I've had been really lucky to work on some amazing excavations, be that in a Medieval urban context or in a rural or dryland rural context but Drumclay is going to stand out. It was like being on fire for nine months. The whole thing, from start to finish, was just it was something I could never have dreamt of being involved in and yet, it was something I had waited 25 years to do.

One of the most, I suppose, in a way, dramatic things about Drumclay crannog is its longevity. The crannog dates from around the 6th 7th century to about the 17th century - so for about a thousand years. Crannogs that have been excavated in the past and particularly Medieval crannogs tend to have much shorter time spans or lifespans but the thing about Drumclay is that once it was established they did keep coming back to it.

We worked down from the latest levels of occupation all the way down to the start of occupation at this particular site and as we made that journey, we uncovered house upon house upon house - the remains of their buildings - the remains of their fires. We recovered the everyday items they used in their homes. We recovered their rubbish because effectively the crannog was a giant compost heap. So if you can imagine a giant midden full of the things people used on a daily basis and the things that they threw away and there's some things that they had kept for a long time and may have lost - we found all of those things.

You saw this mini village almost, on a lake in Fermanagh and every time we went back out into that site you got a new picture. So every day there was almost a new personality or every few weeks the site had a different personality. So for like, towards the top of the site it seemed very late, it seemed that there was only perhaps possibly one house, so a very small number of people living on it but as we moved further down all of a sudden we'd be dealing with these horizons where it looked like the carpenter ruled, you know and then the week after that, it was clearly all the finds are indicating that weaving had become very important. So for those few weeks, you just imagine women collecting and processing wool and dyeing wool to create the clothes that they wore on the site and then as soon as that you got used to it feeling like a site full of weaver's it became a site full of cooper's because the remains of the barrels that were never finished or entire barrels or their barrel staves would appear and the site seemed to take on personalities as we went back in time - very much in terms of led by the types of objects we were finding. We recovered around five and a half thousand individual objects and of that number, just over three thousand represent pottery fragments, so individual sherds of pots.

The level of preservation was just extraordinary and like you'd peel back a layer of the peaty material and you could find bracken that looked like had been taken down from the hills the day before - but it hadn't - it had been sat there for six, seven hundred years because it been used in the insulation of in the walls of the houses and that kind of preservation is not something you see you don't see the electric colour is left in leaves after two weeks let alone a thousand years and we did and so that felt I think, that brings you very close to those people in the past, when you get to touch and feel and actually see the same colours and the same materials they saw every day and it's still survived.

I think it's likely that Drumclay is going to become the key type site for our understanding of crannogs in Ireland because the record that was produced and the finds that were recovered and the nature of the material and the nature of the techniques used in the excavation means we have an unparalleled record and that will just feed into our understanding of early Medieval Ireland like nothing else has before.