Digging for Britain (2010) s11e05 Episode Script
3000-Year-Old Shoes and Giant Axeheads
These islands we call home have a rich
and varied history
stretching back thousands of years.
But hidden under the ground and
underwater
are some amazing treasures just
waiting to be found.
Wow!
So, each year, all across the country,
archaeologists dig, dive
and explore their way down
Oh, this is brilliant.
searching for fresh discoveries.
And it is completely intact.
Revealing traces of ancient
cultures
- The shoe is 2,803 years old.
- Oh, wow.
and unearthing fascinating
artefacts.
Oh, that's a nice thing. What is it?
I've never seen anything quite like
it in my career.
Every dig adds new pieces
to the ever-growing archaeological
jigsaw
That's so cool, isn't it?
That is the epic story of our
islands.
This year, I visit digs in some
extraordinary locations.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
And I call on the help of a trio of
expert investigators
It's quite difficult to find any
other evidence
of things that just don't leave a mark
in the archaeology.
This is a really powerful document
because we're getting to hear the
voices that we don't usually hear.
Who delve deeper to answer the
questions raised by the finds.
Is all of this already recorded in
books?
There was none of this in a book
anywhere.
Finally, the archaeologists bring
their most amazing discoveries
into our tent
Astonishing!
for up-close analysis.
Genuinely rewriting history.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
In this episode, I'll be exploring the
best archaeological digs
in southern England.
On a building site in Kent,
archaeologists discover one of the
oldest finds
we've ever seen on Digging For
Britain.
So what's your ballpark figure at the
moment?
Our ballpark figure at the moment is
probably about
300,000 to 350,000 years old.
On the White Cliffs of Dover,
a top-secret military installation
It's a constant 12 degrees down
here.
Feels colder than that.
is opened up to archaeologists.
We have done a fingertip search.
Technology was still confidential
then,
- so all of the equipment was smashed into small pieces down here.
- Mm.
And, for the first time,
archaeologists unearth
a medieval mud dock, building warships
for one of England's greatest warrior
kings
We're going through the entrance to
the dock.
With finds popping up everywhere.
We've got tens of thousands of these
things
scattered along the whole foreshore
for more than a quarter of a mile.
The South of England - gateway to
the Continent.
It's been a centre of human activity
for thousands of years,
providing rich pickings for
archaeologists.
But not all evidence of human life is
found in trenches.
Sometimes you just need to follow the
tides.
Our first discovery was made not on an
archaeological dig,
but on the edge of the Thames Estuary,
in the North Kent Marshes.
It's a favourite haunt for
archaeologist Steve Tomlinson,
who's also a mud larker.
He looks for finds lying on the
surface of the mud of the estuary.
No trowel or spade is needed here,
just a keen eye and the ability to
pick out finds
of real archaeological significance.
Yeah, just having a look on the mud,
see if there's finds, anything unusual
or any pot sherds of any kind.
Just anything that has basically been
washed up by the tide.
It may seem a bit haphazard,
but mud larking has led Steve to make
some intriguing discoveries.
I've been mud larking for roughly
about seven years now.
Every day is different.
You can get really good days and
really quiet days.
You just don't know what's going to
turn up.
No. Don't care about that one.
It's the thrill of going out there
to say,
"What is out there today? What can I
get? What can I find?"
Quite interesting.
Looks like we've got a piece of Roman
pottery here.
Possibly second century.
So we call that a combing design
inside, which is quite nice.
That's probably going to be a small
storage jar.
Yeah, just washed in on the tides
after nearly 2,000 years,
so that's very nice.
Some finds are easy to identify.
Others can kick-start a detective
trail
involving colleagues, universities and
the British Museum.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, looks like some piece of dried
skin.
So I'm going to take that,
because that could turn out to be
something good,
which would be lovely.
In September 2022, Steve found a
scrap of hide or leather like this,
and it's turned out to be something
extraordinary.
I saw this flat piece of leather,
which looked like a shoe sole.
So Thought it'd be interesting,
so I picked it up, just looked really
old
and I think that's what really got my
excitement going a bit.
Six months later, Steve found
something else
which proved to be part of a leather
bag.
Both finds have been sent for
radiocarbon dating.
And we've also asked archaeological
conservator
and Digging For Britain regular Dana
Goodburn-Brown
to carry out a microscopic examination
of these artefacts.
Steve's come to the tent to see what
she's discovered.
Dana, it's lovely to see you again.
- I'm always excited when you turn up with your microscope
- Thank you.
And this just looks like the most
incredible find.
And, Steve, you found it.
Tell me what we've got here and how
you found it.
I found these, both of these, mud
larking.
- So you're looking along the foreshore.
- Looking on the foreshore
and came across this shoe, which is
absolutely incredible.
- Can I hold it?
- Of course you can.
- Is that all right?
- Yes, of course.
Oh, my goodness.
And I suppose being an
archaeologist,
I kind of had an inkling it was quite
good.
- Can I turn it over?
- Yeah, of course you can.
So I sent it off to a carbon dating
unit in Scotland.
Right.
And four weeks later, they came back
with a date
of 888 to 781 BC.
- Wow!
- Which is 2,803 years old.
It was the oldest shoe ever found
within the British Isles.
So this places it late Bronze Age,
early Iron Age.
- So it's late Bronze Age, yes, or early Iron Age.
- Yeah.
- So, at that point, you found the earliest shoe in Britain.
- Yes.
This shoe also went up to the British
Museum.
- Yeah.
- They got no other record.
This is the smallest Bronze Age shoe
ever found in the world.
That's amazing.
I'm just imagining this little Bronze
Age kid
- running along the banks of the river
- I know.
And then they come back and their
mum goes, "Where's your other shoe?"
- I know.
- And it's gone.
And that's it, until Steve finds it.
- Yeah.
- I love it. Yeah.
Again, it's opened up history.
You know, we make shoes for toddlers
and babies,
and we never knew that actually
existed in history.
- It's lovely, isn't it?
- Which is amazing.
Cos we're right back in pre-history,
there's nothing written down.
- Their mums were just the same.
- They're so cute, those little shoes.
- Yeah. - So
- It's lovely.
Dana, what can you say about this
leather, then?
- I see you've got your microscope.
- I do.
What can you tell by magnifying
them?
I mean, the first stop for a
conservator
is to look at, record what's there.
And one thing about this shoe, it
doesn't make sense, really,
quite what it is and how it can be
used,
but most of it is lost edges.
So all around the edge here, so it's
either worn away or torn.
Right.
So that means it is a bit of
guesswork to figure out
- exactly what shape it started with.
- Yeah.
I took it to X-ray because it looked
like it was in two layers
and then it does seem to be, like, two
layers.
So it's not two layers of the
original leather?
It's actually two pieces of leather
which have been applied together?
- Yeah, it seems to be.
- Stuck together?
- And then what about this bit?
- Yes. Well, this
- You can hold this one, too.
- It's still really supple, isn't it?
- It is. - Yeah.
- We think it's half of a bag.
And so, once again, a mud larking
find,
- 60 foot away from the late Bronze Age shoe.
- Yeah.
And sent it off and it came back
with a date
of 2578 to 2466 BC.
- Which is the late Neolithic period.
- So it's even older.
So it's even older.
It's 1,700 years older than the late
Bronze Age shoe.
So we now know we've got the oldest
piece of leather
found in the British Isles and the
second.
- Found by the same person.
- By the same person, yes.
- Honestly, that is incredible.
- Yeah.
We don't get organic remains being
preserved very often.
And to have ended up finding these
pieces of leather
- from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic
- Still in shock.
- It's just extraordinary.
- Yes.
And do you think this interpretation
of that piece of leather
is a potential bag? Does that make
sense, looking at it?
Kind of. Again, that's not my
speciality.
But the British Museum did think it
might be part of a bag.
But I'm fascinated by this residue on
the top.
Take a look down my screen here.
Looking at the bag found in the
salty mud of the estuary,
Dana is drawn to a small waxy deposit.
What is that strange bit of brownish
colour?
Well, it's so interesting.
And it gets even more intriguing.
I can't wait to show you.
This is what really excites me.
- Oh.
- These are little diatoms,
- which are little single-celled creatures that live in water.
- Yeah.
I think these are freshwater
diatoms.
This is stuck on the surface of the
oily, waxy thing.
Are they likely to have come from
the mud?
- Well, no, because it was found in the estuary, in a salty area.
- Right.
- And they're not in the leather. It's only in this deposit.
- Right.
So I'm thinking, "Why is it on
that?"
Maybe it was carrying fresh water
or while it was still fairly fresh and
sticky enough,
it was lost somewhere in freshwater.
So, somewhere along the line, that
bag has picked up
these freshwater organisms and it's
ended up in an estuary.
- So it can't have come from the estuary. Yeah.
- Yeah.
It's just amazing. It's like
archaeology an absolutely
- Micro
- ..microscopic scale, yeah.
And there are clearly more secrets to
come
- from these pieces of leather.
- I know.
We know how old they are,
we know they're Bronze Age and
Neolithic.
- But there's still a lot more to find out about them.
- Absolutely.
The scientific detective trail
hasn't ended yet.
There's clearly more to be revealed.
But there's enough here already to
work out
what the shoe might have looked like.
Professional leather worker Jess
Connolly
has been trying to reconstruct its
shape.
So when I looked at the leather,
you could see on the leather where the
gaps were,
where it looked torn, the bit cut off
at the back.
And to me, as a leather worker,
that indicated that those are where
holes were
- that had been pulled wider or were degrading.
- Yeah.
So I used a bit of poetic licence
and sort of thought, "Well, these will
be holes all around here."
And so I started to form the varying
sorts.
So
- we have many different styles of the shoe.
- Yeah.
- And what it potentially could be.
- Yeah.
I believe they would have used
veg-tanned leather,
whereby they would have punched the
holes in
using what's called a piercer.
And then what I would do is, I
actually pin it into place
so that you're able to form the
essence of the shoe.
- So we can see now that this is a moccasin.
- Yeah.
And then I get I cut a scrap off
to form the moccasin.
That's really lovely.
That's really great to get my head
around, actually,
what this shoe could have looked like.
I did spend an awful lot of time
looking through various books
to see the styles that are around in
that period to give me a clue.
- But we haven't got much.
- There's not.
I mean, this is the earliest shoe
from Britain.
Yeah, the nearest thing is in
Denmark,
the name that I can never pronounce,
something Torvigo with Margrethe Hald
and her works.
So you've had a look at some other
prehistoric shoes from Scandinavia
and come up with these different
ideas?
I think it's very scientific because
what you've done is,
rather than plumping for one, you've
thought,
- "What are the possibilities here"
- Absolutely.
"..With the evidence that we've got?
- "How could this shoe have been formed?"
- Yeah.
We've got all those, you know,
high-tech scientific techniques
that we can throw at it,
but also this kind of practical
experimentation
is absolutely essential.
- It is, it is. And it's good fun.
- Yeah.
The discovery of Britain's oldest shoe
from the Bronze Age
is something quite remarkable.
A familiar, everyday object from
almost 3,000 years ago.
But the prehistory of Britain
stretches back much, much further.
Archaeology focuses on those physical
traces in the landscape
left by people who were here long
before we were.
And it can complement written history,
but it can also push back even earlier
than anything was written down, back
into pre-history,
where we find evidence that is
thousands of years old,
even tens of thousands of years old,
and sometimes hundreds of thousands of
years old.
Our next dig brings us to the Medway
Valley in Kent,
two miles from the centre of
Gillingham.
This dig was happening before the
construction of a new school -
The Maritime Academy.
The dig was less than 20 miles from
Swanscombe,
a place famous for the discovery of
ancient Stone Age artefacts,
but also a 400,000-year-old skull from
an archaic species of human.
There's always the possibility of
finding more evidence
of early humans in these ancient
layers of silt and gravel.
I think it's worth going down a bit
more.
The excavation at the school site
dug down into gravels dating to
300,000 years ago.
Taking us back
into the Palaeolithic period.
Watching over the dig and ready to
swoop on anything interesting
was a team led by geoarchaeologist
Letty Ingrey.
When we excavate a site like this
ahead of a construction project,
it's not possible to hand dig -
it would take years and years,
and there are a lot of kids waiting to
start school.
So most of the digging we actually did
by machine
and between each pull of the machine,
we had someone on the side of the
trench
that would sift through all the
deposits
looking for artefacts,
and an archaeologist would also enter
the trench between each pull
and have a look at the deposits there
to see if there are any artefacts.
Hang on a sec. Just going to have a
look.
It requires huge concentration and
focus,
as Stone Age artefacts are extremely
rare.
Letty had been working here nonstop
for two months
and had found nothing significant
until, one day, something caught her
eye.
Something that made all the hard work
worthwhile.
I saw the tip first.
The long, kind of pointed tip.
It's something that's unmistakable
when you see it.
It's so different from the other kind
of pebbles and bits of gravel.
So obviously human-made.
It was the first glimpse of
something very exciting.
Ancient stone tools known as hand
axes,
and some were huge!
I spend a lot of time digging holes,
looking for things,
and it's very rare to actually find
them.
It's a big thing. It's what keeps you
going.
Rare finds like this give
archaeologists insights
into ancient technology
from hundreds of thousands of years
ago.
I've asked Letty to bring her finds to
the tent
so I can get a closer look.
But, first, I also want to find out
more about the site
where these remarkable hand axes were
found.
- So have you got pictures of the site?
- I do.
So what I've got, actually, is a
photogrammetry model.
So this trench here is about 70 metres
long.
- Oh, it's huge! OK.
- And about four metres wide.
So, yeah, so it's quite big.
I mean, it doesn't look like there's
much there.
I mean, this is the nature of
Palaeolithic archaeology, isn't it,
is that very often it looks quite
empty.
Yeah, a lot of the time you don't
find anything,
but when you do it, it is amazing.
Letty, these are absolutely
incredible.
I mean, this one in particular is
massive.
So we think this is the
third-biggest hand axe
- ever found in Britain so far.
- Really?
Yeah, which is quite incredible.
- They're more like large knives as opposed to axes.
- Yeah.
It's very sharp, it's very strong.
Would have been really good for things
like cutting up meat,
probably other uses as well.
If I look at this one
- It's, um I mean, that's a hefty object.
- It is.
This type of stone tool is
fascinating, isn't it?
Because it goes way back into
prehistory and, you know,
very early types of humans were making
stone tools
which were actually quite similar to
this.
Yeah, I think about 1.7 million, 1.8
million years ago,
- you get the first kind of hand axes in Africa.
- Yeah.
And in Britain, I think about
600,000 years ago.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That kind of thing.
It's quite extraordinary, isn't it,
that you've got a technology
which kind of stays the same pretty
much for, as you say,
- 1.7 million, 1.8 million years.
- It really works. - Yeah.
I can't stop touching them.
They're so tactile and it's really
lovely to see these
- so fresh out of the ground as well. Thank you so much.
- No worries.
Let's gather us up
To the heavens above
We can always
Come back, my love ♪
The South of England is well known
for its megalithic architecture,
often built using Sarsen stones -
huge sandstone boulders.
Stonehenge in Wiltshire is a
world-famous example.
In neighbouring Dorset, there's an
equally rich ceremonial landscape.
For our next dig, we travelled to the
windswept Tenants Hill
near Dorchester in South Dorset.
This collection of Sarsen stones
is called The Grey Mare and her Colts.
It's an odd name, but what we're
looking at is a Neolithic tomb.
So this is where some of Britain's
earliest farmers
would have buried their dead.
And the surrounding landscape in
Dorset
is littered with ancient monuments
like this.
This megalithic architecture dates
back to the end of the Stone Age.
The Neolithic period.
Now, some of these monuments are less
obvious than others.
And today I'm here to look at one
which is so well hidden
it's only just been recognised.
A community dig is taking place up on
this hill.
It's being led by archaeologist Anne
Teather.
The team have found what they believe
to be a Neolithic tomb,
but there are no huge stones this
time,
and only the merest trace of a mound.
- Anne. - Hi. - Hi.
- Nice to meet you. - Hello.
Now, you promised me a barrow.
I can't see a barrow. I can see you've
got a trench open here.
But how did you find it? It looks so
subtle.
So we completed some geophysics,
- and so we know that there is something here.
- OK.
We're looking at what we think is a
Neolithic oval barrow,
which is a type of mortuary monument
that was common between about 4000 and
3500 BC.
- And that's this whole kind of shape here?
- Absolutely.
So we think this central area would
have been the mortuary chamber.
And then we had a flint bank that was
coming around the outside
- and both an inner ditch and an outer ditch.
- OK.
The geophysics provides a rough map,
but not much in the way of detail.
The team have dug a trench to try to
understand
how this burial chamber was
constructed.
So if we just start here, we've got
a linear feature coming through.
Yeah. This edge here.
This edge, yes, which is
rectangular.
We're just trying to see how far that
extends.
But this may be part of the inner
chamber.
The inner chamber would have formed
the core of the burial mound.
And Anne's colleague, Jim Rylatt, has
discovered a series of features
which point towards how this was
built.
You've got stones poking out around
the edge.
So that's classic post hole.
You dig a big hole, put your post in
and then fill the spaces
in around the posts with stones to
hold it in place.
And that's another one.
We've got another one there and
another one over there.
- Is that potentially an another one?
- Yeah, I think so, yes. - Yeah.
I want to clean that up. Have you got
a spare trowel?
- You can have mine.
- And can I? Can I have? Thank you.
You may. Please help yourself.
Have a little look at this.
It looks suspiciously like another
post hole, doesn't it?
I'm happier excavating skeletons, but,
um
So finding these post holes was
really helpful
because it is beginning to give us an
indication
- of how the barrow was built.
- Yeah.
And that it's got this timber chamber
in the centre of it,
and then presumably that flint bank's
built up against that
- and then covered in earth?
- And then covered an earth.
Yes.
As well as piecing together how the
barrow was constructed,
the team are hoping to accurately date
it,
and Jim has just uncovered something
that could help.
- We've got this large deposit of charcoal.
- Yeah.
But at the bottom of it is a big
chunk of pottery,
which is good at one level,
because we should get a date for it
from the charcoal.
Oh, amazing. If the charcoal's
overlying it,
any date you get on the charcoal, you
know the pottery predates that.
- Yep. - Yes.
- Yeah.
Radiocarbon dating can only be carried
out on organic material.
So finding charcoal is a stroke of
luck.
But it also gives another clue about
how the tomb was used.
The amount of charcoal there is
really striking.
So it's likely that this was some
cooking vessel.
Somebody's passed away, and they're
gathering together to remember them.
And then the results of that feast go
into the ditch.
As well as this hidden barrow,
the team are exploring the wider
Neolithic landscape
on and around Tenants Hill,
including a circle of Sarsens
that's just a stone's throw away from
the tomb.
This is a lovely stone circle.
So what do you think the relationship
is
between this and your long barrow?
I mean, they're very close to each
other.
They are very close to each other
and I think that's quite unusual.
And these stones are just representing
the last bit of Sarsen
in this landscape.
So we do wonder if perhaps they were
once the facades
- to the long barrow.
- Oh, right, yeah.
And had perhaps been moved at some
later point
and made into a stone circle here.
And what about the stones
themselves? Are they?
Are they naturally occurring up here
on the hill
or have they come from elsewhere?
They've definitely come from
elsewhere.
They're not naturally occurring at
this size, in this volume
on this landscape.
And there is another location where
there are many, many stones,
and we think that they've been brought
up from there.
- And how far away is it?
- It's only about a kilometre that way. - Yeah?
- Shall we go and take a look?
- Yeah. - Absolutely. - I'd love to.
Anne thinks these Sarsen stones were
recycled,
taken from the tomb to create this
stone circle.
But I want to see where they came from
originally,
down in the Valley.
And there's some extraordinary
archaeology here.
It's wonderful. It is like a river of
Sarsen stones.
They have all fallen naturally in
this space.
They would have been on top of the
hill.
So out of all the stones here, this
one's really special.
- What makes it special?
- So this is a Neolithic polishing stone -
a polissoir.
And is that what we're looking at
here, this smooth bit?
- Absolutely, yes.
- Yeah. How has that happened?
- Somebody's been polishing something on there?
- Yes.
So polished stone axes are really
characteristic
- of the early Neolithic.
- Yeah.
And they make hundreds, thousands of
them
- and then polish them to a high lustre and surface.
- Yeah.
That's incredible. So it's never been
seen before?
- It's never been noted before?
- It's never been noted before.
And there's only one other find in
England that's similar near Avebury.
- Really?
- Yeah.
So you know what was happening here,
that people were polishing these stone
axes,
and Neolithic people were probably
sitting
- just where we are, doing this?
- Doing this. - Yeah. It's brilliant.
Song With No Name by Johnny
Flynn and Robert Macfarlane
Sadness for the ones
Who've walked before me ♪
Some of the earliest traces of
communities living in the south
lie hidden beneath our rolling hills
and fields.
Others, though, are locked beneath the
many layers
of archaeology under our modern,
thriving cities.
Origin stories just waiting to be
discovered.
There are dozens of beautiful historic
cathedrals across the UK.
Most cities have one, some have two or
even more,
and the earliest of them go back 1,000
years into the Middle Ages.
But we suspect that many of them are
built on the site
of even earlier churches or other
buildings.
But, of course, it's very rare
that archaeologists get a chance to
test that out.
But they are getting that opportunity
at our next dig,
in the grounds of Exeter Cathedral in
South Devon.
There are plans to build a new
cloister gallery here
to help tell the story of the
cathedral's 12th Century origins.
Before construction can start,
archaeologists are digging down
into medieval layers right next to the
cathedral.
And, in fact, the archaeology being
uncovered here
goes even deeper, right back to the
foundation of the city
as Isca Dumnoniorum
in the Roman period.
The dig is being led by the
cathedral's resident archaeologist,
John Allan.
We're standing on a very important
archaeological site.
The centre of Exeter has buried Roman
remains,
the earliest of which go back to the
1st Century,
to the foundation of Exeter as a
legionary fortress
of the 1st Century AD.
And parts of the fortress are under
our feet.
It's a significant find because
occasions to get down so deeply
into the archaeology of the city arise
fairly infrequently.
It's years since we've seen this kind
of evidence emerge.
The fortress was originally the base
for the Second Augustan Legion,
who arrived as part of the invading
Roman army.
Project manager Simon Hughes has
uncovered the very point
when Roman Exeter began.
What we're looking at here is the
geology,
which is river terrace gravels.
This is prehistoric soil.
We know that because overlying it
is this thick band of reddish clay.
Now, this is important because this
was the land surface
at the time when, in about 55 AD,
that the Roman Legionary Army arrived.
And we know that
because this orange clay, this is what
they laid down
as a levelling and through which they
would have constructed
their barrack buildings.
During the height of the fortress,
you'd have had approximately 6,000
soldiers here.
Now, this horizon here between the two
deposits
is a lovely point in time, because
this was the layer
on which the soldiers would have
walked about
when they first arrived in Exeter and
set up their fortress.
The dig takes us back to the origins
of the fortress.
But the archaeologists are also
uncovering finds
that give us a glimpse into the Roman
legionaries' lives.
What we have here is fragments from
a Roman bowl.
This is what's called Samian ware and
it dates from mid 1st Century.
It's got a nice motif of a bird on
this one.
And this date is about sort of 40 to
85 AD,
so perhaps was brought over with the
troops.
With this, we've got this lovely glass
counter.
These would have been like your
equivalent to your checkers today,
that sort of thing. So this is part of
a gaming set.
So a nice little group of finds.
We know that the Second Augustan
Legion was based here
for around 20 years before they moved
to South Wales.
And the fortress at Exeter evolved
into a civilian town.
Remarkably, Simon has found an intact
corner
of a Roman civilian townhouse.
You can see Roman block work here.
And what's interesting is, elsewhere,
Roman masonry
had been completely robbed out and
reused for medieval buildings.
But this bit they've left in,
which is an absolutely fantastic piece
of architecture.
This section here, we're looking at a
Roman townhouse floor surface.
We've got the preparation layer,
which is this quite bright red clay,
and sat on top of it this lovely
smooth surface here.
So we can really picture what the
floor would have been like
within these buildings that the Roman
inhabitants of Exeter
would have walked on.
Thanks to this rare opportunity to
dig deep under Exeter's cathedral,
archaeologists have discovered new,
tangible evidence
of life in the city during the Roman
period.
Lost and Found by Johnny Flynn
Just a lonely radio
Just a makeshift show and tell
Playing out the lives of the lost
and found ♪
For centuries, the coastline of the
South of England
was where the bulk of our famous Navy
was based and built.
By the mid-18th century, Britain had
evolved into a naval superpower.
But the origins of the shipbuilding
industry here in the South
go back a few hundred years before
that.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪
There are plenty of shipyards in the
UK
where the tradition of shipbuilding
goes back for centuries,
but redevelopment over the years
has obscured earlier phases of their
history.
But our next site was abandoned,
so archaeologists have been able to
peel back time
and reveal an intact medieval
shipyard.
The abandoned shipyard is in
Smallhythe in Kent.
Somewhat strangely, it's more than ten
miles from the sea.
Archaeologists are trying to trace the
first physical evidence
of the historic shipyard here.
- Oh! - Oh! Nice.
- That's kind of lovely.
Oh, that is lovely.
It's really, really nice.
Smallhythe's shipbuilding story goes
back to the 15th century
at the end of the Medieval period.
Henry V reigned for just nine years.
But his military victories against
France,
including the Battle of Agincourt,
made him a celebrated warrior king,
immortalised by Shakespeare.
There are written accounts telling us
that some of Henry V's ships were
built here at Smallhythe,
but there's been very little physical
trace
of that industry until now.
Where we once potentially had great
big ships here,
certainly the lower parts of them, is
now just fields.
- That's the inside. Again, something that's
- Yeah.
Nathalie Cohen from the National
Trust
is in charge of investigating this 200
acre site.
So this is our site plan.
So we wanted to know more detail about
how you would construct a ship
in a landscape that is so, so
different to what we see now.
So where is the foreshore?
Where is the deep enough water to
launch your vessels into?
So it's all those kind of details
that we wanted to pick up as part of
this project.
Over the last two decades,
archaeologists have been trying to
establish
the scale of the shipbuilding industry
here.
They know that Smallhythe wasn't
always
as cut-off from the coast as it looks
today.
In 1332, the Knelle Dam was built
across the River Rother,
which still flows through East Sussex
and Kent.
The dam was built primarily as a flood
defence,
but it changed the course of the
river, creating a link
between Smallhythe and Winchelsea
Beach,
on the coast ten miles away.
Smallhythe suddenly became the perfect
place
to build seagoing vessels in large mud
docks
dug into the earth on the banks of the
river.
So I'm trying to peel back to where
I think the real edge is.
Maritime archaeologist Elliott Wragg
is trying to track down
those elusive mud docks.
In the medieval period, right now
I'd be standing on the river bank
running probably almost along the line
of those people in red,
all the way along there and running
over across to the east as well.
This would have been a tidal
environment.
So if it was low tide, I might be dry.
If it was high tide, I'd be wet.
And we're now walking up onto the
river bank
and now we are into the shipbuilding
dock proper
here behind the river bank.
The excavation has revealed how the
mud docks at Smallhythe
were dug adjacent to the river bank
below water level.
Ships were built inside the dock and,
when they were ready,
the bank was removed, the dock flooded
and the ships could sail out into the
river
and all the way to the sea.
This is dug as a hole. It's not
built, it's dug.
And we've got a dark horizon here.
Lots of charcoal.
And this seems to be a horizon before
the dock was dug.
And you can see here in the section
running up here,
a series of up-cast deposits.
And this is the stuff they're digging
out the dock.
They're chucking it up on the side
just up here.
So we've had a couple of good bits of
pottery just out of here
between this, which is before the dock
was dug,
and this, which is the spoil coming
out of the dock excavation.
So if we can date this by pottery,
then that will tell us when they start
digging the dock.
The pottery is crucial evidence for
the archaeologists
trying to understand the medieval
origins of shipbuilding
here at Smallhythe.
But the size of the dock is also
striking.
It's quite extraordinary, really,
because it's not ship-shaped at all.
The dock is 24 metres long and 22
metres wide.
So what it looks like is that this
dock has been dug
for the construction of one ship.
History tells us that royal warships
were built at Smallhythe
and it seems the archaeologists have
now located the shipyard.
And they're also finding plenty of
iron nails and roves, or rivets,
which would have been used to hold the
ship's timbers together.
- What is it?
- That's a rove.
They found thousands of them all
over the site.
The excavations, together with
surveys,
are providing evidence for extensive
shipbuilding here
with several separate mud docks.
Even though there's a gale blowing
outside the tent,
I can't wait to get a closer look at
what Elliott and Nathalie have found
and what it tells us about the
abandoned shipyard
that once built vessels for one of
England's most famous warrior kings.
What we have here is a selection of
roves, these diamond-shaped washers.
- Yeah.
- Medieval shipbuilding is clinker-built.
- It's shell-built, so it's overlapping planks.
- Yeah.
You drive a big nail through it,
like this.
- This is a particularly huge example.
- That's massive. - Yeah.
So this is from a big ship.
You drive that through the two planks,
you put one of them on the other side
and then you bend the nail back over
and that forces forces your planks
together.
So it's like a rivet.
- It's effectively a medieval rivet, yeah.
- Yeah.
And so here we've got the whole
range of roves.
They're initially built in strips here
and you break them off.
- Oh. - And just use them in strips.
- You'd have a strip of them.
I just love all this evidence of
shipbuilding. That's fantastic.
- I mean, it must have been busy.
- Really busy. - Really busy.
I think you've got to imagine
something like a sort of
- mad shanty town with sort of 200 or 300 people.
- Yeah.
- Basically living in shacks, kind of Wild West.
- Mm.
And what about this coin?
The top of the dock, running behind
it, parallel to the shore,
was a gravel road.
The earliest documentation of it is
And then the road itself seems to have
fallen out of use
and collapsed across the top of the
dock.
And this coin, which, I think, dates
to the 1580s,
was in amongst that road collapse.
So that gives us sort of a nice sort
of end point for the shipbuilding.
- So it's Elizabeth I half penny, I think it is.
- I think so, yeah.
I can see a cross on that side.
There's a little crescent on it,
which apparently helps to date
the penny within Elizabeth's period,
which is nice as well,
because we have a 1594 map of the area
which shows the east-west road.
So it's quite a nice marrying up of
documentary references,
cartographic references and a little
bit of archaeology as well.
- Yeah, that's lovely, isn't it?
- Very satisfying.
- Have a bit of absolute dating.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - Nice. Yeah.
How many other mud docks have been
archaeologically excavated
- in this way? - None.
- So this - To my knowledge.
- So this is a unique site?
- I think so, yeah.
Whereas other places we know they're
building medieval ships,
London, Portsmouth, Southampton,
whatever,
- they keep building ships there.
- The shipyard would have developed.
The docks get bigger.
All the early evidence just gets wiped
out.
It's another one of these stories
where, you know, the demise
of something ends up being an
opportunity for the archaeologist.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Yeah.
- I mean, this is the biggest collection of roves
- By far.
- Anywhere.
- Certainly in the UK, yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Oh, there you go.
The first archaeological evidence of a
mud dock.
Yeah. Not bad!
Throughout history, the south coast
of England has often acted
as a front line of defence against
would-be invaders.
Our next dig takes us to Dover in
Kent.
The majestic White Cliffs form a
stunning backdrop
to the Dover Strait, the narrowest
part of the English Channel.
And this place played an active role
in Britain's defences
during World War II.
On a beautiful day like this, the
coast of France is so clear
and there's a constant stream of
ferries taking people on holiday.
Of course, in the Second World War, it
was a completely different story.
That was German-occupied territory
and the entire coastline was bristling
with firepower.
German forces invaded France in May
1940,
and the British mainland was then
within their sights.
The answer to that threat was to build
new gun emplacements
all along the White Cliffs of Dover.
But they've been invisible in the
landscape until now,
when archaeologists are getting the
chance
to excavate and reveal them.
In 2017, the National Trust acquired a
huge stretch of land
along the top of the cliffs,
including some unique wartime
defences.
The guns from the emplacements were
removed in the 1950s
and these sites were demolished and
covered over.
But now, for the first time,
archaeologists have been given the
chance to investigate
these once-classified military
installations.
Jon Barker from the National Trust is
leading the investigation.
So what are we looking at here, then?
Where are we?
So we're at a Fan Bay Battery on the
White Cliffs,
and we've been carrying out an
excavation
on Emplacement Three over here.
So when you started work here, could
you see any of this above ground?
You couldn't see anything.
- Our aim's to understand how much of the emplacement survives.
- Yeah.
And how it works in conjunction with
a structure called
the Plotting Room, which is located
further inland.
There were 38 artillery sites in and
around Dover,
but most were mobile.
The only permanent sites were the
defences
on top of the cliffs.
The stars of the show were two huge
guns,
known as Clem and Jane.
With barrels weighing over 100 tonnes,
they were the largest and
longest-range weapons
ever installed on the UK mainland.
This is one of the first gun
batteries that you see anywhere
where it's not about defending the
port.
- It's actually an offensive gun, it's for attacking shipping.
- Right.
Yeah. Can we get down in there and
have a look?
Yeah. Let's go.
Oh, yes, I can see paint on the wall
here.
There are numbers which must be
degrees.
That's right. Compass bearings.
This is all very flaky and delicate,
isn't it?
So it's been a bit of a race against
time, actually,
to record it properly before we lose
some of it.
Gosh, it's been preserved all these
years.
But now because it's been uncovered,
it's vulnerable, isn't it?
Precisely how the guns were operated
from an underground bunker
was top secret, and the records are
patchy.
But the archaeologists are hoping to
find clues to fill in the gaps.
- So can I open this door?
- Go for it.
Although the emplacements were said
to have been completely demolished,
it turns out there's plenty to see
below ground.
Even including these tunnels, and the
magazine
where the ammunition for the guns was
stored.
Oh, how deep does this go?
So this is a 40-metre-long tunnel
with a spark-proof floor that leads to
the magazines.
Oh, the temperature really drops,
doesn't it, as you walk in here?
It's a constant 12 degrees down
here.
Feels colder than that.
40 metres long.
And presumably that is just to keep it
away from the gun?
- To protect from blast, that's right.
- Yeah.
So this is the shell store,
where the shells have actually been
kept safe, dry and protected.
Well, you say dry, but it looks very
damp in here.
I mean, the ceiling is covered with
drips.
It is now.
Before the site was demolished and
covered over,
there would have been numerous
ventilation shafts
going up to the surface.
- And that's these here, is it?
- That's right.
Now home to a spider.
There's lots of spiders down here.
The emplacement, its tunnels and
magazines
have lain here untouched for almost 80
years.
But now we can begin to understand
what it was like
for the gun crew working here.
What are all these rectangular pieces
of iron?
So these are ladder rungs which are
from the emergency shaft.
And we actually found some original
pieces of the winch
within the material at the bottom of
the shaft.
So this is how the shells are
delivered down into the magazine?
- That's right.
- Yeah.
How many people would have been
working here
on this gun emplacement?
Probably seven to ten.
- You had seven to a gun crew.
- Yeah.
- And presumably it was manned 24/7.
- That's right.
It had to be manned 24 hours a day.
The gun always had to be in a state of
readiness to be fired if needed.
The gun crew was in charge of
maintenance
and loading shells when needed,
but they weren't in control of aiming
at targets.
That was all done remotely from the
Plotting Room,
in a bunker half a mile inland.
Which is down here, I presume? OK.
- It is. We've got to go down this ladder.
- All right, after you.
- Shall I go first?
- Yeah.
The Plotting Room is part of a wider
network of underground chambers
and bombproof tunnels, all dug into
the chalk cliffs.
Oh, this is brilliant.
So this is it. This is the nerve
centre.
Ah. "Unauthorised persons are
forbidden
"to interfere with equipment."
So there was something right there.
And this is where admiralty fire
control table was actually located.
So that was where they're actually
controlling the guns from?
That's right.
So it was unique, originally designed
to work on battleships.
- Yeah.
- But this one had been retrofitted to work on land.
- Everything is hard-wired to here.
- Yeah.
And you've got a whole host of
different services
that are coming into this Plotting
Room as well.
You've got range-finding location,
battery observation posts,
spotter planes and, most importantly,
radar.
And so that's all coming here to be
considered
- before that information is sent out to the guns.
- Yeah.
Well, this is incredible, isn't it?
The technology here remained
classified
for many years after the war.
With so few records, every
archaeological find is precious.
We have done a fingertip search.
These are some of the artefacts that
we've discovered.
In the early 1950s, when the site was
decommissioned,
actually, the technology was still
confidential then,
so all of the equipment was smashed
into small pieces down here.
Mm. Certainly looks as though it has
been smashed up, doesn't it?
I've spotted somewhere else I'd like
to explore.
- So what's through here?
- There's this intriguing little feature here,
- the service tunnel that runs around the whole structure.
- OK.
It's for drainage and it's for power
and services and communication.
It's also got some really interesting
graffiti,
- but it is an adventure.
- Oh, OK.
- How deep is the graffiti in there?
- It's quite a long way. - OK.
All right, I'm game.
Thank you.
The service tunnel is far too narrow
for the camera crew,
so I've had to film by myself.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
But the tunnel hides a very special
connection
to the people who worked here during
the war.
What have we got along here?
- Oh, wow. - So here
- OK.
So it says, "Heros of Fan Hole.
- "W Dodd" or "Dodds".
- Yeah.
- And "Pettit."
- Oh, yeah.
- Do you think that those go back to the war?
- Almost certainly.
The reference to Fan Hole is
interesting
because it was only called Fan Hole up
until about 1942.
After that, it became known as Fan Bay
Battery. So it's an early bit.
Look at that, "The heros of Fan
Hole."
- Quite a long way back.
- It is.
It's not often on Digging For
Britain
that I get to be the one making the
discoveries.
But, on the way back,
I spot something that the
archaeologists have missed.
Oh, my goodness. I think I've got
"Henry Ford
"..1941" here.
- Oh, OK. I haven't seen that one before.
- Is that when it was built?
So the Plotting Room was finished in
the April of '41.
So that could have been somebody
that was actually building it.
That's incredible.
Right, time to go out.
Among the paraphernalia of war
shrouded in secrecy,
it's an astonishing link to an
individual.
I found a new bit of graffiti down
there,
going all the way back to 1941.
And we're not out yet.
- No, we've still got a bit further to go.
- We're still underground.
There's so much more here than the
archaeologists had hoped for.
Most of the underground architecture
of these defences has survived.
And we can also make that connection
to the Fan Hole "heros"
whose names are missing from the
records
but who played such a vital part in
Britain's World War II defences.
Back out into the 21st Century.
Next time on Digging For Britain,
an ancient Welsh home
The oldest house in Cardiff.
Throws up a treasure trove of
finds.
- Find of a lifetime for me, that is. Right on my doorstep.
- Yeah, yeah.
A forgotten fortress gives up its
secrets.
Big chunky stone building. Super
clear to see. Very satisfying.
And the surprising date of an
uncovered mosaic
- 5th to 6th century.
- No, no, no, no, no.
redefines Britain's past.
- This isn't right for a Roman villa.
- Feel the electricity, can't you?
Come and search for we who search
And looking for a scarred land
And dig for those whose stories lie
With buried pasts and futures won
And dig for us as we have done
To lay the dead out in the sun
To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪
and varied history
stretching back thousands of years.
But hidden under the ground and
underwater
are some amazing treasures just
waiting to be found.
Wow!
So, each year, all across the country,
archaeologists dig, dive
and explore their way down
Oh, this is brilliant.
searching for fresh discoveries.
And it is completely intact.
Revealing traces of ancient
cultures
- The shoe is 2,803 years old.
- Oh, wow.
and unearthing fascinating
artefacts.
Oh, that's a nice thing. What is it?
I've never seen anything quite like
it in my career.
Every dig adds new pieces
to the ever-growing archaeological
jigsaw
That's so cool, isn't it?
That is the epic story of our
islands.
This year, I visit digs in some
extraordinary locations.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
And I call on the help of a trio of
expert investigators
It's quite difficult to find any
other evidence
of things that just don't leave a mark
in the archaeology.
This is a really powerful document
because we're getting to hear the
voices that we don't usually hear.
Who delve deeper to answer the
questions raised by the finds.
Is all of this already recorded in
books?
There was none of this in a book
anywhere.
Finally, the archaeologists bring
their most amazing discoveries
into our tent
Astonishing!
for up-close analysis.
Genuinely rewriting history.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
In this episode, I'll be exploring the
best archaeological digs
in southern England.
On a building site in Kent,
archaeologists discover one of the
oldest finds
we've ever seen on Digging For
Britain.
So what's your ballpark figure at the
moment?
Our ballpark figure at the moment is
probably about
300,000 to 350,000 years old.
On the White Cliffs of Dover,
a top-secret military installation
It's a constant 12 degrees down
here.
Feels colder than that.
is opened up to archaeologists.
We have done a fingertip search.
Technology was still confidential
then,
- so all of the equipment was smashed into small pieces down here.
- Mm.
And, for the first time,
archaeologists unearth
a medieval mud dock, building warships
for one of England's greatest warrior
kings
We're going through the entrance to
the dock.
With finds popping up everywhere.
We've got tens of thousands of these
things
scattered along the whole foreshore
for more than a quarter of a mile.
The South of England - gateway to
the Continent.
It's been a centre of human activity
for thousands of years,
providing rich pickings for
archaeologists.
But not all evidence of human life is
found in trenches.
Sometimes you just need to follow the
tides.
Our first discovery was made not on an
archaeological dig,
but on the edge of the Thames Estuary,
in the North Kent Marshes.
It's a favourite haunt for
archaeologist Steve Tomlinson,
who's also a mud larker.
He looks for finds lying on the
surface of the mud of the estuary.
No trowel or spade is needed here,
just a keen eye and the ability to
pick out finds
of real archaeological significance.
Yeah, just having a look on the mud,
see if there's finds, anything unusual
or any pot sherds of any kind.
Just anything that has basically been
washed up by the tide.
It may seem a bit haphazard,
but mud larking has led Steve to make
some intriguing discoveries.
I've been mud larking for roughly
about seven years now.
Every day is different.
You can get really good days and
really quiet days.
You just don't know what's going to
turn up.
No. Don't care about that one.
It's the thrill of going out there
to say,
"What is out there today? What can I
get? What can I find?"
Quite interesting.
Looks like we've got a piece of Roman
pottery here.
Possibly second century.
So we call that a combing design
inside, which is quite nice.
That's probably going to be a small
storage jar.
Yeah, just washed in on the tides
after nearly 2,000 years,
so that's very nice.
Some finds are easy to identify.
Others can kick-start a detective
trail
involving colleagues, universities and
the British Museum.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, looks like some piece of dried
skin.
So I'm going to take that,
because that could turn out to be
something good,
which would be lovely.
In September 2022, Steve found a
scrap of hide or leather like this,
and it's turned out to be something
extraordinary.
I saw this flat piece of leather,
which looked like a shoe sole.
So Thought it'd be interesting,
so I picked it up, just looked really
old
and I think that's what really got my
excitement going a bit.
Six months later, Steve found
something else
which proved to be part of a leather
bag.
Both finds have been sent for
radiocarbon dating.
And we've also asked archaeological
conservator
and Digging For Britain regular Dana
Goodburn-Brown
to carry out a microscopic examination
of these artefacts.
Steve's come to the tent to see what
she's discovered.
Dana, it's lovely to see you again.
- I'm always excited when you turn up with your microscope
- Thank you.
And this just looks like the most
incredible find.
And, Steve, you found it.
Tell me what we've got here and how
you found it.
I found these, both of these, mud
larking.
- So you're looking along the foreshore.
- Looking on the foreshore
and came across this shoe, which is
absolutely incredible.
- Can I hold it?
- Of course you can.
- Is that all right?
- Yes, of course.
Oh, my goodness.
And I suppose being an
archaeologist,
I kind of had an inkling it was quite
good.
- Can I turn it over?
- Yeah, of course you can.
So I sent it off to a carbon dating
unit in Scotland.
Right.
And four weeks later, they came back
with a date
of 888 to 781 BC.
- Wow!
- Which is 2,803 years old.
It was the oldest shoe ever found
within the British Isles.
So this places it late Bronze Age,
early Iron Age.
- So it's late Bronze Age, yes, or early Iron Age.
- Yeah.
- So, at that point, you found the earliest shoe in Britain.
- Yes.
This shoe also went up to the British
Museum.
- Yeah.
- They got no other record.
This is the smallest Bronze Age shoe
ever found in the world.
That's amazing.
I'm just imagining this little Bronze
Age kid
- running along the banks of the river
- I know.
And then they come back and their
mum goes, "Where's your other shoe?"
- I know.
- And it's gone.
And that's it, until Steve finds it.
- Yeah.
- I love it. Yeah.
Again, it's opened up history.
You know, we make shoes for toddlers
and babies,
and we never knew that actually
existed in history.
- It's lovely, isn't it?
- Which is amazing.
Cos we're right back in pre-history,
there's nothing written down.
- Their mums were just the same.
- They're so cute, those little shoes.
- Yeah. - So
- It's lovely.
Dana, what can you say about this
leather, then?
- I see you've got your microscope.
- I do.
What can you tell by magnifying
them?
I mean, the first stop for a
conservator
is to look at, record what's there.
And one thing about this shoe, it
doesn't make sense, really,
quite what it is and how it can be
used,
but most of it is lost edges.
So all around the edge here, so it's
either worn away or torn.
Right.
So that means it is a bit of
guesswork to figure out
- exactly what shape it started with.
- Yeah.
I took it to X-ray because it looked
like it was in two layers
and then it does seem to be, like, two
layers.
So it's not two layers of the
original leather?
It's actually two pieces of leather
which have been applied together?
- Yeah, it seems to be.
- Stuck together?
- And then what about this bit?
- Yes. Well, this
- You can hold this one, too.
- It's still really supple, isn't it?
- It is. - Yeah.
- We think it's half of a bag.
And so, once again, a mud larking
find,
- 60 foot away from the late Bronze Age shoe.
- Yeah.
And sent it off and it came back
with a date
of 2578 to 2466 BC.
- Which is the late Neolithic period.
- So it's even older.
So it's even older.
It's 1,700 years older than the late
Bronze Age shoe.
So we now know we've got the oldest
piece of leather
found in the British Isles and the
second.
- Found by the same person.
- By the same person, yes.
- Honestly, that is incredible.
- Yeah.
We don't get organic remains being
preserved very often.
And to have ended up finding these
pieces of leather
- from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic
- Still in shock.
- It's just extraordinary.
- Yes.
And do you think this interpretation
of that piece of leather
is a potential bag? Does that make
sense, looking at it?
Kind of. Again, that's not my
speciality.
But the British Museum did think it
might be part of a bag.
But I'm fascinated by this residue on
the top.
Take a look down my screen here.
Looking at the bag found in the
salty mud of the estuary,
Dana is drawn to a small waxy deposit.
What is that strange bit of brownish
colour?
Well, it's so interesting.
And it gets even more intriguing.
I can't wait to show you.
This is what really excites me.
- Oh.
- These are little diatoms,
- which are little single-celled creatures that live in water.
- Yeah.
I think these are freshwater
diatoms.
This is stuck on the surface of the
oily, waxy thing.
Are they likely to have come from
the mud?
- Well, no, because it was found in the estuary, in a salty area.
- Right.
- And they're not in the leather. It's only in this deposit.
- Right.
So I'm thinking, "Why is it on
that?"
Maybe it was carrying fresh water
or while it was still fairly fresh and
sticky enough,
it was lost somewhere in freshwater.
So, somewhere along the line, that
bag has picked up
these freshwater organisms and it's
ended up in an estuary.
- So it can't have come from the estuary. Yeah.
- Yeah.
It's just amazing. It's like
archaeology an absolutely
- Micro
- ..microscopic scale, yeah.
And there are clearly more secrets to
come
- from these pieces of leather.
- I know.
We know how old they are,
we know they're Bronze Age and
Neolithic.
- But there's still a lot more to find out about them.
- Absolutely.
The scientific detective trail
hasn't ended yet.
There's clearly more to be revealed.
But there's enough here already to
work out
what the shoe might have looked like.
Professional leather worker Jess
Connolly
has been trying to reconstruct its
shape.
So when I looked at the leather,
you could see on the leather where the
gaps were,
where it looked torn, the bit cut off
at the back.
And to me, as a leather worker,
that indicated that those are where
holes were
- that had been pulled wider or were degrading.
- Yeah.
So I used a bit of poetic licence
and sort of thought, "Well, these will
be holes all around here."
And so I started to form the varying
sorts.
So
- we have many different styles of the shoe.
- Yeah.
- And what it potentially could be.
- Yeah.
I believe they would have used
veg-tanned leather,
whereby they would have punched the
holes in
using what's called a piercer.
And then what I would do is, I
actually pin it into place
so that you're able to form the
essence of the shoe.
- So we can see now that this is a moccasin.
- Yeah.
And then I get I cut a scrap off
to form the moccasin.
That's really lovely.
That's really great to get my head
around, actually,
what this shoe could have looked like.
I did spend an awful lot of time
looking through various books
to see the styles that are around in
that period to give me a clue.
- But we haven't got much.
- There's not.
I mean, this is the earliest shoe
from Britain.
Yeah, the nearest thing is in
Denmark,
the name that I can never pronounce,
something Torvigo with Margrethe Hald
and her works.
So you've had a look at some other
prehistoric shoes from Scandinavia
and come up with these different
ideas?
I think it's very scientific because
what you've done is,
rather than plumping for one, you've
thought,
- "What are the possibilities here"
- Absolutely.
"..With the evidence that we've got?
- "How could this shoe have been formed?"
- Yeah.
We've got all those, you know,
high-tech scientific techniques
that we can throw at it,
but also this kind of practical
experimentation
is absolutely essential.
- It is, it is. And it's good fun.
- Yeah.
The discovery of Britain's oldest shoe
from the Bronze Age
is something quite remarkable.
A familiar, everyday object from
almost 3,000 years ago.
But the prehistory of Britain
stretches back much, much further.
Archaeology focuses on those physical
traces in the landscape
left by people who were here long
before we were.
And it can complement written history,
but it can also push back even earlier
than anything was written down, back
into pre-history,
where we find evidence that is
thousands of years old,
even tens of thousands of years old,
and sometimes hundreds of thousands of
years old.
Our next dig brings us to the Medway
Valley in Kent,
two miles from the centre of
Gillingham.
This dig was happening before the
construction of a new school -
The Maritime Academy.
The dig was less than 20 miles from
Swanscombe,
a place famous for the discovery of
ancient Stone Age artefacts,
but also a 400,000-year-old skull from
an archaic species of human.
There's always the possibility of
finding more evidence
of early humans in these ancient
layers of silt and gravel.
I think it's worth going down a bit
more.
The excavation at the school site
dug down into gravels dating to
300,000 years ago.
Taking us back
into the Palaeolithic period.
Watching over the dig and ready to
swoop on anything interesting
was a team led by geoarchaeologist
Letty Ingrey.
When we excavate a site like this
ahead of a construction project,
it's not possible to hand dig -
it would take years and years,
and there are a lot of kids waiting to
start school.
So most of the digging we actually did
by machine
and between each pull of the machine,
we had someone on the side of the
trench
that would sift through all the
deposits
looking for artefacts,
and an archaeologist would also enter
the trench between each pull
and have a look at the deposits there
to see if there are any artefacts.
Hang on a sec. Just going to have a
look.
It requires huge concentration and
focus,
as Stone Age artefacts are extremely
rare.
Letty had been working here nonstop
for two months
and had found nothing significant
until, one day, something caught her
eye.
Something that made all the hard work
worthwhile.
I saw the tip first.
The long, kind of pointed tip.
It's something that's unmistakable
when you see it.
It's so different from the other kind
of pebbles and bits of gravel.
So obviously human-made.
It was the first glimpse of
something very exciting.
Ancient stone tools known as hand
axes,
and some were huge!
I spend a lot of time digging holes,
looking for things,
and it's very rare to actually find
them.
It's a big thing. It's what keeps you
going.
Rare finds like this give
archaeologists insights
into ancient technology
from hundreds of thousands of years
ago.
I've asked Letty to bring her finds to
the tent
so I can get a closer look.
But, first, I also want to find out
more about the site
where these remarkable hand axes were
found.
- So have you got pictures of the site?
- I do.
So what I've got, actually, is a
photogrammetry model.
So this trench here is about 70 metres
long.
- Oh, it's huge! OK.
- And about four metres wide.
So, yeah, so it's quite big.
I mean, it doesn't look like there's
much there.
I mean, this is the nature of
Palaeolithic archaeology, isn't it,
is that very often it looks quite
empty.
Yeah, a lot of the time you don't
find anything,
but when you do it, it is amazing.
Letty, these are absolutely
incredible.
I mean, this one in particular is
massive.
So we think this is the
third-biggest hand axe
- ever found in Britain so far.
- Really?
Yeah, which is quite incredible.
- They're more like large knives as opposed to axes.
- Yeah.
It's very sharp, it's very strong.
Would have been really good for things
like cutting up meat,
probably other uses as well.
If I look at this one
- It's, um I mean, that's a hefty object.
- It is.
This type of stone tool is
fascinating, isn't it?
Because it goes way back into
prehistory and, you know,
very early types of humans were making
stone tools
which were actually quite similar to
this.
Yeah, I think about 1.7 million, 1.8
million years ago,
- you get the first kind of hand axes in Africa.
- Yeah.
And in Britain, I think about
600,000 years ago.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That kind of thing.
It's quite extraordinary, isn't it,
that you've got a technology
which kind of stays the same pretty
much for, as you say,
- 1.7 million, 1.8 million years.
- It really works. - Yeah.
I can't stop touching them.
They're so tactile and it's really
lovely to see these
- so fresh out of the ground as well. Thank you so much.
- No worries.
Let's gather us up
To the heavens above
We can always
Come back, my love ♪
The South of England is well known
for its megalithic architecture,
often built using Sarsen stones -
huge sandstone boulders.
Stonehenge in Wiltshire is a
world-famous example.
In neighbouring Dorset, there's an
equally rich ceremonial landscape.
For our next dig, we travelled to the
windswept Tenants Hill
near Dorchester in South Dorset.
This collection of Sarsen stones
is called The Grey Mare and her Colts.
It's an odd name, but what we're
looking at is a Neolithic tomb.
So this is where some of Britain's
earliest farmers
would have buried their dead.
And the surrounding landscape in
Dorset
is littered with ancient monuments
like this.
This megalithic architecture dates
back to the end of the Stone Age.
The Neolithic period.
Now, some of these monuments are less
obvious than others.
And today I'm here to look at one
which is so well hidden
it's only just been recognised.
A community dig is taking place up on
this hill.
It's being led by archaeologist Anne
Teather.
The team have found what they believe
to be a Neolithic tomb,
but there are no huge stones this
time,
and only the merest trace of a mound.
- Anne. - Hi. - Hi.
- Nice to meet you. - Hello.
Now, you promised me a barrow.
I can't see a barrow. I can see you've
got a trench open here.
But how did you find it? It looks so
subtle.
So we completed some geophysics,
- and so we know that there is something here.
- OK.
We're looking at what we think is a
Neolithic oval barrow,
which is a type of mortuary monument
that was common between about 4000 and
3500 BC.
- And that's this whole kind of shape here?
- Absolutely.
So we think this central area would
have been the mortuary chamber.
And then we had a flint bank that was
coming around the outside
- and both an inner ditch and an outer ditch.
- OK.
The geophysics provides a rough map,
but not much in the way of detail.
The team have dug a trench to try to
understand
how this burial chamber was
constructed.
So if we just start here, we've got
a linear feature coming through.
Yeah. This edge here.
This edge, yes, which is
rectangular.
We're just trying to see how far that
extends.
But this may be part of the inner
chamber.
The inner chamber would have formed
the core of the burial mound.
And Anne's colleague, Jim Rylatt, has
discovered a series of features
which point towards how this was
built.
You've got stones poking out around
the edge.
So that's classic post hole.
You dig a big hole, put your post in
and then fill the spaces
in around the posts with stones to
hold it in place.
And that's another one.
We've got another one there and
another one over there.
- Is that potentially an another one?
- Yeah, I think so, yes. - Yeah.
I want to clean that up. Have you got
a spare trowel?
- You can have mine.
- And can I? Can I have? Thank you.
You may. Please help yourself.
Have a little look at this.
It looks suspiciously like another
post hole, doesn't it?
I'm happier excavating skeletons, but,
um
So finding these post holes was
really helpful
because it is beginning to give us an
indication
- of how the barrow was built.
- Yeah.
And that it's got this timber chamber
in the centre of it,
and then presumably that flint bank's
built up against that
- and then covered in earth?
- And then covered an earth.
Yes.
As well as piecing together how the
barrow was constructed,
the team are hoping to accurately date
it,
and Jim has just uncovered something
that could help.
- We've got this large deposit of charcoal.
- Yeah.
But at the bottom of it is a big
chunk of pottery,
which is good at one level,
because we should get a date for it
from the charcoal.
Oh, amazing. If the charcoal's
overlying it,
any date you get on the charcoal, you
know the pottery predates that.
- Yep. - Yes.
- Yeah.
Radiocarbon dating can only be carried
out on organic material.
So finding charcoal is a stroke of
luck.
But it also gives another clue about
how the tomb was used.
The amount of charcoal there is
really striking.
So it's likely that this was some
cooking vessel.
Somebody's passed away, and they're
gathering together to remember them.
And then the results of that feast go
into the ditch.
As well as this hidden barrow,
the team are exploring the wider
Neolithic landscape
on and around Tenants Hill,
including a circle of Sarsens
that's just a stone's throw away from
the tomb.
This is a lovely stone circle.
So what do you think the relationship
is
between this and your long barrow?
I mean, they're very close to each
other.
They are very close to each other
and I think that's quite unusual.
And these stones are just representing
the last bit of Sarsen
in this landscape.
So we do wonder if perhaps they were
once the facades
- to the long barrow.
- Oh, right, yeah.
And had perhaps been moved at some
later point
and made into a stone circle here.
And what about the stones
themselves? Are they?
Are they naturally occurring up here
on the hill
or have they come from elsewhere?
They've definitely come from
elsewhere.
They're not naturally occurring at
this size, in this volume
on this landscape.
And there is another location where
there are many, many stones,
and we think that they've been brought
up from there.
- And how far away is it?
- It's only about a kilometre that way. - Yeah?
- Shall we go and take a look?
- Yeah. - Absolutely. - I'd love to.
Anne thinks these Sarsen stones were
recycled,
taken from the tomb to create this
stone circle.
But I want to see where they came from
originally,
down in the Valley.
And there's some extraordinary
archaeology here.
It's wonderful. It is like a river of
Sarsen stones.
They have all fallen naturally in
this space.
They would have been on top of the
hill.
So out of all the stones here, this
one's really special.
- What makes it special?
- So this is a Neolithic polishing stone -
a polissoir.
And is that what we're looking at
here, this smooth bit?
- Absolutely, yes.
- Yeah. How has that happened?
- Somebody's been polishing something on there?
- Yes.
So polished stone axes are really
characteristic
- of the early Neolithic.
- Yeah.
And they make hundreds, thousands of
them
- and then polish them to a high lustre and surface.
- Yeah.
That's incredible. So it's never been
seen before?
- It's never been noted before?
- It's never been noted before.
And there's only one other find in
England that's similar near Avebury.
- Really?
- Yeah.
So you know what was happening here,
that people were polishing these stone
axes,
and Neolithic people were probably
sitting
- just where we are, doing this?
- Doing this. - Yeah. It's brilliant.
Song With No Name by Johnny
Flynn and Robert Macfarlane
Sadness for the ones
Who've walked before me ♪
Some of the earliest traces of
communities living in the south
lie hidden beneath our rolling hills
and fields.
Others, though, are locked beneath the
many layers
of archaeology under our modern,
thriving cities.
Origin stories just waiting to be
discovered.
There are dozens of beautiful historic
cathedrals across the UK.
Most cities have one, some have two or
even more,
and the earliest of them go back 1,000
years into the Middle Ages.
But we suspect that many of them are
built on the site
of even earlier churches or other
buildings.
But, of course, it's very rare
that archaeologists get a chance to
test that out.
But they are getting that opportunity
at our next dig,
in the grounds of Exeter Cathedral in
South Devon.
There are plans to build a new
cloister gallery here
to help tell the story of the
cathedral's 12th Century origins.
Before construction can start,
archaeologists are digging down
into medieval layers right next to the
cathedral.
And, in fact, the archaeology being
uncovered here
goes even deeper, right back to the
foundation of the city
as Isca Dumnoniorum
in the Roman period.
The dig is being led by the
cathedral's resident archaeologist,
John Allan.
We're standing on a very important
archaeological site.
The centre of Exeter has buried Roman
remains,
the earliest of which go back to the
1st Century,
to the foundation of Exeter as a
legionary fortress
of the 1st Century AD.
And parts of the fortress are under
our feet.
It's a significant find because
occasions to get down so deeply
into the archaeology of the city arise
fairly infrequently.
It's years since we've seen this kind
of evidence emerge.
The fortress was originally the base
for the Second Augustan Legion,
who arrived as part of the invading
Roman army.
Project manager Simon Hughes has
uncovered the very point
when Roman Exeter began.
What we're looking at here is the
geology,
which is river terrace gravels.
This is prehistoric soil.
We know that because overlying it
is this thick band of reddish clay.
Now, this is important because this
was the land surface
at the time when, in about 55 AD,
that the Roman Legionary Army arrived.
And we know that
because this orange clay, this is what
they laid down
as a levelling and through which they
would have constructed
their barrack buildings.
During the height of the fortress,
you'd have had approximately 6,000
soldiers here.
Now, this horizon here between the two
deposits
is a lovely point in time, because
this was the layer
on which the soldiers would have
walked about
when they first arrived in Exeter and
set up their fortress.
The dig takes us back to the origins
of the fortress.
But the archaeologists are also
uncovering finds
that give us a glimpse into the Roman
legionaries' lives.
What we have here is fragments from
a Roman bowl.
This is what's called Samian ware and
it dates from mid 1st Century.
It's got a nice motif of a bird on
this one.
And this date is about sort of 40 to
85 AD,
so perhaps was brought over with the
troops.
With this, we've got this lovely glass
counter.
These would have been like your
equivalent to your checkers today,
that sort of thing. So this is part of
a gaming set.
So a nice little group of finds.
We know that the Second Augustan
Legion was based here
for around 20 years before they moved
to South Wales.
And the fortress at Exeter evolved
into a civilian town.
Remarkably, Simon has found an intact
corner
of a Roman civilian townhouse.
You can see Roman block work here.
And what's interesting is, elsewhere,
Roman masonry
had been completely robbed out and
reused for medieval buildings.
But this bit they've left in,
which is an absolutely fantastic piece
of architecture.
This section here, we're looking at a
Roman townhouse floor surface.
We've got the preparation layer,
which is this quite bright red clay,
and sat on top of it this lovely
smooth surface here.
So we can really picture what the
floor would have been like
within these buildings that the Roman
inhabitants of Exeter
would have walked on.
Thanks to this rare opportunity to
dig deep under Exeter's cathedral,
archaeologists have discovered new,
tangible evidence
of life in the city during the Roman
period.
Lost and Found by Johnny Flynn
Just a lonely radio
Just a makeshift show and tell
Playing out the lives of the lost
and found ♪
For centuries, the coastline of the
South of England
was where the bulk of our famous Navy
was based and built.
By the mid-18th century, Britain had
evolved into a naval superpower.
But the origins of the shipbuilding
industry here in the South
go back a few hundred years before
that.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪
There are plenty of shipyards in the
UK
where the tradition of shipbuilding
goes back for centuries,
but redevelopment over the years
has obscured earlier phases of their
history.
But our next site was abandoned,
so archaeologists have been able to
peel back time
and reveal an intact medieval
shipyard.
The abandoned shipyard is in
Smallhythe in Kent.
Somewhat strangely, it's more than ten
miles from the sea.
Archaeologists are trying to trace the
first physical evidence
of the historic shipyard here.
- Oh! - Oh! Nice.
- That's kind of lovely.
Oh, that is lovely.
It's really, really nice.
Smallhythe's shipbuilding story goes
back to the 15th century
at the end of the Medieval period.
Henry V reigned for just nine years.
But his military victories against
France,
including the Battle of Agincourt,
made him a celebrated warrior king,
immortalised by Shakespeare.
There are written accounts telling us
that some of Henry V's ships were
built here at Smallhythe,
but there's been very little physical
trace
of that industry until now.
Where we once potentially had great
big ships here,
certainly the lower parts of them, is
now just fields.
- That's the inside. Again, something that's
- Yeah.
Nathalie Cohen from the National
Trust
is in charge of investigating this 200
acre site.
So this is our site plan.
So we wanted to know more detail about
how you would construct a ship
in a landscape that is so, so
different to what we see now.
So where is the foreshore?
Where is the deep enough water to
launch your vessels into?
So it's all those kind of details
that we wanted to pick up as part of
this project.
Over the last two decades,
archaeologists have been trying to
establish
the scale of the shipbuilding industry
here.
They know that Smallhythe wasn't
always
as cut-off from the coast as it looks
today.
In 1332, the Knelle Dam was built
across the River Rother,
which still flows through East Sussex
and Kent.
The dam was built primarily as a flood
defence,
but it changed the course of the
river, creating a link
between Smallhythe and Winchelsea
Beach,
on the coast ten miles away.
Smallhythe suddenly became the perfect
place
to build seagoing vessels in large mud
docks
dug into the earth on the banks of the
river.
So I'm trying to peel back to where
I think the real edge is.
Maritime archaeologist Elliott Wragg
is trying to track down
those elusive mud docks.
In the medieval period, right now
I'd be standing on the river bank
running probably almost along the line
of those people in red,
all the way along there and running
over across to the east as well.
This would have been a tidal
environment.
So if it was low tide, I might be dry.
If it was high tide, I'd be wet.
And we're now walking up onto the
river bank
and now we are into the shipbuilding
dock proper
here behind the river bank.
The excavation has revealed how the
mud docks at Smallhythe
were dug adjacent to the river bank
below water level.
Ships were built inside the dock and,
when they were ready,
the bank was removed, the dock flooded
and the ships could sail out into the
river
and all the way to the sea.
This is dug as a hole. It's not
built, it's dug.
And we've got a dark horizon here.
Lots of charcoal.
And this seems to be a horizon before
the dock was dug.
And you can see here in the section
running up here,
a series of up-cast deposits.
And this is the stuff they're digging
out the dock.
They're chucking it up on the side
just up here.
So we've had a couple of good bits of
pottery just out of here
between this, which is before the dock
was dug,
and this, which is the spoil coming
out of the dock excavation.
So if we can date this by pottery,
then that will tell us when they start
digging the dock.
The pottery is crucial evidence for
the archaeologists
trying to understand the medieval
origins of shipbuilding
here at Smallhythe.
But the size of the dock is also
striking.
It's quite extraordinary, really,
because it's not ship-shaped at all.
The dock is 24 metres long and 22
metres wide.
So what it looks like is that this
dock has been dug
for the construction of one ship.
History tells us that royal warships
were built at Smallhythe
and it seems the archaeologists have
now located the shipyard.
And they're also finding plenty of
iron nails and roves, or rivets,
which would have been used to hold the
ship's timbers together.
- What is it?
- That's a rove.
They found thousands of them all
over the site.
The excavations, together with
surveys,
are providing evidence for extensive
shipbuilding here
with several separate mud docks.
Even though there's a gale blowing
outside the tent,
I can't wait to get a closer look at
what Elliott and Nathalie have found
and what it tells us about the
abandoned shipyard
that once built vessels for one of
England's most famous warrior kings.
What we have here is a selection of
roves, these diamond-shaped washers.
- Yeah.
- Medieval shipbuilding is clinker-built.
- It's shell-built, so it's overlapping planks.
- Yeah.
You drive a big nail through it,
like this.
- This is a particularly huge example.
- That's massive. - Yeah.
So this is from a big ship.
You drive that through the two planks,
you put one of them on the other side
and then you bend the nail back over
and that forces forces your planks
together.
So it's like a rivet.
- It's effectively a medieval rivet, yeah.
- Yeah.
And so here we've got the whole
range of roves.
They're initially built in strips here
and you break them off.
- Oh. - And just use them in strips.
- You'd have a strip of them.
I just love all this evidence of
shipbuilding. That's fantastic.
- I mean, it must have been busy.
- Really busy. - Really busy.
I think you've got to imagine
something like a sort of
- mad shanty town with sort of 200 or 300 people.
- Yeah.
- Basically living in shacks, kind of Wild West.
- Mm.
And what about this coin?
The top of the dock, running behind
it, parallel to the shore,
was a gravel road.
The earliest documentation of it is
And then the road itself seems to have
fallen out of use
and collapsed across the top of the
dock.
And this coin, which, I think, dates
to the 1580s,
was in amongst that road collapse.
So that gives us sort of a nice sort
of end point for the shipbuilding.
- So it's Elizabeth I half penny, I think it is.
- I think so, yeah.
I can see a cross on that side.
There's a little crescent on it,
which apparently helps to date
the penny within Elizabeth's period,
which is nice as well,
because we have a 1594 map of the area
which shows the east-west road.
So it's quite a nice marrying up of
documentary references,
cartographic references and a little
bit of archaeology as well.
- Yeah, that's lovely, isn't it?
- Very satisfying.
- Have a bit of absolute dating.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - Nice. Yeah.
How many other mud docks have been
archaeologically excavated
- in this way? - None.
- So this - To my knowledge.
- So this is a unique site?
- I think so, yeah.
Whereas other places we know they're
building medieval ships,
London, Portsmouth, Southampton,
whatever,
- they keep building ships there.
- The shipyard would have developed.
The docks get bigger.
All the early evidence just gets wiped
out.
It's another one of these stories
where, you know, the demise
of something ends up being an
opportunity for the archaeologist.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Yeah.
- I mean, this is the biggest collection of roves
- By far.
- Anywhere.
- Certainly in the UK, yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Oh, there you go.
The first archaeological evidence of a
mud dock.
Yeah. Not bad!
Throughout history, the south coast
of England has often acted
as a front line of defence against
would-be invaders.
Our next dig takes us to Dover in
Kent.
The majestic White Cliffs form a
stunning backdrop
to the Dover Strait, the narrowest
part of the English Channel.
And this place played an active role
in Britain's defences
during World War II.
On a beautiful day like this, the
coast of France is so clear
and there's a constant stream of
ferries taking people on holiday.
Of course, in the Second World War, it
was a completely different story.
That was German-occupied territory
and the entire coastline was bristling
with firepower.
German forces invaded France in May
1940,
and the British mainland was then
within their sights.
The answer to that threat was to build
new gun emplacements
all along the White Cliffs of Dover.
But they've been invisible in the
landscape until now,
when archaeologists are getting the
chance
to excavate and reveal them.
In 2017, the National Trust acquired a
huge stretch of land
along the top of the cliffs,
including some unique wartime
defences.
The guns from the emplacements were
removed in the 1950s
and these sites were demolished and
covered over.
But now, for the first time,
archaeologists have been given the
chance to investigate
these once-classified military
installations.
Jon Barker from the National Trust is
leading the investigation.
So what are we looking at here, then?
Where are we?
So we're at a Fan Bay Battery on the
White Cliffs,
and we've been carrying out an
excavation
on Emplacement Three over here.
So when you started work here, could
you see any of this above ground?
You couldn't see anything.
- Our aim's to understand how much of the emplacement survives.
- Yeah.
And how it works in conjunction with
a structure called
the Plotting Room, which is located
further inland.
There were 38 artillery sites in and
around Dover,
but most were mobile.
The only permanent sites were the
defences
on top of the cliffs.
The stars of the show were two huge
guns,
known as Clem and Jane.
With barrels weighing over 100 tonnes,
they were the largest and
longest-range weapons
ever installed on the UK mainland.
This is one of the first gun
batteries that you see anywhere
where it's not about defending the
port.
- It's actually an offensive gun, it's for attacking shipping.
- Right.
Yeah. Can we get down in there and
have a look?
Yeah. Let's go.
Oh, yes, I can see paint on the wall
here.
There are numbers which must be
degrees.
That's right. Compass bearings.
This is all very flaky and delicate,
isn't it?
So it's been a bit of a race against
time, actually,
to record it properly before we lose
some of it.
Gosh, it's been preserved all these
years.
But now because it's been uncovered,
it's vulnerable, isn't it?
Precisely how the guns were operated
from an underground bunker
was top secret, and the records are
patchy.
But the archaeologists are hoping to
find clues to fill in the gaps.
- So can I open this door?
- Go for it.
Although the emplacements were said
to have been completely demolished,
it turns out there's plenty to see
below ground.
Even including these tunnels, and the
magazine
where the ammunition for the guns was
stored.
Oh, how deep does this go?
So this is a 40-metre-long tunnel
with a spark-proof floor that leads to
the magazines.
Oh, the temperature really drops,
doesn't it, as you walk in here?
It's a constant 12 degrees down
here.
Feels colder than that.
40 metres long.
And presumably that is just to keep it
away from the gun?
- To protect from blast, that's right.
- Yeah.
So this is the shell store,
where the shells have actually been
kept safe, dry and protected.
Well, you say dry, but it looks very
damp in here.
I mean, the ceiling is covered with
drips.
It is now.
Before the site was demolished and
covered over,
there would have been numerous
ventilation shafts
going up to the surface.
- And that's these here, is it?
- That's right.
Now home to a spider.
There's lots of spiders down here.
The emplacement, its tunnels and
magazines
have lain here untouched for almost 80
years.
But now we can begin to understand
what it was like
for the gun crew working here.
What are all these rectangular pieces
of iron?
So these are ladder rungs which are
from the emergency shaft.
And we actually found some original
pieces of the winch
within the material at the bottom of
the shaft.
So this is how the shells are
delivered down into the magazine?
- That's right.
- Yeah.
How many people would have been
working here
on this gun emplacement?
Probably seven to ten.
- You had seven to a gun crew.
- Yeah.
- And presumably it was manned 24/7.
- That's right.
It had to be manned 24 hours a day.
The gun always had to be in a state of
readiness to be fired if needed.
The gun crew was in charge of
maintenance
and loading shells when needed,
but they weren't in control of aiming
at targets.
That was all done remotely from the
Plotting Room,
in a bunker half a mile inland.
Which is down here, I presume? OK.
- It is. We've got to go down this ladder.
- All right, after you.
- Shall I go first?
- Yeah.
The Plotting Room is part of a wider
network of underground chambers
and bombproof tunnels, all dug into
the chalk cliffs.
Oh, this is brilliant.
So this is it. This is the nerve
centre.
Ah. "Unauthorised persons are
forbidden
"to interfere with equipment."
So there was something right there.
And this is where admiralty fire
control table was actually located.
So that was where they're actually
controlling the guns from?
That's right.
So it was unique, originally designed
to work on battleships.
- Yeah.
- But this one had been retrofitted to work on land.
- Everything is hard-wired to here.
- Yeah.
And you've got a whole host of
different services
that are coming into this Plotting
Room as well.
You've got range-finding location,
battery observation posts,
spotter planes and, most importantly,
radar.
And so that's all coming here to be
considered
- before that information is sent out to the guns.
- Yeah.
Well, this is incredible, isn't it?
The technology here remained
classified
for many years after the war.
With so few records, every
archaeological find is precious.
We have done a fingertip search.
These are some of the artefacts that
we've discovered.
In the early 1950s, when the site was
decommissioned,
actually, the technology was still
confidential then,
so all of the equipment was smashed
into small pieces down here.
Mm. Certainly looks as though it has
been smashed up, doesn't it?
I've spotted somewhere else I'd like
to explore.
- So what's through here?
- There's this intriguing little feature here,
- the service tunnel that runs around the whole structure.
- OK.
It's for drainage and it's for power
and services and communication.
It's also got some really interesting
graffiti,
- but it is an adventure.
- Oh, OK.
- How deep is the graffiti in there?
- It's quite a long way. - OK.
All right, I'm game.
Thank you.
The service tunnel is far too narrow
for the camera crew,
so I've had to film by myself.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
But the tunnel hides a very special
connection
to the people who worked here during
the war.
What have we got along here?
- Oh, wow. - So here
- OK.
So it says, "Heros of Fan Hole.
- "W Dodd" or "Dodds".
- Yeah.
- And "Pettit."
- Oh, yeah.
- Do you think that those go back to the war?
- Almost certainly.
The reference to Fan Hole is
interesting
because it was only called Fan Hole up
until about 1942.
After that, it became known as Fan Bay
Battery. So it's an early bit.
Look at that, "The heros of Fan
Hole."
- Quite a long way back.
- It is.
It's not often on Digging For
Britain
that I get to be the one making the
discoveries.
But, on the way back,
I spot something that the
archaeologists have missed.
Oh, my goodness. I think I've got
"Henry Ford
"..1941" here.
- Oh, OK. I haven't seen that one before.
- Is that when it was built?
So the Plotting Room was finished in
the April of '41.
So that could have been somebody
that was actually building it.
That's incredible.
Right, time to go out.
Among the paraphernalia of war
shrouded in secrecy,
it's an astonishing link to an
individual.
I found a new bit of graffiti down
there,
going all the way back to 1941.
And we're not out yet.
- No, we've still got a bit further to go.
- We're still underground.
There's so much more here than the
archaeologists had hoped for.
Most of the underground architecture
of these defences has survived.
And we can also make that connection
to the Fan Hole "heros"
whose names are missing from the
records
but who played such a vital part in
Britain's World War II defences.
Back out into the 21st Century.
Next time on Digging For Britain,
an ancient Welsh home
The oldest house in Cardiff.
Throws up a treasure trove of
finds.
- Find of a lifetime for me, that is. Right on my doorstep.
- Yeah, yeah.
A forgotten fortress gives up its
secrets.
Big chunky stone building. Super
clear to see. Very satisfying.
And the surprising date of an
uncovered mosaic
- 5th to 6th century.
- No, no, no, no, no.
redefines Britain's past.
- This isn't right for a Roman villa.
- Feel the electricity, can't you?
Come and search for we who search
And looking for a scarred land
And dig for those whose stories lie
With buried pasts and futures won
And dig for us as we have done
To lay the dead out in the sun
To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪