dinner duty. It was up to me and a small Romanian girl from Durham to represent the combined archaeological departments of Cambridge, Durham and Southampton to the world. I still have the clipping, and although it's in Danish I remember very distinctly how angry my supervisor was with what I'd said. "Archaeology is very slow," I recall her translating, "so it's hard to bother doing it properly." Another piece of wisdom was, "I'm not sure what we've found here on Als, but it's certainly not worth talking about in your paper."

We had one day off a week, and it was important we spent it wisely. The youth hostel was next to a small ferry terminal, and we wasted our first day off by taking the ferry back to the mainland and discovering there wasn't a town there either. On future days off we visited the two local towns on the island, the imaginatively named Nordborg in the north and Sonderborg in the south. Sonderborg was by far the most exciting, but was also too distant to be practical. Nordborg had a post office, a bar and a telephone booth, so we spent a lot of time queuing there and taking it in turns to talk to family.

The evenings on a work day were mind-numbing, often spent sitting out in the garden playing stupid games (I recall breaking a game of I Have Never by asking, "Is fucking a dead foal necrophilia, bestiality or paedophilia?", which had the Durham students hooting and the Southampton oiks non-plussed), enjoying massive rows between the two factions, or else going to the tavern next door where a glass of beer could be had for around £4. A girl from Durham - Eleanor - took a particular fancy to me, and declared herself my wife. I generally accepted this, since this meant I had more friends (including the yacht-loving Imogen from the Isle of Wight, and the minor aristocrat Antonia Castor).

Jason left after two weeks to join an altenative dig in Greece, and without my regular yoghurt sessions the constant drag of work soon made me quite depressed. One evening - after field walking in the pouring rain, during which time my boots became caked in so much mud you could have spent four weeks excavating my feet - I found myself again sitting in the miserable bar in Hardeshøj with the Durham crowd, after another huge argument with Southampton, drinking expensive beer and talking crap. I decided I just needed to get away from it all and get some distance, and so I simply walked out of the bar without a word, and walked off down the road and didn't stop until I'd reached Nordborg (only 4.3 miles, according to Google).

I hadn't expected this to cause any trouble at all. I mean, surely it was acceptable to go for a stroll in the evening? Instead, alas, Eleanor became extremely panicked. We had recently learned that a wild boar had escaped from a nearby farm and - while no one had claimed it was dangerous - after an hour of absence Eleanor was convinced the beast had attacked and eaten me. It cannot have taken her more than five minutes to rouse the entire archaeological team and convince them that my mutilated and half-eaten corpse lay somewhere in the dark.

As I returned along the road to Hardeshøj, therefore, I met a large delegation coming the other way. Search parties had been dispatched along the major roads, while others were walking the coast in search of my bloated corpse. I cannot have been gone more that a couple of hours. One of the trip organisers, a kindly and rotund woman, bundled me into her car. "You've caused a lot of trouble," she said. I couldn't help feeling I had caused nothing at all, but I knew it would not help to argue. I returned to Hardeshøj and Eleanor gave me a huge hug.

"I'm glad you weren't eaten by a pig," she said, with greater sincerity than that sentance deserves.

As it happens, the wild boar showed up a few days later. I was washing up dishes in the kitchen, looked out of the window and saw a man apparently pointing a shot gun at me. I screamed, and he aimed and fired. It turned out the pig was on our lawn, and I rushed out to see the poor creature bleeding to death, before a couple of farm hands turned up and together the men bled the creature onto the grass and then cut open its belly and tore out its guts to stop them spoiling the meat. Our lovely lawn - where we had lain chatting in the sun - was turned into a blood-drenched battle field strewn with offal.

We were given free sausages to make up for the trouble.

A few days later I was washing up, looked out of the window and saw three men with machine guns peering at me through the window. I rushed outside to see what was happening and discovered around two dozen fully armed soldiers hiding round the back of the house. I demanded to know what was going on but they weren't allowed to tell me, but they were all rather handsome so I brought out a couple of boxes of wine and a pleasant afternoon was had in the sun. Alas, they were mostly interested in our glamorous Swedish colleague Marika, who specialised in excavating mass graves and had tits like watermelons, so I saw no action that evening.

The field trip seemed to last forever and the Durham crew disappeared home before the final week, so I was left pretty much on my own. During the final week I prayed to Imaginary God every night that time would speed up so I could go home, but alas with so few archaeologists on the team now - and with the Bronze Age graveyard revealed as a patio - the only work to be done was fieldwalking, and so the passing of every day felt like a year.

When I was finally allowed home, I wept with joy. To this day, I cannot pass a freshly ploughed field without wincing.

[Time: Summer 1996]