Digging for Britain (2010) s08e02 Episode Script
North
The United Kingdom has
an epic history
and a wealth of secrets
still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds
of archaeologists dig, dive,
and sieve to find clues to
add to the great historical jigsaw
of our ancestors' lives.
You know when people say, "What's
the best thing you've ever found?"
Guys, this!
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered some
astonishing finds
and made some truly
ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow! Look at that!
Each team of archaeologists has been
armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record
their discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant! Dave, I love you!
Our roving archaeologist, Dr Naoise
Mac Sweeney is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at? It's royal.
I will be inviting the teams
to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful!
In this episode, we're in the north
of the British Isles.
The north of Britain is stuffed
full of history and archaeology,
from Neolithic settlements on Orkney
to Hadrian's Wall,
from a Viking capital in York to a
king buried in a Leicester car park.
I'm here on the banks of Loch Ness,
close to Culloden,
the site of the last great battle
of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745.
We'll join digs
right across the north,
as archaeologists search for
a long-lost Viking drinking hall,
discover Roman treasure
hidden in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery,
and reveal evidence
of our ancestors' deepest fears.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
Our first dig takes us to the
childhood home of Britain's
shortest reigning monarch.
She was a first cousin of
Henry VIII's son Edward VI and she
was on the English throne in 1553,
from the 10th to the 19th of July.
She's known as the
Nine Days Queen, Lady Jane Grey.
In the Leicestershire countryside
lies Bradgate Park
850 acres of stunning
rugged landscape.
This ancient estate was the family
seat of Britain's often
forgotten monarch, Lady Jane Grey,
who's believed to have lived
here as a child.
Professor Richard Thomas and his
team from Leicester University are
excavating within what remains
of the estate's main building,
Bradgate House.
This is thought to have been one of
the first unfortified aristocratic
houses in England, dating
back to the early 16th century.
Richard is looking for evidence
that could support that early date
and the long-held theory that
this was indeed the childhood
home of Lady Jane.
There's very little
information about Bradgate House,
both in terms of the written
record and in terms of images.
But we know next to
nothing about the house,
as it looked in the 16th century.
Lady Jane was born in 1536.
The great niece of King Henry VIII,
she was raised as
a devout Protestant.
Before Henry's son
King Edward VI died,
he declared that his first cousin,
Lady Jane, should succeed him.
She was proclaimed Queen at just 16.
But England was in the middle
of a power struggle.
There was a lot of turmoil
over different religious sides,
so Henry VIII sets up
the Church of England,
but there's still quite a strong
Catholic following in England at the
time, so there was a lot of tension
between the two sides, if you like.
Lady Jane's aunt,
Mary Tudor, was a Catholic
and Mary's followers were
determined to see her on the throne.
Just nine days after Lady Jane was
declared Queen, she was deposed,
locked up in the Tower of London
and eventually executed.
At the dig, the team have made
an unexpected discovery.
It looks like the large upstanding
brick building was
constructed over something older.
I'm standing at the moment
inside a room
and inside that room,
we've got this other brick structure
that's over on my left-hand side
and it's got a tiled
surface behind me.
And what this is
is a fireplace and we can tell that
because we've got fire-cracked tiles
that belong to the hearth.
It's beginning to look a little
bit like a kitchen structure.
But as they excavate further, they
realise it's not just a kitchen.
It's the foundations of another
entire house, predating the larger
brick building which has always been
assumed to be Lady Jane's home.
What do you think this structure is?
Well, potentially,
this might be a garderobe, which is
the medieval word for a toilet.
Garderobes were the luxury loos
of the Tudor era, a room with a seat
connected to a shaft that dropped
waste into a moat or drain below.
Only the wealthiest
households had one.
After getting all the rubble out,
we have found 600-year-old
excrement and so forth.
Does it smell? It does.
It has a strange smell
that you can't really compare
to anything else.
That is a bloody big drain!
The team want to pin down
the date of this mystery building.
As the days pass,
they discover tantalising traces
of the people who lived here,
including what they ate.
From our excavations,
we can work out what
kind of animal it's come from,
so things like peacocks, some marine
fish and some other exotic animals.
And of course, because we're
in the middle of a deer park,
we know that they are eating
quite a lot of venison.
We've got
quite high status living here.
The team also find evidence
that this was a religious household.
So, I think
one of my favourites has been this.
It's got a decoration
on that appears to
be Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden.
And then you've got the apple tree
and then you can see the snake,
curling around the trunk
of the tree.
Known as a pilgrim badge, tokens
like this often depicted
Biblical stories or saints
and were worn by the devout.
This land was owned by the Grey
family long before Lady Jane
was born, but it's not yet clear
which generation of Greys
lived in this earlier structure.
The team are looking for clues
to show exactly
when this older building was in use
and halfway through the dig,
they have a breakthrough.
This morning,
when we were clearing away
some of the demolition layer
in this area, however,
we uncovered a sovereign penny,
minted during the reign
of Henry VIII, so we don't know
the exact date of minting,
but somewhere between 1509 and 1547.
That's important cos that gives us
a date somewhere in the sort
of early to mid 16th century.
We can say with some degree
of confidence that these walls
came down sometime in the first
half of the 16th century.
This tiny coin suggests the older
building was in use
when Lady Jane was a child.
Richard now believes that these
older foundations,
not the upstanding ruins,
are what's left of the childhood
home of England's Nine Days Queen.
I've asked Richard to come
and explain more about this
exciting new revelation.
So, where's that
kind of mythology come from,
that what you see above ground
was her house?
We've got historical records
that tell us that the
standing room is where
she spent her childhood.
And we'd always assumed that this
traditional narrative, that the
standing room you see,
the brick structure, was her house.
When we started the project,
we had absolutely no idea that we'd
be discovering an earlier house
and that the upstanding structure
would turn out to be later,
so it was completely unexpected. So,
you've got some of the finds here.
How do those relate to this
building?
Yeah, so we knew we had this earlier
building,
but what we really needed
is something that gives us
an absolute date for
when it was in use.
And the coins have been really,
really helpful in helping us
to determine those dates
and this is a coin, silver coin,
that was minted
at the Tower of London
and it was minted
somewhere between 1544 and 1547.
She was born in 1536, so
potentially, she's eight years old,
running around Bradgate House,
at the time the coin is
dropped on this floor surface.
And then it becomes sealed
by another floor surface later on.
So, we're getting this glimpse
of a moment where there's this
little girl running
round in the house,
her great uncle is on these
coins, and she has got no
conception at all that she will
eventually end up on the throne.
Absolutely none, whatsoever.
What else have we got here?
Some objects that tell us
a little bit about everyday
life in the house, perhaps?
Yeah, this is a small
fragment of a hand-painted jug.
And the jug will have
come from the Netherlands,
so it's what we call tin glazers,
commonly known as majolica ware.
But what's nice is it's
a very small fragment,
but it's got a motif
of the Passion of the Christ.
Hang on a minute.
There's a pillar with a spiral
and then a sort of fan-like
arrangement over here.
How do you know that this
is meant to be
something about the Crucifixion?
So, yeah, thankfully, we've got
complete vessels where we can
actually see what the entire
picture looks like.
But what we've got here
is this pillar.
That is the pillar where Jesus
was whipped.
And then we can see the fan you're
referring to, that is the whip.
And again, it's telling us
lots of different stories.
It's telling us
about trade connections,
it's telling us about their status,
to be able to afford these,
you know, luxury imports,
but it's also telling us
again about that centrality
of religion to daily life.
And what about Lady Jane Grey
herself?
Do we know where she ended up?
Where was she buried?
Because she was of royal descent,
she gets executed at the Tower
of London and so her body,
she's supposed to have been buried
in one of the chapels at the Tower.
So, of course,
all sorts of local legends that the
body was spirited back to Bradgate
and was re-buried, but we have no
expectation that was the case.
And why do we not call her
Queen Jane?
Yeah, it's really interesting
why she's still Lady Jane Grey.
The reason is cos
although she was proclaimed Queen,
she never had a coronation.
So it's effectively a technicality
that we don't call her Queen Jane.
It's just extraordinary, isn't it?
She had no idea when she was
a little girl that she would
end up sitting on the throne.
And then,
she's on the throne for nine days
and that is effectively
a death sentence.
Yeah, at age 16. Yeah.
It's a real tragic story.
Now we travel to Northern Ireland,
where archaeologists have
discovered the cemetery
of a Victorian workhouse.
Now, the 19th century was a pivotal
time in Irish history,
a time of great hardship for many,
where poverty
and disease were made even
worse by the Great Famine.
Our roving archaeologist Naoise Mac
Sweeney joins the excavation.
I've come to the small
County Down town of Downpatrick,
where archaeologists are excavating
on the site of a Victorian
workhouse, built in 1842.
By the mid 19th century,
there were almost 2,000 workhouses
across the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland.
They were designed to house
and feed the poor,
in exchange for hard,
physical labour.
In Downpatrick,
the land connected to the poorhouse
is now needed for access to
a new school, but the site contains
the workhouse's cemetery,
so a specialist archaeological team
has been brought in to excavate
and document the burials before they
can be carefully reinterred nearby.
I'm with osteoarchaeologist
Bethany Johnson to find out what
she's discovered about the people
who died here.
These are people from the workhouse.
Is there anything we can
tell about the bones at this stage?
As we're taking the bones out,
it has become quite obvious that
forgetting how they're actually
preserved in the ground,
they're not as robust as you
would like.
These people were malnourished,
the bones sort of reflect that.
The poor in Ireland relied almost
solely on the potato to survive.
In 1845, an aggressive plant
pathogen, known as the blight,
decimated crops throughout
the country.
This was the beginning
of the Great Famine.
The potato blight stretched
workhouses like these to the limit.
That would have been quite limited,
really.
And they probably weren't actually
meeting their calorific needs.
Documenting all the individuals
buried here has been
especially difficult
because many of their remains have
been found mixed together.
So, Bethany, can you just tell us
what we've got here?
Here, we have an exposed grave cut
with at least two individuals,
so you can see we've got two
skulls at the top end here,
one lying on top of the other,
and then we have the rest of the
bodies basically intermingling.
So, were these two
buried in a single grave?
What's happening is
the coffins are actually
collapsing in on top of each other.
So, two coffins stacked on one
another. Exactly.
The wood rots and then the skeletons
fall through. They fall through.
They've actually been buried
with dignity.
Somebody's made the effort to
They are and it would have been
really important for the people,
that they knew that they
were actually
going to be buried in a coffin.
So, what's the kind of maximum depth
that they've been stacked?
Just in the far corner here,
I think we had eight individuals.
Eight? Yes.
The higher stacks show
that at a certain point,
the death rate accelerated rapidly,
beyond even famine levels.
The cause was known as famine fever.
In 1847, just two years after
the famine struck, a deadly
combination of relapsing fever and
typhus ripped through Downpatrick
and the workhouse.
Head archaeologist Chris Lynn
understands how devastating
the combination of famine
and fever was.
What kind of impact did it
have on the workhouse?
The workhouse was really constructed
for a population of 500. Right.
But during the famine, it increased
to 1,000, and because of the fever,
there was, like, a sudden collapse
of the population of the workhouse.
Right. So, people were dying
and then, the population
of the workhouse more or less
instantly filled back up again
because of the famine.
By 1849, just seven years
after this workhouse opened,
a million Irish men,
women and children had died.
A further two million fled
the country,
many seeking refuge in America.
So, this site for me has been
a real eye-opener.
We're only 150 years apart
and I'm sitting here,
I'm only separated by a few
generations from the person.
And that has made this a very
immediate experience for me.
It's all the more so because part
of my family is Irish, my father
is Irish,
so this feels like I'm sitting here,
excavating a bit of my own history.
The team estimate there are close to
400 burials in this single cemetery.
It will take them more than a year
to carefully exhume,
document and reinter the remains.
But what they reveal
stands as a shocking
reminder of the devastation
that poverty, famine
and fever reaped on this community
in such a short period of history.
Our next dig is a very old site
with a modern twist.
Archaeology is a detective story,
we're looking for clues,
piecing them together, trying
to understand past events, working
out what the societies were like,
getting inside our ancestors' minds.
Sometimes,
the clues are hidden in plain sight
and it just takes a keen eye
to recognise them.
Our next story takes us
back into the depths of prehistory,
but then collides with a much more
recent tale of superstition,
witches and the occult.
The dig is taking place
at Creswell Crags,
located on the border
of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
It's a limestone gorge,
riddled with caves,
that have been studied by
archaeologists for over a century.
Those investigations revealed
evidence of human activity
here dating back more
than 10,000 years.
Back in series one of Digging For
Britain, I visited Creswell
to study their spectacular
Ice Age cave art.
Today, a small team of
archaeologists from the University
of Sheffield are conducting a new
investigation into a more recent
period of history here.
They are digging outside the caves,
where a medieval village once stood.
We're looking in a non-cave context
because nobody's excavated
outside the caves yet.
We know from maps that there were
some structures at the east
end of the gorge and they were there
until the early 19th century.
And there was a fairly obvious
hint that there might be
a building here,
in the form of that arch there.
So we put our trench here,
we thought that we might get
part of the post-medieval
settlement, and who knows?
If we can get down far enough,
maybe even some earlier stuff.
So by conducting an archaeological
excavation there, we might find some
material that gives us some insight
into the people who lived here.
The village was occupied
from medieval times right up to the
18th century, but the team's initial
finds date from much earlier.
Well, this is a flint,
blade tool, or a flake.
It looks to be a Neolithic blade or
a Neolithic flake, if you like,
which is interesting
because it's much older than what
we thought we were
going to find in that structure.
It's a reminder that the archaeology
here at Creswell spans this
immense period of time.
Most of what we know about Creswell
comes from the work of amateur
archaeologist
Albert Leslie Armstrong,
who led a series of digs
in the 1920s and '30s.
Armstrong is famous and notorious.
He was an early archaeologist
that was very interested in the
Palaeolithic in Britain
and he pretty much identified
the Palaeolithic in Britain.
The bad thing is that the techniques
for excavation at that time
were picks and shovels
and wheelbarrows
and not the kind of control
that we like these days.
Unfortunately for the team,
their finds tell them
less about the lives of
the 18th century villagers
and more about Armstrong's
early 20th century methods.
The first thing
we found was this bottle cap,
which actually has a date on it,
which says 1933 on it.
And obviously,
Armstrong's dig was in the 1930s.
Over here is a George V coin.
Obviously, George V died in 1936,
so this again fits perfectly
with Armstrong's dig.
The reason for this renewed
interest in the lives of these
villagers at Creswell is thanks
to an incredible revelation
announced in early 2019 about
something that had been right
under Armstrong's nose all along.
The walls of the caves at Creswell
Crags are covered in strange
marks, scratched into the rock.
There are literally hundreds
of marks, scarring the wall,
all the way around.
There's hardly a small space
of clear rock that you could put
another one on.
For generations, archaeologists have
just assumed that these marks
were graffiti,
unworthy of serious attention.
We knew that there was a
lot of graffiti in the caves,
but what we hadn't realised was that
hiding between these marks
were these single marks
that are the most pertinent ones.
But in 2019, a pair of amateur
symbologists happened
to visit the site.
They realised the significance
of these markings,
recognising them as witches' marks.
We realised that they were quite
important because there were
so many of them and they
were in such a concentration,
in one particular place, so we knew
there was a story to be told here.
Witches' marks or
"apotropaic marks"
from the Greek meaning to turn away,
were used by fearful locals
to ward off evil spirits.
King James wrote a treatise called
Demonology, which set out ways
in which witches could be feared
and witches could be seen and found
and how they infiltrated houses.
James I believed
that witches existed
and were responsible
for many of society's ills.
His 1597 treatise on demonology
described different sorts
of demons and witches,
and he was personally
involved in witchcraft trials,
a belief in which has persisted
right up to the 19th century.
Whereas a common mark at Creswell
is the conjoined "V" which refers
to the cult of the Virgin
and the Virgin Mary.
We sometimes marks
of Christ's name -
one that we find is the "IX".
This is known from other cave
contexts and from churches
and buildings, as well.
We've also got a 1718
and a 1717,
which is right in in the middle
of the period that we think
that these probably date to.
Further down the tunnel on the
right-hand side, we've got
possibly our oldest date of all,
which is 1505.
The dates place the marks
within the timeframe of the village
and they're particularly
concentrated in one area
of the cave.
What we've got here is what some
of the press have christened
the gateway to hell,
and there's a gaping chasm
in the middle of this chamber here,
which has got to be 12
to 15 feet deep.
There may have been a draught
blowing through that hole
and evil spirits are meant
to follow flows of air
so it could have been that
that was concerning them.
Maybe there's been some infant
mortalities as cows aren't
producing enough milk,
which you might think is down
to an evil influence
and that you might want to do
something about that
and drive that evil into
the furthest reaches
of the darkest part of this cave
in order to trap it there.
It turns out that the most
compelling evidence of the villagers
themselves has been hiding
in plain sight
inside the caves all along.
We haven't yet found anything
which ties it into the witches'
marks, but we haven't finished yet.
We're still going down.
The excavation of the village
is only in its early stages,
but the real revelation this year
has been the discovery
of these witches' marks,
a rare glimpse of the beliefs
and superstitions
of the villagers
who once lived here.
The Anglo-Saxon period in English
history dawns after the collapse
of the Roman Empire and lasts right
up to the Norman Conquest.
We learn a lot about the
Anglo-Saxons from their burials,
in particular the grave goods.
We learn about the clothes
people wore,
the objects that they
found precious,
and the way that they
constructed their identities.
Now a dig in Lincoln
is focusing on Anglo-Saxon death
in order to shed light
on those past lives.
This site is on a farm not
far from the Lincolnshire coast,
just outside the tiny village
of Scremby.
First discovered
by a local metal detectorist,
it's a hilltop cemetery containing
almost 100 graves,
dating back to the early Anglo-Saxon
period in the 6th century AD.
Digging For Britain first
visited the site last year
when Dr Hugh Wilmott and his team
from the University of Sheffield
were starting to excavate the site,
which was threatened with damage
from agricultural vehicles.
They discovered an extraordinary
proportion of high status burials
containing precious
and exotic grave goods
like these ivory rings, which may
have been imported from Africa.
This site dates from the sort of
migration period from the sort of
late 5th, early 6th century.
This is a period when you're
starting to get Anglo-Saxon
migrations appearing
into eastern England
and then moving into central England
after the end of the Roman Empire.
Thankfully, the team continued
filming their dig diaries
after our visit last season.
One piece they later uncovered
proved to be incredibly rare.
Oh, beautiful.
It's completely different.
A spectacularly well-preserved
bronze and enamel bowl.
The team have returned this year
to complete the dig.
This is the trench
we're excavating this summer
and there are burials
right the way across it.
They're continuing to find
an astonishing array of grave goods,
catching their discoveries
on their dig diary cameras.
Well, earlier on, we started
excavating this burial
and a bit of iron came up
and we weren't sure what it was,
but now it's been fully exposed
and it's really rather exciting.
It's an Anglo-Saxon seax,
which is kind of like a dagger,
so it's bigger than a knife,
but smaller than a sword.
Right, I'm going to lift the seax.
Iron weapons are often found in male
Anglo-Saxon graves,
perhaps suggesting warrior status.
Round of applause?
It's an important find as there
have been so few intact male burials
at this site.
The females have sort of buried
on their side,
often a crouched position,
and have to be dug a bit deeper in.
The males are buried
a bit shallower,
lying on their backs and extended.
You don't need a very deep hole
for that.
We know farmers don't know
they're there and they often get
just totally wiped out
when ploughing takes place.
We don't know why men and women
were buried at different depths,
but it means that many deeper
female burials
have survived completely intact.
We just started lifting one of the
necklaces on one of the females,
and one of the fine beads that's
come up is this rock crystal one,
a naturally occurring mineral.
It's extremely hard and it's been
polished and smoothed
into this really super bead
that looks like it was made
yesterday,
and, you know, they're not
that common a find.
But not all the finds
are simply decorative.
Wow. How's it going here?
What have we got?
We've kind of got an indication
that there might be a girdle hanger
around here, but we're
not quite sure yet.
Girdle hangers were worn
at the waist
and often shaped like keys.
Scholars believe that they represent
an important symbol of female
identity, possibly relating
to a role as head of a household
or even a landowner.
Women had comparatively high status
in Anglo-Saxon society
with legal rights,
including the right to own land
and the right to leave
their husbands.
Midway through the season,
the team's dig cameras catch
a once-in-a-lifetime find
in another female grave.
It's a silver bracelet.
It's got an incised design on it,
and it's right on the surface
of the grave.
It's a really terrific find.
It's a really, really special,
rare object.
This is the first one like this
we've found here and there's
probably less than half a dozen
other ones that have been found
nationally and usually they're
associated with individuals
thought to be of really quite
high status.
This season has been even
more fruitful than last year.
We've done two seasons of work now
and I think we've learned pretty
much
as much as we're going to.
The quantity of rare finds in this
ancient Lincolnshire cemetery
suggests it was reserved
for the most high ranking people
in this Anglo-Saxon community.
You've been back at Scremby again
and you've had some amazing finds
coming out of this cemetery.
We have.
Some quite characteristic
Anglo-Saxon finds
but some unusual ones, as well.
This astonishing bowl.
I mean, that is
absolutely beautiful.
Is this an object which has
any parallels elsewhere?
Well, this is a super object
in its own right Yeah.
and it's even more exciting
in the context it's in.
So, it's actually Roman.
It probably dates to
the second century AD.
Really? Yep.
It belongs to a group - there's
about half a dozen similar vessels
to this that are known
from Roman Britain,
so it's a really rare
object as a Roman vessel,
but then it's found buried
400 years after it's made
in an Anglo-Saxon grave.
It was an antique.
Oh, absolutely.
What's it made of? Is it bronze?
Yeah, it's cast in bronze,
and then this decoration
is actually chased out
with a sharp tool Right, OK.
and then it's in-filled
with enamelling
If you imagine that new shiny
bronze with colours
You've got red, you've got green,
you've got blue.
It would have been I mean,
it is a gorgeous object now.
It would have been absolutely bright
and stunning, wouldn't it?
Yes. What have we got here?
What's that extraordinary thing?
Oh, this is really super.
This is a little boar's head mount.
You can see the tusks and the teeth
there and it's got
these little garnet eyes.
Those garnets are looking
a bit dull now,
but they would have been
bright red, wouldn't they?
We're not entirely sure what it is,
but one possibility is,
it's possibly a mount of a helmet.
Right.
There's a bit of an association
between the boar imagery
and Anglo-Saxon helmets.
That is stunning.
Now, that brings me to this
extraordinary bracelet.
Absolutely beautiful.
Wow. This is one of our star finds.
It's not often you find sort
of large silver objects
in Anglo-Saxon burials.
Can I pick it up? Yep.
Is it too fragile?
No, it's remarkably stable.
I mean, it's almost as if
it's been made yesterday.
Yeah. I mean, it's a very,
very rare object.
There's probably about a dozen
of them known from cemeteries
across the country Yeah.
and most of those come
from antiquarian excavations,
so it's really nice to have one
from a modern excavation.
And the ones that are known, are
they of a similar style to this?
There are two broad styles,
ones like this,
which are sort of flat strips of
silver that's just wrapped around,
and tend to be heavier and have
a higher content of silver
and then you get another type where
they're sort of crinkle cut,
sort of thinner and sort of fluted.
They seem to have a sort
of distinct regional variation.
What about this pattern? Is that is
that a kind of known pattern?
It's a really interesting
pattern again.
They tend to be decorated like this
with this sort of punched
decoration.
But this is the only one
that has almost like a sort of
stylised beast head
or flower head at the end,
and the only other parallel
I know of is actually on a piece
of gold work from
the Staffordshire Hoard.
There's a sort of gold strip that
has a similar kind of decoration
on the end. Do you think the objects
that they're buried with are sort of
everyday objects or are these
objects specifically for the grave?
It's difficult to tell that,
but I think most of these objects
were actually things
they were using all the time.
So, the beads, for instance,
are often worn and slightly chipped.
Perhaps some of the objects,
like the silver bracelets,
seem in remarkably good condition,
so perhaps they were specifically
put in for the burial.
What's your understanding of the
cemetery now that you've
more fully excavated it?
What's been really interesting is
that although it's been quite
damaged by ploughing, we've managed
to excavate pretty much 100%
of the cemetery.
We've got about 50 intact burials.
That's probably about half of what
there would have been originally.
So it's one of these small little
cemeteries that seems to come
into use in the 6th century,
and then goes out of use
by the middle of that century.
What about who they are, in terms
of their material wealth?
Is it unusual, the amount of
material wealth
that you're seeing in these graves?
This is clearly a community
that is very well-connected,
and potentially
quite wealthy as well.
So they are choosing to bury
their dead with a substantial
amount of material culture.
We tend to see these as small,
isolated communities in the early
Middle Ages, but actually
they were probably part of a much
wider network. They liked nice
things, didn't they?
Quite clearly. They did. Yeah.
But at the moment,
that is my favourite object
of this series of
Digging For Britain.
It's amazing! Fantastic.
As you go back in history,
there are very strong links
between Scandinavia and Scotland.
The Vikings start by
attacking places in Britain.
Lindisfarne, Iona, but very
quickly, they are coming here,
not just to plunder and return home,
but to stay.
Our next dig takes us to Orkney,
where archaeologists
are investigating
a large Viking settlement.
Off the north coast
of mainland Scotland,
sits Rousay, one of the
Orkney Islands.
It was an important seat
of Norse power,
and the west of the island is
mentioned in the Icelandic
Orkneyinga saga, documenting
the colonisation of the region
by the Viking, Sigurd "the mighty".
It's home to Skaill,
an abandoned farmstead
with links back to the 17th century.
But recently, archaeologists
from the University of the Highlands
and Islands discovered a long wall
running beneath the farm building.
The wall is estimated
to be over 1,000 years old,
which would place it in the
Viking era, when the Northern Isles
came under Norse rule.
This year, the team,
led by archaeologist Daniel Lee,
has returned to the site,
along with local volunteers.
They want to know if this wall
could be more
than just an ancient boundary.
"Skaill" is Norse for "hall",
and the team think it's possible
that this wall could be part of
a Viking longhouse,
or drinking hall.
They use their dig diary
to document what they find.
We've uncovered more of the wall
in trench four,
and we're extending
that trench down to the west.
So hopefully we'll be able
to find the end of the wall.
Daniel suspects they're excavating
one of the long sides
of the building.
He hopes to find another
shorter rear wall at its end.
We can find the internal area
and try and assess
what this building was used for,
and try and date it more securely.
While half the team gets stuck in
trying to find the end
of the ancient wall,
others working in neighbouring
trenches are already finding clues
that this was a well-established
Norse settlement.
We've got trench 22,
where we found some Norse
artefacts, and a kind of mid layer.
We had a pig skull and a pot lid
and some pottery,
a lot of garnet mica-schist
which is typically Norse.
Garnet mica-schist is a hard
rock, often used to make millstones,
but it's not native to Orkney.
The Vikings here most likely
imported it from Norway,
or other parts of Scotland
as they spread across the region.
But there are also signs
that they made ingenious use
of the local materials
available on this island.
This here is a spindle whorl,
quite an exciting find that we've
just made in trench four.
It's made with the top the ball
joint off the top of a femur.
So it's been sawn off, and then
it's had a hole bored through it.
That's the ball joint and that
would have had a stick through it.
Spindle whorls are weights, often
made from soapstone, antler or bone,
giving a simple drop spindle
the momentum needed
to spin fibres into yarn.
Despite success in the other
trenches, the Viking hall itself
is still proving elusive.
The mystery wall
seems to have no end.
What have we got, Jess?
Er, more of the wall
that was uncovered last year,
and we're hoping to find
the corner really soon.
But it's not looking promising.
But, at the end of week one,
there's a glimmer of hope.
It's day seven at Skaill Farm.
We've had a really exciting
development in trench four.
We've got another phase of wall
on top of that
in the northern side of the trench.
To find a new section of wall
built on top of the first
implies they're digging
the foundations of a structure
important enough
to have been rebuilt or enlarged.
So they start widening the trench.
We've been trying to expose
some of the internal area
of what we think
is a large building,
maybe hoping it would be the hall
at Skaill.
They're now more than
halfway through the dig.
It's a race against time
to find more conclusive evidence.
And, at last,
they have a breakthrough.
Today, we've extended the trench
further to the south,
and we think we've found it.
We've got a very large longhouse,
an early longhouse coming out from
underneath the settlement mound,
down the slope to the west
towards the shore.
Daniel's suspicions
have been confirmed.
In another trench, they discover
a second wall running parallel
to the first.
Along it, they find what looks
like evidence for seating,
suggesting the structure
was indeed a large longhouse.
We've got the inside face
of the southern wall,
running parallel with
the trench edge just there,
and we think that this is
one of these side benches
down the inside face
of the long hall
that would have run up and down
that way, with a similar feature
on the opposite side
of the hall there.
Then you'd have had
the hearth somewhere here.
Elsewhere on the site,
small personal items
are turning up,
characteristically Viking in style.
I just found this tiny fragment
of really quite finely carved
end of a Norse cone, which may have
the antler teeth as well.
It's got a nice circular
design on the end.
It's really quite an exciting find.
How did it survive from the
Norse period in this rubble?
How did it get there?
As the days pass, the great
hall is exposed,
and it's even more impressive
than Daniel had hoped.
We're looking at probably over 13,
possibly 15 plus metres in length.
So a really big building,
metre-wide walls,
but internal benches and features
are starting to come through.
So we're really, really
chuffed about that.
A longhouse of this size
is a remarkable discovery.
Perhaps it could even
have been the hall of Sigurd,
the first Earl of Orkney himself.
It's a reminder of just how
strong those Scandinavian
connections are here,
taking us back to a time
when Norse settlers
were making this island their home.
It's all very well
invading a country
and establishing
a military presence there,
but then you have to feed your army.
Now, it's quite rare to find
any evidence of how the Romans
managed to support
their troops in Britain.
But now archaeologists
in North West Yorkshire
are hoping to find some answers.
At the northern-most point
of the Yorkshire Dales National Park
lies the majestic Swaledale.
In 2009, a local amateur archaeology
group uncovered
the footprint of
a single roundhouse,
a typical Iron Age dwelling.
But native Britons continued
to make roundhouses
right into the Roman period.
Archaeologist Philip Barstow
has been investigating the site,
and is returning this year
with a team from the University
of Newcastle to explore further.
It might be a continuation of
this cobbled surface that we see.
Philip thinks there
could be more dwellings,
and he's focusing on an area
that they began excavating in 2018.
This is Area 1.
Last year, when we opened
up the vast open area,
we came across these flagstones.
So, our task this year
is to cut into this
and try to find the northern edge
because up to now, we've only got
one definite roundhouse.
As they excavate,
the team are finding signs
of the people that lived here.
Nice, big, fat, juicy worm. Just
remove him, and then you can see
You can see the rim appearing.
And the rest of it
appears to be here.
It's a massive rim.
That's a big pot.
Philip's suspicion that there may
be other dwellings here
proves to be correct.
They've exposed another
large cobbled surface
with a curved, reinforcing wall
behind it.
We can confirm
this is another roundhouse.
It's about four or five
metres in diameter.
That's cobbled as well, and cobbled
path going up to the west.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing structure.
With another roundhouse appearing,
this could be a village.
But what's most striking is evidence
of a sophisticated design feature
not usually seen in roundhouses.
This carved piece of stone
is a door sill.
Real craftsmanship, to actually
create that lower surface,
to create an upper ridge there,
so that the door actually
shuts against that.
This unusual masonry
seems incongruous.
It looks like the
work of another group -
the Romans.
I've seen no other parallels
of this sort of construction
in a native Britain site,
but loads in Roman forts,
so somebody is advising them,
or showing them,
or actually making these and putting
it in the context of the house.
There certainly was a strong
Roman presence in the area.
After the Romans invaded
in the first century AD,
they steadily advanced north,
setting up military strongholds
along the way.
By the mid second century,
there were around 50,000
Roman troops in Britain,
and some of them
were stationed near here.
We've got Bainbridge to the south.
We've got Catterick to our east,
and to our north, we've got
Greta Bridge and Bowes.
At least three of those
were in active occupation
throughout the whole period.
And these forts needed food.
We've got a pit -
flag-based,
stones vertical at the sides,
well-built, and some sort
of possible shoot here.
Maybe now we've found where they're
actually storing their grain.
I'm just really pleased with this.
Other finds on the site suggest
that not only were the native
Britons storing grain here,
they were processing it
using Roman equipment.
What we're getting back,
the information we're getting back,
is this is a military-type
grain store.
Quern-stones like this were
used for milling grain into flour.
This is a community living here,
and using these to grind presumably
quite large quantities of grain.
There are also signs
that the native Britons
were being paid for this work.
And this one's really nice.
If you look carefully,
you can see that she's
the wife of Septimus Severus.
Brilliant.
So this coin dates
from about 196 to 211.
Right. And it's a silver denarius,
so this is the sort of thing Roman
soldiers would been paid with.
So is that indicating, well,
they're buying things on site?
Yeah.
So they need everything -
they need leather,
they need animals to eat,
they need grain,
they need foodstuffs. Right.
All of that kind of stuff.
The archaeological evidence
is helping us make sense
of this intriguing site.
It was part of an agricultural
landscape within Roman Britain.
Just look down the dale,
Upper Swaledale.
Lovely rich pasture area.
The individuals who occupied,
or owned this,
were switched on to realise
it is essential to four Roman forts.
We think now this is a well-to-do,
well-established,
developed farmstead
but they're dealing
with the military.
Their wealth has come with the
husbandry of the cattle, the sheep.
It could well be the collection
point for the whole dale.
This is where it comes.
This is where it is processed.
Then off to whichever fort
it's needed.
And there's still plenty
to be discovered.
We need to do the research question,
where the water's coming from.
With all this engineering on site,
they can't have been going to the
spring to get it in buckets.
It must have been
ducted on site, and
that will be pivotal
to what we do next year.
This site has shown how
Roman influence
extended into the countryside,
where native British farmers
could grow rich
by supplying food
to the Roman military.
Many archaeological digs focus
on one particular time period,
but our next site in Cheshire
spans some 10,000 years,
from the end of the Stone Age,
through to the 17th century.
We sent archaeologist
Naoise Mac Sweeney to find out more.
The Poulton Research Project sits
just five miles south of Chester,
close to the Welsh border.
This unassuming stretch of farmland
may be one of the north of England's
most significant archaeological
sites of recent times.
I'm joining dig leader
Dr Kevin Cootes to find out why.
So, Kevin,
how did it all get started?
We've got to go back to 1962. Right.
Mr Jerry Phair had just
taken over the land,
and he had historic maps
of this field,
and he could see, marked on it,
an ancient chapel.
He could also see the stones
just poking out. Right.
And he found a glazed medieval floor
tile of 14th, 15th century dates.
Right.
Eventually, the farmer
persuaded teams
from Cheshire Archaeology and
Liverpool John Moores University
to come and excavate the site.
They knew they were
going to find a chapel,
but they were hoping it would be
a "Capella ad Portam".
A "Capella ad Portam". That sounds
like something "at the gate".
Yes, my best Latin, which is
not great, but it is,
it means a "chapel at the gate".
Right.
Because we have a lot of
ancient literary texts
that tell us that there was
a missing abbey here,
the Abbey of Poulton.
Poulton Abbey
was an ancient monastery
founded in the 12th century
by Cistercian monks.
They often had a chapel at the gate
so lay people could worship
without entering the Abbey grounds.
The abbey was moved
in the early 13th century,
but the chapel continued to be used
as a local church and cemetery
right up until
the English Civil War.
It would have been the place
where the farmers and their families
who actually ploughed the land,
and worked the land for the monks,
that's what they'd have worshipped,
and where they were buried.
We didn't expect to find
any bones in this graveyard
because this is what we call
glacial till,
or what I call boulder clay
because everyone knows what it is,
and it is generally acidic.
But by sheer geological coincidence,
the last great glacier deposited
a whole load of crushed calcite
in the field,
making it neutral, so we have
almost perfect preservation
of the human remains in this
medieval graveyard
that we've been training students
on for the last 24 years.
This geological anomaly offers
an incredible opportunity to study
the lives and deaths of one
community over hundreds of years.
I've joined human remains
specialist Rea Carlin
to see what she's found
in this year's excavations.
What's going on here,
and what do we have?
We have an adult skeleton,
and it's almost complete.
So We've got perfect bone
preservation here.
Archaeologist's dream! Absolutely.
It's fantastic.
The burial itself is cutting
two other features here.
So we had a double burial here,
with juvenile bones in,
which itself was cut by a later
burial of a teenager in here.
So the gravedigger might not have
known that there's a burial there.
Maybe the wooden
cross had disintegrated,
or they didn't have a burial marker.
In terms of dating them,
where would we put this in terms of
the lifespan of the cemetery?
Probably toward the end, sometime
before the Civil War at least.
By that time, the cemetery's
been in use
for maybe a couple of hundred
years already.
Oh, yes. So the graveyard would be
almost full, as you can see,
by the intercutting features. Yeah.
So we just need to take
off a little bit of the clay
that's still sticking
to the bone while it's wet.
Just clean it up a bit here.
OK. So that's just one bone..
How long would it take to lift
the entire skeleton at that rate?
It will take us at least
the rest of today,
maybe a bit of tomorrow morning,
as well.
How many have you had
on this site to date?
What are we, 986, this one?
I think, so
990, I think, we are up to now.
990. 990.
That's a lot of excavation,
a lot of analysis. It is, isn't it?
Absolutely,
yeah, it's a big storage room.
Finding the perfectly preserved
remains of one community
over a 400-year period
is fascinating in itself -
but what is most incredible
about Poulton
is that, as archaeologists
continue to dig down,
they realise the site
had been occupied for far longer
than anyone had previously thought.
What comes before
the medieval period here?
So, the medieval gravediggers
were actually digging into earlier
occupation layers,
and they were throwing it back in
with the medieval burials,
so we were getting Roman pottery,
we were getting Saxon material,
we were even getting material
from the first hunter-gatherers
to recolonise this area
after the retreat of the ice sheets.
Kevin believes he knows why
countless generations
have kept returning
to this location.
We're standing on a side with
10,000 years of human history.
Why here, in this one place?
Well, that's a really good
question -
and the answer
is right here in front of us.
This is the perfect spot
for settlement.
That is actually the
old Pulford Brook Right.
the historic boundary
of England and Wales.
It's heavily changed now
from its original form,
but it would've been wider,
more free flowing.
You would have been up in this
section here,
and you'd have been
looking at the large animals
coming down to water.
It would have been like
shooting fish in a barrel -
and it's a flood plain below us.
When the flood waters recede,
it leaves behind
very nutrient-rich silts,
which are really good
for agriculture.
And then it moves up through time,
through to the extensive Iron Age
occupation,
into the Roman period, Saxon period,
then the medieval period.
Basically, people don't change.
People's basic needs stay the same.
You need security, you need
raw materials, you need water,
you need food, you need to survive,
so people are always going
to inhabit the kind of place
where they've got the better
chance of survival.
What started as a dig in
a small medieval graveyard
has become the discovery
of a site with 10,000 years
of human occupation.
There's this wonderful sense
of a community
over not just centuries,
but millennia.
And why are they here?
And it's not immediately obvious
when you come to this place
the first time,
but then when you start
looking around the landscape,
it all starts to make
a bit more sense.
I've asked Kevin to come in
and show me some of the artefacts
from this incredible period
of occupation at Poulton.
Kevin, this seems like
such an extraordinary site
with so much time depth,
so much going on,
and you've got some of the
finds here. They're lovely.
So, what's the what's the earliest
find you've got on the table here?
This is a beautiful flint
that was imported into the region,
and it's late Neolithic,
early Bronze Age. That's lovely.
We think it's used
for making leather items,
or possibly wooden items.
It's absolutely beautiful.
That's evidence of the first farmers
to move into the region, then? Yes.
Then, moving on, you found some
quite spectacular Iron Age remains.
I mean, what's this large lump
of what looks like rusty metal?
It's called an adze,
which is a woodworking tool.
You can see the edge
of the blade here.
I'm holding it pretty much upright.
There would've been a handle
coming through here
and it's used for hafting
and working wood.
And then the Romans arrive.
I recognise this
as being Roman pottery.
It is indeed. This is a mortarium,
a food mixing bowl,
where the word mortar and pestle
come from.
Yeah. But on the back,
somebody has scratched IVCV,
and it might mean the name
of the owner, Luculla or Lucundus.
Basically,
"This is mine. Hands off." Yeah!
So what do you think you've got?
We think we've got at the moment
a dispersed farmstead,
but there was so much
material culture,
and we have so much to survey,
we can't discount anything
at the moment.
Poulton's a real one-off
in this region. Yeah.
And then finally, you've got
these beautiful tiles,
which takes you right back to the
original discovery of the site.
Yeah, they're gorgeous. They date
to the 14th, 15th century.
We've got several designs,
which are parallelling the local
and regional designs themselves.
Yeah.
The medieval chapel floor
would have been covered in these.
And when do we see activity ceasing?
When's the last date
that you've got from this site?
Well, we know
it's in ruins by 1681.
We think the last time it was used
was in English Civil War,
because we have records
that Poulton Green
was manned by
Parliamentarians, soldiers,
three weeks before
the Civil War ended -
and we've got material
from the actual chapel of that date,
including musket shot.
We think that they were basically
melting down the windows
to use the lead. They trashed it.
They would have used it as a base.
It would have been
a great lookout post -
a chapel with possibly a tower,
but they trashed it.
I think this is
absolutely fascinating.
We're getting this wonderful picture
of hunter-gatherer communities,
and then farming communities
through the centuries,
and this part of the landscape,
which is quite empty now.
It is just farmland, but it's been
quite densely populated
three times, through all
those farming generations -
and it's great to see
this picture of ordinary life.
This year, the North has once
again proven to be a region
rich in archaeological discoveries.
From forgotten Tudor homes
to Anglo Saxon treasure
and a long lost Viking
drinking hall.
We've shown there's still so much
to do to widen the bounds
of our knowledge
and shed light on our past.
Join us next time as we continue
Digging For Britain.
an epic history
and a wealth of secrets
still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds
of archaeologists dig, dive,
and sieve to find clues to
add to the great historical jigsaw
of our ancestors' lives.
You know when people say, "What's
the best thing you've ever found?"
Guys, this!
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered some
astonishing finds
and made some truly
ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow! Look at that!
Each team of archaeologists has been
armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record
their discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant! Dave, I love you!
Our roving archaeologist, Dr Naoise
Mac Sweeney is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at? It's royal.
I will be inviting the teams
to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful!
In this episode, we're in the north
of the British Isles.
The north of Britain is stuffed
full of history and archaeology,
from Neolithic settlements on Orkney
to Hadrian's Wall,
from a Viking capital in York to a
king buried in a Leicester car park.
I'm here on the banks of Loch Ness,
close to Culloden,
the site of the last great battle
of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745.
We'll join digs
right across the north,
as archaeologists search for
a long-lost Viking drinking hall,
discover Roman treasure
hidden in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery,
and reveal evidence
of our ancestors' deepest fears.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
Our first dig takes us to the
childhood home of Britain's
shortest reigning monarch.
She was a first cousin of
Henry VIII's son Edward VI and she
was on the English throne in 1553,
from the 10th to the 19th of July.
She's known as the
Nine Days Queen, Lady Jane Grey.
In the Leicestershire countryside
lies Bradgate Park
850 acres of stunning
rugged landscape.
This ancient estate was the family
seat of Britain's often
forgotten monarch, Lady Jane Grey,
who's believed to have lived
here as a child.
Professor Richard Thomas and his
team from Leicester University are
excavating within what remains
of the estate's main building,
Bradgate House.
This is thought to have been one of
the first unfortified aristocratic
houses in England, dating
back to the early 16th century.
Richard is looking for evidence
that could support that early date
and the long-held theory that
this was indeed the childhood
home of Lady Jane.
There's very little
information about Bradgate House,
both in terms of the written
record and in terms of images.
But we know next to
nothing about the house,
as it looked in the 16th century.
Lady Jane was born in 1536.
The great niece of King Henry VIII,
she was raised as
a devout Protestant.
Before Henry's son
King Edward VI died,
he declared that his first cousin,
Lady Jane, should succeed him.
She was proclaimed Queen at just 16.
But England was in the middle
of a power struggle.
There was a lot of turmoil
over different religious sides,
so Henry VIII sets up
the Church of England,
but there's still quite a strong
Catholic following in England at the
time, so there was a lot of tension
between the two sides, if you like.
Lady Jane's aunt,
Mary Tudor, was a Catholic
and Mary's followers were
determined to see her on the throne.
Just nine days after Lady Jane was
declared Queen, she was deposed,
locked up in the Tower of London
and eventually executed.
At the dig, the team have made
an unexpected discovery.
It looks like the large upstanding
brick building was
constructed over something older.
I'm standing at the moment
inside a room
and inside that room,
we've got this other brick structure
that's over on my left-hand side
and it's got a tiled
surface behind me.
And what this is
is a fireplace and we can tell that
because we've got fire-cracked tiles
that belong to the hearth.
It's beginning to look a little
bit like a kitchen structure.
But as they excavate further, they
realise it's not just a kitchen.
It's the foundations of another
entire house, predating the larger
brick building which has always been
assumed to be Lady Jane's home.
What do you think this structure is?
Well, potentially,
this might be a garderobe, which is
the medieval word for a toilet.
Garderobes were the luxury loos
of the Tudor era, a room with a seat
connected to a shaft that dropped
waste into a moat or drain below.
Only the wealthiest
households had one.
After getting all the rubble out,
we have found 600-year-old
excrement and so forth.
Does it smell? It does.
It has a strange smell
that you can't really compare
to anything else.
That is a bloody big drain!
The team want to pin down
the date of this mystery building.
As the days pass,
they discover tantalising traces
of the people who lived here,
including what they ate.
From our excavations,
we can work out what
kind of animal it's come from,
so things like peacocks, some marine
fish and some other exotic animals.
And of course, because we're
in the middle of a deer park,
we know that they are eating
quite a lot of venison.
We've got
quite high status living here.
The team also find evidence
that this was a religious household.
So, I think
one of my favourites has been this.
It's got a decoration
on that appears to
be Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden.
And then you've got the apple tree
and then you can see the snake,
curling around the trunk
of the tree.
Known as a pilgrim badge, tokens
like this often depicted
Biblical stories or saints
and were worn by the devout.
This land was owned by the Grey
family long before Lady Jane
was born, but it's not yet clear
which generation of Greys
lived in this earlier structure.
The team are looking for clues
to show exactly
when this older building was in use
and halfway through the dig,
they have a breakthrough.
This morning,
when we were clearing away
some of the demolition layer
in this area, however,
we uncovered a sovereign penny,
minted during the reign
of Henry VIII, so we don't know
the exact date of minting,
but somewhere between 1509 and 1547.
That's important cos that gives us
a date somewhere in the sort
of early to mid 16th century.
We can say with some degree
of confidence that these walls
came down sometime in the first
half of the 16th century.
This tiny coin suggests the older
building was in use
when Lady Jane was a child.
Richard now believes that these
older foundations,
not the upstanding ruins,
are what's left of the childhood
home of England's Nine Days Queen.
I've asked Richard to come
and explain more about this
exciting new revelation.
So, where's that
kind of mythology come from,
that what you see above ground
was her house?
We've got historical records
that tell us that the
standing room is where
she spent her childhood.
And we'd always assumed that this
traditional narrative, that the
standing room you see,
the brick structure, was her house.
When we started the project,
we had absolutely no idea that we'd
be discovering an earlier house
and that the upstanding structure
would turn out to be later,
so it was completely unexpected. So,
you've got some of the finds here.
How do those relate to this
building?
Yeah, so we knew we had this earlier
building,
but what we really needed
is something that gives us
an absolute date for
when it was in use.
And the coins have been really,
really helpful in helping us
to determine those dates
and this is a coin, silver coin,
that was minted
at the Tower of London
and it was minted
somewhere between 1544 and 1547.
She was born in 1536, so
potentially, she's eight years old,
running around Bradgate House,
at the time the coin is
dropped on this floor surface.
And then it becomes sealed
by another floor surface later on.
So, we're getting this glimpse
of a moment where there's this
little girl running
round in the house,
her great uncle is on these
coins, and she has got no
conception at all that she will
eventually end up on the throne.
Absolutely none, whatsoever.
What else have we got here?
Some objects that tell us
a little bit about everyday
life in the house, perhaps?
Yeah, this is a small
fragment of a hand-painted jug.
And the jug will have
come from the Netherlands,
so it's what we call tin glazers,
commonly known as majolica ware.
But what's nice is it's
a very small fragment,
but it's got a motif
of the Passion of the Christ.
Hang on a minute.
There's a pillar with a spiral
and then a sort of fan-like
arrangement over here.
How do you know that this
is meant to be
something about the Crucifixion?
So, yeah, thankfully, we've got
complete vessels where we can
actually see what the entire
picture looks like.
But what we've got here
is this pillar.
That is the pillar where Jesus
was whipped.
And then we can see the fan you're
referring to, that is the whip.
And again, it's telling us
lots of different stories.
It's telling us
about trade connections,
it's telling us about their status,
to be able to afford these,
you know, luxury imports,
but it's also telling us
again about that centrality
of religion to daily life.
And what about Lady Jane Grey
herself?
Do we know where she ended up?
Where was she buried?
Because she was of royal descent,
she gets executed at the Tower
of London and so her body,
she's supposed to have been buried
in one of the chapels at the Tower.
So, of course,
all sorts of local legends that the
body was spirited back to Bradgate
and was re-buried, but we have no
expectation that was the case.
And why do we not call her
Queen Jane?
Yeah, it's really interesting
why she's still Lady Jane Grey.
The reason is cos
although she was proclaimed Queen,
she never had a coronation.
So it's effectively a technicality
that we don't call her Queen Jane.
It's just extraordinary, isn't it?
She had no idea when she was
a little girl that she would
end up sitting on the throne.
And then,
she's on the throne for nine days
and that is effectively
a death sentence.
Yeah, at age 16. Yeah.
It's a real tragic story.
Now we travel to Northern Ireland,
where archaeologists have
discovered the cemetery
of a Victorian workhouse.
Now, the 19th century was a pivotal
time in Irish history,
a time of great hardship for many,
where poverty
and disease were made even
worse by the Great Famine.
Our roving archaeologist Naoise Mac
Sweeney joins the excavation.
I've come to the small
County Down town of Downpatrick,
where archaeologists are excavating
on the site of a Victorian
workhouse, built in 1842.
By the mid 19th century,
there were almost 2,000 workhouses
across the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland.
They were designed to house
and feed the poor,
in exchange for hard,
physical labour.
In Downpatrick,
the land connected to the poorhouse
is now needed for access to
a new school, but the site contains
the workhouse's cemetery,
so a specialist archaeological team
has been brought in to excavate
and document the burials before they
can be carefully reinterred nearby.
I'm with osteoarchaeologist
Bethany Johnson to find out what
she's discovered about the people
who died here.
These are people from the workhouse.
Is there anything we can
tell about the bones at this stage?
As we're taking the bones out,
it has become quite obvious that
forgetting how they're actually
preserved in the ground,
they're not as robust as you
would like.
These people were malnourished,
the bones sort of reflect that.
The poor in Ireland relied almost
solely on the potato to survive.
In 1845, an aggressive plant
pathogen, known as the blight,
decimated crops throughout
the country.
This was the beginning
of the Great Famine.
The potato blight stretched
workhouses like these to the limit.
That would have been quite limited,
really.
And they probably weren't actually
meeting their calorific needs.
Documenting all the individuals
buried here has been
especially difficult
because many of their remains have
been found mixed together.
So, Bethany, can you just tell us
what we've got here?
Here, we have an exposed grave cut
with at least two individuals,
so you can see we've got two
skulls at the top end here,
one lying on top of the other,
and then we have the rest of the
bodies basically intermingling.
So, were these two
buried in a single grave?
What's happening is
the coffins are actually
collapsing in on top of each other.
So, two coffins stacked on one
another. Exactly.
The wood rots and then the skeletons
fall through. They fall through.
They've actually been buried
with dignity.
Somebody's made the effort to
They are and it would have been
really important for the people,
that they knew that they
were actually
going to be buried in a coffin.
So, what's the kind of maximum depth
that they've been stacked?
Just in the far corner here,
I think we had eight individuals.
Eight? Yes.
The higher stacks show
that at a certain point,
the death rate accelerated rapidly,
beyond even famine levels.
The cause was known as famine fever.
In 1847, just two years after
the famine struck, a deadly
combination of relapsing fever and
typhus ripped through Downpatrick
and the workhouse.
Head archaeologist Chris Lynn
understands how devastating
the combination of famine
and fever was.
What kind of impact did it
have on the workhouse?
The workhouse was really constructed
for a population of 500. Right.
But during the famine, it increased
to 1,000, and because of the fever,
there was, like, a sudden collapse
of the population of the workhouse.
Right. So, people were dying
and then, the population
of the workhouse more or less
instantly filled back up again
because of the famine.
By 1849, just seven years
after this workhouse opened,
a million Irish men,
women and children had died.
A further two million fled
the country,
many seeking refuge in America.
So, this site for me has been
a real eye-opener.
We're only 150 years apart
and I'm sitting here,
I'm only separated by a few
generations from the person.
And that has made this a very
immediate experience for me.
It's all the more so because part
of my family is Irish, my father
is Irish,
so this feels like I'm sitting here,
excavating a bit of my own history.
The team estimate there are close to
400 burials in this single cemetery.
It will take them more than a year
to carefully exhume,
document and reinter the remains.
But what they reveal
stands as a shocking
reminder of the devastation
that poverty, famine
and fever reaped on this community
in such a short period of history.
Our next dig is a very old site
with a modern twist.
Archaeology is a detective story,
we're looking for clues,
piecing them together, trying
to understand past events, working
out what the societies were like,
getting inside our ancestors' minds.
Sometimes,
the clues are hidden in plain sight
and it just takes a keen eye
to recognise them.
Our next story takes us
back into the depths of prehistory,
but then collides with a much more
recent tale of superstition,
witches and the occult.
The dig is taking place
at Creswell Crags,
located on the border
of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
It's a limestone gorge,
riddled with caves,
that have been studied by
archaeologists for over a century.
Those investigations revealed
evidence of human activity
here dating back more
than 10,000 years.
Back in series one of Digging For
Britain, I visited Creswell
to study their spectacular
Ice Age cave art.
Today, a small team of
archaeologists from the University
of Sheffield are conducting a new
investigation into a more recent
period of history here.
They are digging outside the caves,
where a medieval village once stood.
We're looking in a non-cave context
because nobody's excavated
outside the caves yet.
We know from maps that there were
some structures at the east
end of the gorge and they were there
until the early 19th century.
And there was a fairly obvious
hint that there might be
a building here,
in the form of that arch there.
So we put our trench here,
we thought that we might get
part of the post-medieval
settlement, and who knows?
If we can get down far enough,
maybe even some earlier stuff.
So by conducting an archaeological
excavation there, we might find some
material that gives us some insight
into the people who lived here.
The village was occupied
from medieval times right up to the
18th century, but the team's initial
finds date from much earlier.
Well, this is a flint,
blade tool, or a flake.
It looks to be a Neolithic blade or
a Neolithic flake, if you like,
which is interesting
because it's much older than what
we thought we were
going to find in that structure.
It's a reminder that the archaeology
here at Creswell spans this
immense period of time.
Most of what we know about Creswell
comes from the work of amateur
archaeologist
Albert Leslie Armstrong,
who led a series of digs
in the 1920s and '30s.
Armstrong is famous and notorious.
He was an early archaeologist
that was very interested in the
Palaeolithic in Britain
and he pretty much identified
the Palaeolithic in Britain.
The bad thing is that the techniques
for excavation at that time
were picks and shovels
and wheelbarrows
and not the kind of control
that we like these days.
Unfortunately for the team,
their finds tell them
less about the lives of
the 18th century villagers
and more about Armstrong's
early 20th century methods.
The first thing
we found was this bottle cap,
which actually has a date on it,
which says 1933 on it.
And obviously,
Armstrong's dig was in the 1930s.
Over here is a George V coin.
Obviously, George V died in 1936,
so this again fits perfectly
with Armstrong's dig.
The reason for this renewed
interest in the lives of these
villagers at Creswell is thanks
to an incredible revelation
announced in early 2019 about
something that had been right
under Armstrong's nose all along.
The walls of the caves at Creswell
Crags are covered in strange
marks, scratched into the rock.
There are literally hundreds
of marks, scarring the wall,
all the way around.
There's hardly a small space
of clear rock that you could put
another one on.
For generations, archaeologists have
just assumed that these marks
were graffiti,
unworthy of serious attention.
We knew that there was a
lot of graffiti in the caves,
but what we hadn't realised was that
hiding between these marks
were these single marks
that are the most pertinent ones.
But in 2019, a pair of amateur
symbologists happened
to visit the site.
They realised the significance
of these markings,
recognising them as witches' marks.
We realised that they were quite
important because there were
so many of them and they
were in such a concentration,
in one particular place, so we knew
there was a story to be told here.
Witches' marks or
"apotropaic marks"
from the Greek meaning to turn away,
were used by fearful locals
to ward off evil spirits.
King James wrote a treatise called
Demonology, which set out ways
in which witches could be feared
and witches could be seen and found
and how they infiltrated houses.
James I believed
that witches existed
and were responsible
for many of society's ills.
His 1597 treatise on demonology
described different sorts
of demons and witches,
and he was personally
involved in witchcraft trials,
a belief in which has persisted
right up to the 19th century.
Whereas a common mark at Creswell
is the conjoined "V" which refers
to the cult of the Virgin
and the Virgin Mary.
We sometimes marks
of Christ's name -
one that we find is the "IX".
This is known from other cave
contexts and from churches
and buildings, as well.
We've also got a 1718
and a 1717,
which is right in in the middle
of the period that we think
that these probably date to.
Further down the tunnel on the
right-hand side, we've got
possibly our oldest date of all,
which is 1505.
The dates place the marks
within the timeframe of the village
and they're particularly
concentrated in one area
of the cave.
What we've got here is what some
of the press have christened
the gateway to hell,
and there's a gaping chasm
in the middle of this chamber here,
which has got to be 12
to 15 feet deep.
There may have been a draught
blowing through that hole
and evil spirits are meant
to follow flows of air
so it could have been that
that was concerning them.
Maybe there's been some infant
mortalities as cows aren't
producing enough milk,
which you might think is down
to an evil influence
and that you might want to do
something about that
and drive that evil into
the furthest reaches
of the darkest part of this cave
in order to trap it there.
It turns out that the most
compelling evidence of the villagers
themselves has been hiding
in plain sight
inside the caves all along.
We haven't yet found anything
which ties it into the witches'
marks, but we haven't finished yet.
We're still going down.
The excavation of the village
is only in its early stages,
but the real revelation this year
has been the discovery
of these witches' marks,
a rare glimpse of the beliefs
and superstitions
of the villagers
who once lived here.
The Anglo-Saxon period in English
history dawns after the collapse
of the Roman Empire and lasts right
up to the Norman Conquest.
We learn a lot about the
Anglo-Saxons from their burials,
in particular the grave goods.
We learn about the clothes
people wore,
the objects that they
found precious,
and the way that they
constructed their identities.
Now a dig in Lincoln
is focusing on Anglo-Saxon death
in order to shed light
on those past lives.
This site is on a farm not
far from the Lincolnshire coast,
just outside the tiny village
of Scremby.
First discovered
by a local metal detectorist,
it's a hilltop cemetery containing
almost 100 graves,
dating back to the early Anglo-Saxon
period in the 6th century AD.
Digging For Britain first
visited the site last year
when Dr Hugh Wilmott and his team
from the University of Sheffield
were starting to excavate the site,
which was threatened with damage
from agricultural vehicles.
They discovered an extraordinary
proportion of high status burials
containing precious
and exotic grave goods
like these ivory rings, which may
have been imported from Africa.
This site dates from the sort of
migration period from the sort of
late 5th, early 6th century.
This is a period when you're
starting to get Anglo-Saxon
migrations appearing
into eastern England
and then moving into central England
after the end of the Roman Empire.
Thankfully, the team continued
filming their dig diaries
after our visit last season.
One piece they later uncovered
proved to be incredibly rare.
Oh, beautiful.
It's completely different.
A spectacularly well-preserved
bronze and enamel bowl.
The team have returned this year
to complete the dig.
This is the trench
we're excavating this summer
and there are burials
right the way across it.
They're continuing to find
an astonishing array of grave goods,
catching their discoveries
on their dig diary cameras.
Well, earlier on, we started
excavating this burial
and a bit of iron came up
and we weren't sure what it was,
but now it's been fully exposed
and it's really rather exciting.
It's an Anglo-Saxon seax,
which is kind of like a dagger,
so it's bigger than a knife,
but smaller than a sword.
Right, I'm going to lift the seax.
Iron weapons are often found in male
Anglo-Saxon graves,
perhaps suggesting warrior status.
Round of applause?
It's an important find as there
have been so few intact male burials
at this site.
The females have sort of buried
on their side,
often a crouched position,
and have to be dug a bit deeper in.
The males are buried
a bit shallower,
lying on their backs and extended.
You don't need a very deep hole
for that.
We know farmers don't know
they're there and they often get
just totally wiped out
when ploughing takes place.
We don't know why men and women
were buried at different depths,
but it means that many deeper
female burials
have survived completely intact.
We just started lifting one of the
necklaces on one of the females,
and one of the fine beads that's
come up is this rock crystal one,
a naturally occurring mineral.
It's extremely hard and it's been
polished and smoothed
into this really super bead
that looks like it was made
yesterday,
and, you know, they're not
that common a find.
But not all the finds
are simply decorative.
Wow. How's it going here?
What have we got?
We've kind of got an indication
that there might be a girdle hanger
around here, but we're
not quite sure yet.
Girdle hangers were worn
at the waist
and often shaped like keys.
Scholars believe that they represent
an important symbol of female
identity, possibly relating
to a role as head of a household
or even a landowner.
Women had comparatively high status
in Anglo-Saxon society
with legal rights,
including the right to own land
and the right to leave
their husbands.
Midway through the season,
the team's dig cameras catch
a once-in-a-lifetime find
in another female grave.
It's a silver bracelet.
It's got an incised design on it,
and it's right on the surface
of the grave.
It's a really terrific find.
It's a really, really special,
rare object.
This is the first one like this
we've found here and there's
probably less than half a dozen
other ones that have been found
nationally and usually they're
associated with individuals
thought to be of really quite
high status.
This season has been even
more fruitful than last year.
We've done two seasons of work now
and I think we've learned pretty
much
as much as we're going to.
The quantity of rare finds in this
ancient Lincolnshire cemetery
suggests it was reserved
for the most high ranking people
in this Anglo-Saxon community.
You've been back at Scremby again
and you've had some amazing finds
coming out of this cemetery.
We have.
Some quite characteristic
Anglo-Saxon finds
but some unusual ones, as well.
This astonishing bowl.
I mean, that is
absolutely beautiful.
Is this an object which has
any parallels elsewhere?
Well, this is a super object
in its own right Yeah.
and it's even more exciting
in the context it's in.
So, it's actually Roman.
It probably dates to
the second century AD.
Really? Yep.
It belongs to a group - there's
about half a dozen similar vessels
to this that are known
from Roman Britain,
so it's a really rare
object as a Roman vessel,
but then it's found buried
400 years after it's made
in an Anglo-Saxon grave.
It was an antique.
Oh, absolutely.
What's it made of? Is it bronze?
Yeah, it's cast in bronze,
and then this decoration
is actually chased out
with a sharp tool Right, OK.
and then it's in-filled
with enamelling
If you imagine that new shiny
bronze with colours
You've got red, you've got green,
you've got blue.
It would have been I mean,
it is a gorgeous object now.
It would have been absolutely bright
and stunning, wouldn't it?
Yes. What have we got here?
What's that extraordinary thing?
Oh, this is really super.
This is a little boar's head mount.
You can see the tusks and the teeth
there and it's got
these little garnet eyes.
Those garnets are looking
a bit dull now,
but they would have been
bright red, wouldn't they?
We're not entirely sure what it is,
but one possibility is,
it's possibly a mount of a helmet.
Right.
There's a bit of an association
between the boar imagery
and Anglo-Saxon helmets.
That is stunning.
Now, that brings me to this
extraordinary bracelet.
Absolutely beautiful.
Wow. This is one of our star finds.
It's not often you find sort
of large silver objects
in Anglo-Saxon burials.
Can I pick it up? Yep.
Is it too fragile?
No, it's remarkably stable.
I mean, it's almost as if
it's been made yesterday.
Yeah. I mean, it's a very,
very rare object.
There's probably about a dozen
of them known from cemeteries
across the country Yeah.
and most of those come
from antiquarian excavations,
so it's really nice to have one
from a modern excavation.
And the ones that are known, are
they of a similar style to this?
There are two broad styles,
ones like this,
which are sort of flat strips of
silver that's just wrapped around,
and tend to be heavier and have
a higher content of silver
and then you get another type where
they're sort of crinkle cut,
sort of thinner and sort of fluted.
They seem to have a sort
of distinct regional variation.
What about this pattern? Is that is
that a kind of known pattern?
It's a really interesting
pattern again.
They tend to be decorated like this
with this sort of punched
decoration.
But this is the only one
that has almost like a sort of
stylised beast head
or flower head at the end,
and the only other parallel
I know of is actually on a piece
of gold work from
the Staffordshire Hoard.
There's a sort of gold strip that
has a similar kind of decoration
on the end. Do you think the objects
that they're buried with are sort of
everyday objects or are these
objects specifically for the grave?
It's difficult to tell that,
but I think most of these objects
were actually things
they were using all the time.
So, the beads, for instance,
are often worn and slightly chipped.
Perhaps some of the objects,
like the silver bracelets,
seem in remarkably good condition,
so perhaps they were specifically
put in for the burial.
What's your understanding of the
cemetery now that you've
more fully excavated it?
What's been really interesting is
that although it's been quite
damaged by ploughing, we've managed
to excavate pretty much 100%
of the cemetery.
We've got about 50 intact burials.
That's probably about half of what
there would have been originally.
So it's one of these small little
cemeteries that seems to come
into use in the 6th century,
and then goes out of use
by the middle of that century.
What about who they are, in terms
of their material wealth?
Is it unusual, the amount of
material wealth
that you're seeing in these graves?
This is clearly a community
that is very well-connected,
and potentially
quite wealthy as well.
So they are choosing to bury
their dead with a substantial
amount of material culture.
We tend to see these as small,
isolated communities in the early
Middle Ages, but actually
they were probably part of a much
wider network. They liked nice
things, didn't they?
Quite clearly. They did. Yeah.
But at the moment,
that is my favourite object
of this series of
Digging For Britain.
It's amazing! Fantastic.
As you go back in history,
there are very strong links
between Scandinavia and Scotland.
The Vikings start by
attacking places in Britain.
Lindisfarne, Iona, but very
quickly, they are coming here,
not just to plunder and return home,
but to stay.
Our next dig takes us to Orkney,
where archaeologists
are investigating
a large Viking settlement.
Off the north coast
of mainland Scotland,
sits Rousay, one of the
Orkney Islands.
It was an important seat
of Norse power,
and the west of the island is
mentioned in the Icelandic
Orkneyinga saga, documenting
the colonisation of the region
by the Viking, Sigurd "the mighty".
It's home to Skaill,
an abandoned farmstead
with links back to the 17th century.
But recently, archaeologists
from the University of the Highlands
and Islands discovered a long wall
running beneath the farm building.
The wall is estimated
to be over 1,000 years old,
which would place it in the
Viking era, when the Northern Isles
came under Norse rule.
This year, the team,
led by archaeologist Daniel Lee,
has returned to the site,
along with local volunteers.
They want to know if this wall
could be more
than just an ancient boundary.
"Skaill" is Norse for "hall",
and the team think it's possible
that this wall could be part of
a Viking longhouse,
or drinking hall.
They use their dig diary
to document what they find.
We've uncovered more of the wall
in trench four,
and we're extending
that trench down to the west.
So hopefully we'll be able
to find the end of the wall.
Daniel suspects they're excavating
one of the long sides
of the building.
He hopes to find another
shorter rear wall at its end.
We can find the internal area
and try and assess
what this building was used for,
and try and date it more securely.
While half the team gets stuck in
trying to find the end
of the ancient wall,
others working in neighbouring
trenches are already finding clues
that this was a well-established
Norse settlement.
We've got trench 22,
where we found some Norse
artefacts, and a kind of mid layer.
We had a pig skull and a pot lid
and some pottery,
a lot of garnet mica-schist
which is typically Norse.
Garnet mica-schist is a hard
rock, often used to make millstones,
but it's not native to Orkney.
The Vikings here most likely
imported it from Norway,
or other parts of Scotland
as they spread across the region.
But there are also signs
that they made ingenious use
of the local materials
available on this island.
This here is a spindle whorl,
quite an exciting find that we've
just made in trench four.
It's made with the top the ball
joint off the top of a femur.
So it's been sawn off, and then
it's had a hole bored through it.
That's the ball joint and that
would have had a stick through it.
Spindle whorls are weights, often
made from soapstone, antler or bone,
giving a simple drop spindle
the momentum needed
to spin fibres into yarn.
Despite success in the other
trenches, the Viking hall itself
is still proving elusive.
The mystery wall
seems to have no end.
What have we got, Jess?
Er, more of the wall
that was uncovered last year,
and we're hoping to find
the corner really soon.
But it's not looking promising.
But, at the end of week one,
there's a glimmer of hope.
It's day seven at Skaill Farm.
We've had a really exciting
development in trench four.
We've got another phase of wall
on top of that
in the northern side of the trench.
To find a new section of wall
built on top of the first
implies they're digging
the foundations of a structure
important enough
to have been rebuilt or enlarged.
So they start widening the trench.
We've been trying to expose
some of the internal area
of what we think
is a large building,
maybe hoping it would be the hall
at Skaill.
They're now more than
halfway through the dig.
It's a race against time
to find more conclusive evidence.
And, at last,
they have a breakthrough.
Today, we've extended the trench
further to the south,
and we think we've found it.
We've got a very large longhouse,
an early longhouse coming out from
underneath the settlement mound,
down the slope to the west
towards the shore.
Daniel's suspicions
have been confirmed.
In another trench, they discover
a second wall running parallel
to the first.
Along it, they find what looks
like evidence for seating,
suggesting the structure
was indeed a large longhouse.
We've got the inside face
of the southern wall,
running parallel with
the trench edge just there,
and we think that this is
one of these side benches
down the inside face
of the long hall
that would have run up and down
that way, with a similar feature
on the opposite side
of the hall there.
Then you'd have had
the hearth somewhere here.
Elsewhere on the site,
small personal items
are turning up,
characteristically Viking in style.
I just found this tiny fragment
of really quite finely carved
end of a Norse cone, which may have
the antler teeth as well.
It's got a nice circular
design on the end.
It's really quite an exciting find.
How did it survive from the
Norse period in this rubble?
How did it get there?
As the days pass, the great
hall is exposed,
and it's even more impressive
than Daniel had hoped.
We're looking at probably over 13,
possibly 15 plus metres in length.
So a really big building,
metre-wide walls,
but internal benches and features
are starting to come through.
So we're really, really
chuffed about that.
A longhouse of this size
is a remarkable discovery.
Perhaps it could even
have been the hall of Sigurd,
the first Earl of Orkney himself.
It's a reminder of just how
strong those Scandinavian
connections are here,
taking us back to a time
when Norse settlers
were making this island their home.
It's all very well
invading a country
and establishing
a military presence there,
but then you have to feed your army.
Now, it's quite rare to find
any evidence of how the Romans
managed to support
their troops in Britain.
But now archaeologists
in North West Yorkshire
are hoping to find some answers.
At the northern-most point
of the Yorkshire Dales National Park
lies the majestic Swaledale.
In 2009, a local amateur archaeology
group uncovered
the footprint of
a single roundhouse,
a typical Iron Age dwelling.
But native Britons continued
to make roundhouses
right into the Roman period.
Archaeologist Philip Barstow
has been investigating the site,
and is returning this year
with a team from the University
of Newcastle to explore further.
It might be a continuation of
this cobbled surface that we see.
Philip thinks there
could be more dwellings,
and he's focusing on an area
that they began excavating in 2018.
This is Area 1.
Last year, when we opened
up the vast open area,
we came across these flagstones.
So, our task this year
is to cut into this
and try to find the northern edge
because up to now, we've only got
one definite roundhouse.
As they excavate,
the team are finding signs
of the people that lived here.
Nice, big, fat, juicy worm. Just
remove him, and then you can see
You can see the rim appearing.
And the rest of it
appears to be here.
It's a massive rim.
That's a big pot.
Philip's suspicion that there may
be other dwellings here
proves to be correct.
They've exposed another
large cobbled surface
with a curved, reinforcing wall
behind it.
We can confirm
this is another roundhouse.
It's about four or five
metres in diameter.
That's cobbled as well, and cobbled
path going up to the west.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing structure.
With another roundhouse appearing,
this could be a village.
But what's most striking is evidence
of a sophisticated design feature
not usually seen in roundhouses.
This carved piece of stone
is a door sill.
Real craftsmanship, to actually
create that lower surface,
to create an upper ridge there,
so that the door actually
shuts against that.
This unusual masonry
seems incongruous.
It looks like the
work of another group -
the Romans.
I've seen no other parallels
of this sort of construction
in a native Britain site,
but loads in Roman forts,
so somebody is advising them,
or showing them,
or actually making these and putting
it in the context of the house.
There certainly was a strong
Roman presence in the area.
After the Romans invaded
in the first century AD,
they steadily advanced north,
setting up military strongholds
along the way.
By the mid second century,
there were around 50,000
Roman troops in Britain,
and some of them
were stationed near here.
We've got Bainbridge to the south.
We've got Catterick to our east,
and to our north, we've got
Greta Bridge and Bowes.
At least three of those
were in active occupation
throughout the whole period.
And these forts needed food.
We've got a pit -
flag-based,
stones vertical at the sides,
well-built, and some sort
of possible shoot here.
Maybe now we've found where they're
actually storing their grain.
I'm just really pleased with this.
Other finds on the site suggest
that not only were the native
Britons storing grain here,
they were processing it
using Roman equipment.
What we're getting back,
the information we're getting back,
is this is a military-type
grain store.
Quern-stones like this were
used for milling grain into flour.
This is a community living here,
and using these to grind presumably
quite large quantities of grain.
There are also signs
that the native Britons
were being paid for this work.
And this one's really nice.
If you look carefully,
you can see that she's
the wife of Septimus Severus.
Brilliant.
So this coin dates
from about 196 to 211.
Right. And it's a silver denarius,
so this is the sort of thing Roman
soldiers would been paid with.
So is that indicating, well,
they're buying things on site?
Yeah.
So they need everything -
they need leather,
they need animals to eat,
they need grain,
they need foodstuffs. Right.
All of that kind of stuff.
The archaeological evidence
is helping us make sense
of this intriguing site.
It was part of an agricultural
landscape within Roman Britain.
Just look down the dale,
Upper Swaledale.
Lovely rich pasture area.
The individuals who occupied,
or owned this,
were switched on to realise
it is essential to four Roman forts.
We think now this is a well-to-do,
well-established,
developed farmstead
but they're dealing
with the military.
Their wealth has come with the
husbandry of the cattle, the sheep.
It could well be the collection
point for the whole dale.
This is where it comes.
This is where it is processed.
Then off to whichever fort
it's needed.
And there's still plenty
to be discovered.
We need to do the research question,
where the water's coming from.
With all this engineering on site,
they can't have been going to the
spring to get it in buckets.
It must have been
ducted on site, and
that will be pivotal
to what we do next year.
This site has shown how
Roman influence
extended into the countryside,
where native British farmers
could grow rich
by supplying food
to the Roman military.
Many archaeological digs focus
on one particular time period,
but our next site in Cheshire
spans some 10,000 years,
from the end of the Stone Age,
through to the 17th century.
We sent archaeologist
Naoise Mac Sweeney to find out more.
The Poulton Research Project sits
just five miles south of Chester,
close to the Welsh border.
This unassuming stretch of farmland
may be one of the north of England's
most significant archaeological
sites of recent times.
I'm joining dig leader
Dr Kevin Cootes to find out why.
So, Kevin,
how did it all get started?
We've got to go back to 1962. Right.
Mr Jerry Phair had just
taken over the land,
and he had historic maps
of this field,
and he could see, marked on it,
an ancient chapel.
He could also see the stones
just poking out. Right.
And he found a glazed medieval floor
tile of 14th, 15th century dates.
Right.
Eventually, the farmer
persuaded teams
from Cheshire Archaeology and
Liverpool John Moores University
to come and excavate the site.
They knew they were
going to find a chapel,
but they were hoping it would be
a "Capella ad Portam".
A "Capella ad Portam". That sounds
like something "at the gate".
Yes, my best Latin, which is
not great, but it is,
it means a "chapel at the gate".
Right.
Because we have a lot of
ancient literary texts
that tell us that there was
a missing abbey here,
the Abbey of Poulton.
Poulton Abbey
was an ancient monastery
founded in the 12th century
by Cistercian monks.
They often had a chapel at the gate
so lay people could worship
without entering the Abbey grounds.
The abbey was moved
in the early 13th century,
but the chapel continued to be used
as a local church and cemetery
right up until
the English Civil War.
It would have been the place
where the farmers and their families
who actually ploughed the land,
and worked the land for the monks,
that's what they'd have worshipped,
and where they were buried.
We didn't expect to find
any bones in this graveyard
because this is what we call
glacial till,
or what I call boulder clay
because everyone knows what it is,
and it is generally acidic.
But by sheer geological coincidence,
the last great glacier deposited
a whole load of crushed calcite
in the field,
making it neutral, so we have
almost perfect preservation
of the human remains in this
medieval graveyard
that we've been training students
on for the last 24 years.
This geological anomaly offers
an incredible opportunity to study
the lives and deaths of one
community over hundreds of years.
I've joined human remains
specialist Rea Carlin
to see what she's found
in this year's excavations.
What's going on here,
and what do we have?
We have an adult skeleton,
and it's almost complete.
So We've got perfect bone
preservation here.
Archaeologist's dream! Absolutely.
It's fantastic.
The burial itself is cutting
two other features here.
So we had a double burial here,
with juvenile bones in,
which itself was cut by a later
burial of a teenager in here.
So the gravedigger might not have
known that there's a burial there.
Maybe the wooden
cross had disintegrated,
or they didn't have a burial marker.
In terms of dating them,
where would we put this in terms of
the lifespan of the cemetery?
Probably toward the end, sometime
before the Civil War at least.
By that time, the cemetery's
been in use
for maybe a couple of hundred
years already.
Oh, yes. So the graveyard would be
almost full, as you can see,
by the intercutting features. Yeah.
So we just need to take
off a little bit of the clay
that's still sticking
to the bone while it's wet.
Just clean it up a bit here.
OK. So that's just one bone..
How long would it take to lift
the entire skeleton at that rate?
It will take us at least
the rest of today,
maybe a bit of tomorrow morning,
as well.
How many have you had
on this site to date?
What are we, 986, this one?
I think, so
990, I think, we are up to now.
990. 990.
That's a lot of excavation,
a lot of analysis. It is, isn't it?
Absolutely,
yeah, it's a big storage room.
Finding the perfectly preserved
remains of one community
over a 400-year period
is fascinating in itself -
but what is most incredible
about Poulton
is that, as archaeologists
continue to dig down,
they realise the site
had been occupied for far longer
than anyone had previously thought.
What comes before
the medieval period here?
So, the medieval gravediggers
were actually digging into earlier
occupation layers,
and they were throwing it back in
with the medieval burials,
so we were getting Roman pottery,
we were getting Saxon material,
we were even getting material
from the first hunter-gatherers
to recolonise this area
after the retreat of the ice sheets.
Kevin believes he knows why
countless generations
have kept returning
to this location.
We're standing on a side with
10,000 years of human history.
Why here, in this one place?
Well, that's a really good
question -
and the answer
is right here in front of us.
This is the perfect spot
for settlement.
That is actually the
old Pulford Brook Right.
the historic boundary
of England and Wales.
It's heavily changed now
from its original form,
but it would've been wider,
more free flowing.
You would have been up in this
section here,
and you'd have been
looking at the large animals
coming down to water.
It would have been like
shooting fish in a barrel -
and it's a flood plain below us.
When the flood waters recede,
it leaves behind
very nutrient-rich silts,
which are really good
for agriculture.
And then it moves up through time,
through to the extensive Iron Age
occupation,
into the Roman period, Saxon period,
then the medieval period.
Basically, people don't change.
People's basic needs stay the same.
You need security, you need
raw materials, you need water,
you need food, you need to survive,
so people are always going
to inhabit the kind of place
where they've got the better
chance of survival.
What started as a dig in
a small medieval graveyard
has become the discovery
of a site with 10,000 years
of human occupation.
There's this wonderful sense
of a community
over not just centuries,
but millennia.
And why are they here?
And it's not immediately obvious
when you come to this place
the first time,
but then when you start
looking around the landscape,
it all starts to make
a bit more sense.
I've asked Kevin to come in
and show me some of the artefacts
from this incredible period
of occupation at Poulton.
Kevin, this seems like
such an extraordinary site
with so much time depth,
so much going on,
and you've got some of the
finds here. They're lovely.
So, what's the what's the earliest
find you've got on the table here?
This is a beautiful flint
that was imported into the region,
and it's late Neolithic,
early Bronze Age. That's lovely.
We think it's used
for making leather items,
or possibly wooden items.
It's absolutely beautiful.
That's evidence of the first farmers
to move into the region, then? Yes.
Then, moving on, you found some
quite spectacular Iron Age remains.
I mean, what's this large lump
of what looks like rusty metal?
It's called an adze,
which is a woodworking tool.
You can see the edge
of the blade here.
I'm holding it pretty much upright.
There would've been a handle
coming through here
and it's used for hafting
and working wood.
And then the Romans arrive.
I recognise this
as being Roman pottery.
It is indeed. This is a mortarium,
a food mixing bowl,
where the word mortar and pestle
come from.
Yeah. But on the back,
somebody has scratched IVCV,
and it might mean the name
of the owner, Luculla or Lucundus.
Basically,
"This is mine. Hands off." Yeah!
So what do you think you've got?
We think we've got at the moment
a dispersed farmstead,
but there was so much
material culture,
and we have so much to survey,
we can't discount anything
at the moment.
Poulton's a real one-off
in this region. Yeah.
And then finally, you've got
these beautiful tiles,
which takes you right back to the
original discovery of the site.
Yeah, they're gorgeous. They date
to the 14th, 15th century.
We've got several designs,
which are parallelling the local
and regional designs themselves.
Yeah.
The medieval chapel floor
would have been covered in these.
And when do we see activity ceasing?
When's the last date
that you've got from this site?
Well, we know
it's in ruins by 1681.
We think the last time it was used
was in English Civil War,
because we have records
that Poulton Green
was manned by
Parliamentarians, soldiers,
three weeks before
the Civil War ended -
and we've got material
from the actual chapel of that date,
including musket shot.
We think that they were basically
melting down the windows
to use the lead. They trashed it.
They would have used it as a base.
It would have been
a great lookout post -
a chapel with possibly a tower,
but they trashed it.
I think this is
absolutely fascinating.
We're getting this wonderful picture
of hunter-gatherer communities,
and then farming communities
through the centuries,
and this part of the landscape,
which is quite empty now.
It is just farmland, but it's been
quite densely populated
three times, through all
those farming generations -
and it's great to see
this picture of ordinary life.
This year, the North has once
again proven to be a region
rich in archaeological discoveries.
From forgotten Tudor homes
to Anglo Saxon treasure
and a long lost Viking
drinking hall.
We've shown there's still so much
to do to widen the bounds
of our knowledge
and shed light on our past.
Join us next time as we continue
Digging For Britain.