‘Mystery of the Manor Moat’ (Llancaiach, South Wales) | Series 18 Episode 9 | Time Team

look at that one of the finest manor houses in britain was built for a powerful family played host to charles the first you can imagine how excited the archaeologists were when they discovered the moats of this grade one listed building except there was one tiny problem look at this map the archaeologists drew there's the house here's the moat and does it go up to here and then turn around the house no it goes hurtling off in that direction this is the direction the moat is going in but what on earth is going on what's it protecting well there have been several theories from a roman fort to a royal court from a chapel to a heavily fortified cattle enclosure and we've got just three days to rip up this field and find out what this has got to do with that please don't let it be a cattle enclosure please not a cattle enclosure [Music] clan is just north of cardiff sitting on a platter of land in the middle of the rolling south wales valleys the earthworks we're here to investigate were first recorded in the 1970s but so far all attempts to establish exactly what they are have failed where is coming in now is where that ditch was shown coming through but it makes sense to assume they've got something to do with next-door flank our mana where the powerful pritchard family once entertained charles the first and the manor itself now a museum and education center is also a bit of a mystery because no one knows if it was the first house to be built on this side you've got this a whole place to run and you've got coach loads of kids coming in and all the tourists and you've invited us here for three days we have indeed i just really really want to know whether we've got anything else that's earlier than about 15 30 which is what the date we think the house behind us is because i don't think the manor house is the only thing that's important on this site it's always struck me as rather strange that that we have this potential moated enclosure and it actually goes out in the opposite direction from the house and and in this document from the royal commission it says this might be a medieval moated site or on balance more likely a roman origin and then the golden words excavation will be required to decide the matter so you're quite happy to fend the kids and the children often absolutely no i'd be delighted so do we have an earlier moated house or even a roman fort in this enormous field it's a big question and for once we're not waiting for geophys to answer it there are definite earth works there definite earthworks because some of the team have decided to break with tradition and open a trench immediately look at that not only a trench but a big one here are the three wise monkeys of archaeology ben how come we got a trench in already well stuart had a wander about this morning and he picked up these very low earth works but they seemed to line up with the with a possible moat so we thought we'd go for it we couldn't wait any longer a couple of years ago they put a trench across where they think the earthworks were and they found two rows of stones two sort of banks of stones with a post hole in the middle until we open up a bigger area we won't know whether we can identify these stone rows whether we can only find any more posters we've got to think big surely this is going to be the easiest dig we've ever done there's the house there's the moat something in the middle bosch go home yeah except the term moat on an ordnance survey map covers a multitude of sins what does he mean well all it means really is that somebody's seen a bit of a depression i mean first of all what is a moat it could mean a water filled ditch it could just mean a dry ditch it could be something that's that's functional defensive it could be for fish it could just be something that looks nice in in your in your grounds i mean we've got no idea what this thing is until we dig it so our first trench has gone in over the tantalizingly visible bit of the l-shaped earthworks that everyone is calling a moat [Music] i mean this first trench is always so important i reckon i reckon you learn more from that first trance than you do all the other ones you put through it gives you that first impression of the site we suspect this earthwork may only be one corner of a much larger feature with some potentially stunning archaeology in the middle and until john and his team finished their survey of this field we can only guess what that might be stuart do me a favor tell me our moat isn't a cattle enclosure well the problem with any ditch that turns the corner of the bank with it historically people think of moats and moats they associate with medieval manners and so on but that could be the corner of any type of enclosure that could be a corner of a roman fort or fartlet could be something like a medieval boat it could be a cattle enclosure but we've got to remember that just beyond that set of trees up there there's that there's a fine manor house and so we've got to take those trees away and perhaps see in this field that we're part of the landscape that goes with that manor house over there so to work out what's going on in the field we need to find out as much as we can about the house and the most obvious thing about lancashire manor is that it's a house of wealth and power which is probably not that surprising considering it belonged to a powerful welsh dynasty called the pritchards as far as you know the the history of south wales goes pritchard was quite an important character during the civil war period he was governor of cardiff castle and then of cardiff itself as well he comes from quite an important family they're thought to be part of the royal line from glamorgan and that's that's the genealogy that they want to hold to going back to ivor park who was sort of a king of glamorgan you know some centuries beforehand i know it's early days yet but what do you think might be the relationship between this house and that field if we've got what looks to be a motor enclosure that's heading out across the field it's almost always made me wonder whether there's the possibility that there's an earlier building that's there we just need to try and see if we can find it so could our potential moat enclose the ancestral home of the pritchard family well archaeological digs have shown time and time again that posh houses are built on top of or next to slightly less posh houses belonging to an earlier generation of the family and it seems unlikely that a house as grand as the current clan kayak far was the first to be built on this side this is so you might have had a big post in there yeah and ben and phil have now hit the first evidence of the mysterious earthworks that promised so much that bank out there is one row of stones this could be the post hole in the middle yeah and then we go that way and we have another row of stones which is the other bank drew knows geophysics might be able to track it all the way across picking up the rest of this earthwork feature and what's inside it in this lovely flat field should be a walk in the park for geophys i mean what could possibly go wrong it's lunchtime day one we've put in our first trench it was over where this moat like feature is supposed to be and sure enough it's there but the problem with this moat on the maps is that it looks vaguely l-shaped nothing more but now john has done the geophase is everything clear as clear as mud what do you mean well i've got an old stream bed for you ridge and faux flowering a few lines nothing that looks like a moat ditch and i can't see any evidence for an enclosure in other words the field could be completely empty which is not good news with two and a half days still to go [Music] afternoon day one here at clan kayak in south wales where we're looking for a moat which rather than going round the medieval house over there seems to be going off in this direction which is a bit of a puzzle but in order to solve it john's been out with his geophys team and frankly ben i think we now know even less about this site than we did when we got here look at that looks like someone sneezed on it in black and white yeah that's not quite the idea of geophysics is it basically this geophysical phlegm has found no hint of the moat or any suggestion for the earlier medieval house we'd hope to find in this field and as for the moat well ben and phil have now worked out what the surveyors actually saw [Music] if we look here this mound of stones boulders and pebbles here that's that's more or less conforming with where the moat should be but i have to say there's nothing in this trench that looks terribly moat like and it ought to be here there's no moat oh dear so the moat the reason we came here doesn't exist but all due credit to john the gfiz has thrown up something unexpected that has got ben and the team intrigued there's some sort of linear feature a ditch or something like that running up here turning a corner and coming down here this is enclosing a very large area and that ties in quite nicely with something that feels good at the end of the trench here we think we've got a feature running in that that direction but until we get a section across that ditch we can't tell what date it is it might be nothing at all to do with the medieval period it could be something much earlier we've got to dig it basically and have a look and what's intriguing about this newly discovered enclosure is that it and what's inside it appear to be under in other words earlier than the medieval rigid furrow plowing oh well let's have a go carry on and we'll see what we what we get so as well as investigating it in trench one we're opening a second trench further along its northern boundary i think we've got an edge about there look right this is actually quite compacted i think that's that's our age we've been working on the theory that our main field may have been the site of a posh house that's earlier than the next door grand manor house austere looking isn't it it is but to work out if that's the case we need to get as many dates from this site as possible including the correct date for when the manor house was built so right just cutting through this original being here with the partition and it looks like this whole corridor has been added early 17th century if we look at this collar it's it's what about the pearlings they look like original they've got peg holes for the common rafters so we've brought in a dendrochronologist because oddly enough the best dating evidence for a house is often found in the roof timbers it's either significantly later than we'd anticipated or significantly earlier we'll pick that up through the dendro even if we don't get that that fine resolution of dating yeah and that would potentially allow us to fit it into the family history so hopefully we'll get results back to you come day three brilliant the dendro dates and digging are going to have to be our main sources for the early story of flank kayak because there's almost no written history for the prichard family prior to the 16th century that was all passed down through word of mouth although we do at least have an impressive family tree well they claimed that they went back a very long way indeed and from up here you will see how they trace their descent back to a very distinguished hero in this area in the 12th century a man called ivor up mayrig and better known as evil bache or the small we know the pritchard family lived somewhere in this area from at least the twelve hundreds but the first recorded mentions of a house at lan kayak don't appear until the mid-1500s gaiad glan kayak we saw mist with no healthy heart and rain as a shroud over glenn kaya so do we know where they're living before our house is built unfortunately we don't and it'll be very exciting indeed if the archaeology can show that there was a major minority center of the middle ages here prior to the house that we know of [Music] unfortunately we don't seem to have any evidence for a medieval manner in the big field but we're not giving up because steward has a theory oops come a bit further there's the other side of it against that tree there look oh you'd easily get a cart over there this is a seriously big bridge he thinks the landscape may hold a clue to the location of an earlier house on the other side of this vast site guys you could have chosen a slightly nicer place well what we're starting to do now is kind of understand the site as a whole i mean we started out in the field on the other side over there we're now thinking 180 degrees different the house is over there we're completely on the other side and looking through the the maps through time what we see is that the main road that probably is this house is associated with actually we're standing on it now the house is facing south yeah so there's got to be something in this corner rather than that corner as an entrance way that's my feeling anyway so do you think this is the first house on this side i don't think there's anything in the house that to me says there's anything on that specific site before so does that mean there's unlikely to be another structure here no no there could be one in the vicinity of it perhaps why did you go hahaha maps well here we have the the the tithe map for the area you can see there's the house complex there there is a field here with a number 1483 in it and on the apportionment that goes with that 1483 has the name hendra now i'm told by our well speaking historian that is a very important name because it's often applied to the old settlement or the old place and anything with that name is likely to have been sort of fossilized in the jog for the place by the middle ages so there might be something very old just in that field over there that's here before that house so thanks to his beloved maps stewart believes that this area to the south of the house may contain an earlier settlement [Music] so geophys once again find themselves surveying another nice big open flat piece of grass once again it's the perfect site for a geophys survey any vibes and so once again what could possibly go wrong is this a stewart idea or is this actually bona fide i wouldn't say anything against you not when he's in the back of shot moment of truth um oh dear once again john can see no evidence of any structures that was well worth waiting for wasn't it yeah well back to the drawing board this was a stewart plan wasn't it yeah yeah i'm pretty sure it was yeah so if there is an earlier house here then where on earth is it this morning i thought this big field presented us with one of the easiest most straightforward time teams we've done in a long time nine hours later i'm not so sure ben can i remind you what this royal commission report written about 35 years ago actually says this could be a medieval moated site on balance however a roman origin is far more likely but excavation will be required to decide the matter well we've done the excavation it don't seem to be medieval it don't seem to be moted and it doesn't seem to be roman either correct but does this mean that there isn't an earlier building on this side no i i don't think it means that at all i think logically it's it's likely that an early building would be somewhere around here so what's the strategy for tomorrow well as you can see there there's beautiful lawns we can't come busting in here with a big machine but we can get some test pits in here and hopefully we'll come across some deposits some layers something that just gives us a clue where this early house might be well we may have lost our moat but do we have an earlier building on this site well the only way to find out is to put our shovels into this beautiful garden i can't wait it's the beginning of day two here at lancashire manor in south wales and we may not have found a medieval house here in the so-called moat field but we definitely have archaeology oh joy two bits of charity oh yeah lovely because both trenches are picking up traces of a massive enclosure ditch discovered by geophys i do wonder whether it could be could be seriously old yes prehistoric if you like i wouldn't mind better and that will now be our major investigation here because we've established there isn't a medieval moat here in spite of what it says on the maps what the royal commission saw were two banks and a slightly hollowed area in the middle and i think what has created one of the banks is this big stoney feature running through here and what do you reckon that is well at the moment it is a bank and that's all we can say about it do you think we'll be able to date these two features well we got no sort of firm dating evidence but what these these features do seem to respect is the medieval ridge and furrow so i suspect that some of this is probably medieval what i don't understand is that just behind you there's a bunch of stones going in the completely different direction that is what is so important tony because it is not going in in the same direction at all it's a totally different direction and we think this could be a much much earlier prehistoric enclosure on the site so ben everyone around here yeah believes that there was at one time a moat in this field yeah we've had people leaning over that gate for the last 24 hours saying are digging there digging the moat are you yes why the thing is the royal commission came and they saw some earthworks and i guess they did well to spot these features because they described them as slight but given that they're close to this big fortified house it was a natural thing to think this could be a possibility a moat and once you've put it on a map it must be true do you now think that this field isn't going to be able to tell us the story of why this house was here in the first place we've clearly got interesting things going on in this field we've got these these rubble banks we've got this early feature that phil's been dealing with there's definitely a story to be told here but i'm not sure it's going to get us to where the early house is there is actually a chance that this big feature was a cattle enclosure or a horse paddock or something else but because these banks and potential post holes are so criss-crossed by later ploughing it'll have to remain an enigma done i've got some bad news for you okay break it to me gently then it also means i need to have a chat with diane there is nothing that ties in with this house at all in this field right okay so where do we go from here then i don't know how do you feel about that it it's difficult because it creates more questions than it answers really you know i can't imagine that this field you know just you know this area they'd just suddenly put a house here in the 1530s you know there's got to be something that went before it you know it's such a perfect location it's near sort of the roman road it's near the river it's near the ford you can't imagine that people haven't used it for living on sort of since time began almost if we want to find evidence of an earlier house or the first version of that house then we've got to move in that direction that's fine moving in that direction means moving into your lovely garden moving into your lovely garden means ripping it up at least bits of it that's fine we'll just dig holes in the lawn and see what happens so a lot of our effort is now shifting to the area immediately around the standing tudor manor house as we try to find any previous buildings that may have stood on this site the test pits are so close to the house because geophys have already eliminated an area further to the south that stewart thought may contain a hendra an early welsh settlement but undeterred stewart has another target as he believes there should be some sort of structure on the original road into the site we need to get across to as close as that wall as possible so looking at some sort of l-shape well what we're looking for over here find our level and then we can chase it back it'll be a funny shape trench yeah it's a funny shaped area we've got to have a funny shaped trench we're putting in a couple of trenches here because we'd expect an earlier manner to have a defensive wall and a gatehouse because during medieval times this was the wild welsh west constant feuds and lawlessness meant even the most powerful families needed to defend themselves it's funny that with on that door there are no defenses at all even though that's the first door you come to but the second door pull that across certainly the current manor house is a monument to the art of survival [Music] all right that and same thing another drawbar but we're on the first floor now that doorway there goes through to the lord's private quarters and that's defended in the same way so the pritchards could barricade themselves in there if all else failed well if all else really fails they can go down this escape stair here down to another part of the house you'll see that this is a house of power and paranoia there's no such paranoia over in the moat field more a profound sense of relief and jubilation because we've just made a remarkably rare discovery isn't that wonderful that looks very prehistoric and it looks like it's tending more towards the bronze age than well i know what i was gonna say let's let's have the local knowledge it's gotta be bronze age isn't it bronze age yeah that's really something i've never dug a piece of bronze eight [ __ ] up in my life and i i've been digging over 50 years you've never ever dug a piece of pieces in museums no no no never seen any this pot suggests that people may have been living here during the bronze age and when you consider the whole population of the uk 4 000 years ago was only about 200 000 it's like finding a needle in a haystack but i mean this should be an ideal place for a little bronze age settlement down boy the stream lovely place yeah i think we're oh just superb let's find some more yeah yeah this is the field that refuses to die yesterday evening we discovered that we hadn't actually got a medieval moat here then this morning we thought we might have something prehistoric and this afternoon we've discovered that yes we have got prehistoric and it's actually bronze age which is apparently quite rare isn't it but all that brings into question our understanding of john's dear fizz a bit monty python at two shares in the middle of a field yeah we need the desk presumably looking for a medieval moat is rather different from trying to find something prehistoric in the geophys yeah i mean the problem we've got is all this medieval rigid furrow ploughing it's masking what's below and the ploughing is not only eaten into the archaeology it's certainly eaten into the magnetic responses so trying to understand the geophysical anomalies is even more difficult okay so if you forget about there being anything medieval here and you forget all this plowing is there any evidence in your geophys of something that might be prehistoric well the stream like that may be of interest now then some of the ditches clearly these come into play we've now extended the survey down and look at some of these curving responses i mean it could be we've got a sort of prehistoric landscape here so day one here day two over there and now it looks like we're going to come back here again that's the way it goes that sounds very stoney down there raksha back over at the house our quest for an earlier medieval manner is falling apart i've just found a piece of plastic if there had once been a building in this area we'd have expected to find some evidence of it but there's not even a sniff of anything medieval i think we've actually got to call it a day on this one i don't think we're going to get to where we want to get to with this and as for stuart's latest target well uh over here we've got natural yep over here we've got natural and over here we've got natural we do have a sewage pipe down there and we've got a beautiful 19th century cobbled surface have you been able to get underneath that well we have and we've got natural no gay house at all no gate house no road no boundary ditch none of what stuart thought was going to be here but it was worth a try not really oh dear so not only no moat but nothing medieval outside the tudor house either and certainly no major defenses if there isn't anything here after all we're really at the creek aren't we no i don't think we are we've come here to test a possibility why is this house here is there anything earlier here and there's a range of possibilities it could be that there was an earlier ancestral home here and they simply built this grand new house in the same place it could be they arrived on a green field site we're here we're imposing ourselves on this area we'll build a big house here the other thing is that although they're thinking a bit about defence it's also the beginning of the period where they're thinking about the picturesque qualities of the landscape so again is it simply that it's just a wonderful area to be in and they're just hedging their bets with a bit of defense because over there is the badlands still they're brave words but i don't know how much faith i have in them after all what do we have well as far as i'm concerned not a lot apart from geophys being on the verge of a nervous breakdown but just as i'm beginning to think this is one of the most frustrating sights we've encountered in a long time we make our first proper medieval find gentlemen i think that might address yourself oh that's a bit nice this little coin is a major discovery because we suspect it dates to before the time of the current manor house that's a little penny isn't it long cross really got to cross on one shoulder well i'm not entirely sure because if you have a close look at it there appears to be a cross on both sides let me put my glasses on look and would you believe it it's not from the garden it's from the moat field that we dismissed as having nothing medieval in it what we can say is this is this this is earlier than the manor house isn't it now it might just be someone dropped out of a pocket or a purse walking across the field it could be something like that but that proves that there were people in this field earlier than the manor house it's now the end of a perplexing day too well it's perplexed most of us although there is one man who seems to be content with the results of his labors i really am over the moon i mean not only have we got our piece of bronze age popped but more importantly we've now not got one bronze age ditch but three ditches and and the the beauty of that is that it it implies that people have been living here for such a more extended length of time so we've got prehistoric occupation here for probably hundreds if not thousands of years and not only that you've got some rather good fines very very surprising fines we have not one but two medieval coins what's a date 14th century if they're 14th century am i right and saying it is medieval but it's earlier than our house absolutely yeah we finally extended activity back earlier than the present house so there's all to play for not only have we got something prehistoric and fairly epic but it looks as though something quite exciting was going on here in the middle ages before that house was built what'll it be we'll find out tomorrow it's the beginning of day three of our dig in south wales and it's not just the weather that's taken a turn for the worse have you started then well we'd like to start if you tell us where you'd like us to dig well you're there the mood's also darker amongst the diggers yes but it's my map you know we can't dig it all in spite of our best efforts we can't find any evidence of an earlier manner here at flank high but we're not giving up yet even if it means we have to turn the whole garden upside down so why are we putting this trench in well this is the back side of the house really and uh well we see that up there the privy guarder robe that tiny little window there yeah yeah well this is the area where all the sort of rubbish and muck would would be deposited in and presumably we could possibly find evidence here of an earlier phase of this building if an earlier phase exists absolutely yes the thing is hopefully we'll have some rubbish pits or a midden heap something with some early pottery in because it's been remarkable how clean this site is we've got very little pottery it must be going somewhere and pushing it towards the back seems a seems a good candidate a lot's riding on this trench to the north of the manor we've found no trace of an earlier house in the test pits and trenches to the south and yet common archaeological sense suggests there could be an earlier manner here we've got to go back the whole way now so hopefully something else comes up a bit further along otherwise we're going to be rather disappointing again and all i can say to people is natural the pritchards who owned plank kayak manor had lived in the area since the 1200s and yet this house was built much later although no one's ever come up with an exact date i hope he's in our friends until now nigel um you've got a dendro day for us i have and that date is ad 1548 to 1565. 1548 to 1565 and you're pretty certain about that yeah absolutely it's black and white okay thanks ever so much mate bye you murmured the word later i mean sort of all things in the commission volume suggesting around the 1530s so 1548 to sort of a little bit later than we thought but but we you know got a date what does that date tell you about the house it tells us that the house is more old-fashioned than we thought really because you know you're looking at the mid 16th century you don't expect something like this at that date normally so we're a bit in the backwoods then really at that point on a little bit yes and you've been looking after this house and doing all this reconstruction for ages but you've never actually known how old the house was we just all we knew was around the 1530s well you know that's just fantastic to to know that's the thing because we've never known with this date of roughly 1550 we've at least answered one of diane's questions about flanker [Music] it also makes the coins we're finding in the next door field all the more intriguing because they predate the standing house it's either a threatens or a sixpence um most likely of elizabeth first could it be something a bit special it's already special i think as well as this fantastic find we've also discovered coins that are over a hundred years earlier than the current house i can see a crown i can see a crown because we've got the fir we've got one of the i'm so excited i'm actually knocked the light over you can see the one of the fleur de lis is is complete in the middle and you can see a half fleur-de-lis at the end so that's the angular end of a crown these weren't kind of around 1280 don't they but instead of jumping for joy that we've found evidence of an earlier house the archaeologists have taken a more pragmatic view as to why the coins are here this coin could just have been dropped as an accidental loss it isn't necessarily evidence for earlier activity on this site three or four coins different dates but all from this area you've detected all the other spoil and the other trenches but they're concentrated here that's that's interesting do you think that might be evidence of settlement or evidence of trading or what it's evidence of where people have been congregating with money in their pockets and that's root ways meeting places that kind of thing isn't it yeah and it would seem that clan kayak was at a major intersection of route ways we've got the the house here and it's quite clear looking at it that it's in a landscape dominated by deep valleys the great advantage of the stream the kayak coming down there is that it defines for you we've got a shallow pass running through here that actually allows you to run from east to west across the valleys is something that's really quite unique and important for this area this is one of the few places that routes from deep in the valleys would meet with east-west traffic [Music] so the coins aren't evidence of a grand early house but more likely of a dodgy crossroads where for centuries travellers tripped up and lost their loose change is that another patch of charcoal in the bottom there phil yeah is tracy and yet this field has produced our best discovery so far a network of bronze age ditches some three and a half thousand years older than the house but even with this information we still can't make head or tail at the geophys i mean we've done more survey and we're getting the same sort of result i mean we've still got odd lengths of ditches we've got odd pits and they're scattered right across the field but there's no clear patterns in the results there's no sort of discreet nice juicy target to go for if i could extend that trench all the way down the field hang on so how wide is that trench uh very wide and you'd like to extend it down the length yeah yeah why not slightly just maybe just slightly i don't think we can just go poking around hoping that we're gonna hit something in here keep looking you might find something small and sexy in the meantime i'm going on to another scene right so phil we've got all sorts of features in here so when i've got school children coming in to sort of go around the site and i want to be able to tell them what we found in the field what am i going to be able to tell them about what was going on here in the prehistoric period well what you can say with absolute certainty is that people have been here for at least 4 000 years and we do have a lot of ditches let's be clear about this over where matt is we can see he's standing in one next door is another one and next door to that is another one those ditches have been re-cut they've been re-dug they've been re-dug by hand that's a lot of effort what that does mean is that their boundaries have stayed static for a very long time what is absolutely indisputable is that we've got one piece of early bronze age pot that's going to take us back to about 2000 bc so thanks to phil and his digger's doggy determination diane has got a story to tell about this field just not the one she was expecting but there is a chance that the kids who visit here will be more interested in the story about the day time team took a mechanical digger to flank kayak's beautifully manicured lawn because ben under the concerned watch of the manor's gardeners is opening another trench to the north of the house this trench is our absolutely last ditch attempt to find any evidence of a house or actually anything medieval that pre-dates our house well it's a cable i don't think it's still connected to anything let's hope not because our previous last ditch attempt to find something of archaeological note hasn't been completely successful just when we thought that we weren't going to get any archaeology at all away from the field over there away from the house over here on the far side of the current boundary of that house where faye and raksha have been working on their own for ages they've found evidence not only of life but of death too haven't you faye we've certainly got evidence of death yes we've got what looks like a dead horse a dead horse yep can you date it well we've got one bit of pottery from actually that trench there which is 17th century so we can now say that sometime a horse died on this farm thank you for your contribution to this story i'll avoid any remarks about flogging a dead horse although i can't help but wonder that in spite of ben's heroic attempts to re-landscape the whole of the garden it's natural this looks like natural oh we are now flogging a dead what you call it i just cannot understand the lack of pottery rubbish detritus these must have been the cleanest people in wales the evidence speaks for itself [Music] so here we go the timeline this is the bronze age little piece of pot there nothing in the iron age nothing in the roman nothing in the early christian or the viking or the norman here we are in the 15th century we've got two coins 16th century a thimble 17th century a ropey piece of tile 19th century a penny and a bit of pot helen what's happened well from the archaeological evidence it seems like we have a bit of activity here in the bronze age and then a great lot of nothing until sometime in the 16th century people started dropping things maybe they built a house and then they apparently went away again i have to say in defense of all the people who were living in all these vast eons of time they might have been making stuff that hasn't survived in the ground they might have been but that's that's absence of evidence and it's really dangerous to use that to argue that that is evidence of absence yeah yeah but it's getting there it's we've nearly got enough to say nothing was happening is that too depressing no thank you helen so we nearly have enough to say nothing was happening between the digging of these bronze age ditches and the building of the current manor and that's a resolution of sorts i suppose it really doesn't help having that later feature well this the rich yeah it must have just chopped the top of it yeah but surprisingly there is a faction of the team that thinks the two could still be linked and it's all down to the medieval welsh love of heritage and making a link with your ancestors we now know that the ditches over there might be as old as bronze age they're certainly old do you think that the pritchards would have been aware of that when they came to build their house here certainly phil and ben seem quite confident that whatever there was out there could have been visible in the 16th century when they got here and this could i think have been a real attraction for a gentry family so if it's an ancient place to build a house next door would give them a kind of legitimacy that we've always been here this is a period when the antiquarian movement is becoming much more popular much more widespread as part of the cult and the education of the gentry there was certainly a cachet there was a value to having what in now in modern archaeological terms he called an ancient monument having that very direct and immediate connection with the past would have been something that would have meant a great deal to them and i think is very exciting the possibilities here we're now confident that echoes of that prehistoric landscape would have been visible in the 16th century [Music] but our hunt for an earlier medieval manner has been a completely different kettle of fish well digging produced nothing to the east of the building while geophys and test pits showed nothing to the south the results weren't too hot either to the west and as for the north well we did find an electrical cable and a dead horse if i was feeling generous i'd call it a mixed result okay after three days excavation are we in a position to say whether or not there was a medieval manner anywhere on this site before this one yes we are in a position to say that almost feels no [Laughter] i'm certain not one scrap of medieval pottery from all these holes we've dug and if there was a medieval house here we'd find pottery everywhere i'm sure of it it's just not there you have not even seen any background manure in on the fields you get when when privies are cleared out and they chuck the stuff on the land they've not got any of that which rather begs the question why did they build this place on a greenfield site if you think about what originally brought us to this site it was that people saw an earth work over there and it was if it was visible in the 1970s it should have been visible in the 1570s as well i think that is what drew them here and we know that that they that there was an interest in the past on the part of the pritchards and we know that there's an interesting place the name field name of hendra i think those all point to this being a special place that's quite interesting you're saying they might have built this place here because in folklore it was an important site i think that's there's every chance of that yeah so we now know the pritchards didn't come here until the 1550s when they built a beautiful if somewhat old-fashioned house on a major crossroads besides some ancient mysterious earthworks and it's tantalizing to think that they were trying to forge a link with the great welsh hero ifo bach the 12th century icon from whom the pritchards claimed to be directly descended and i was just talking to a couple of local people who work here and they were over the moon that we'd managed to take the story of this site right back to the prehistoric well it's absolutely wonderful you know i mean you always hope that you're going to find things that are really fascinating but to find out we've got something that's a bronze age enclosure it's wonderful and we've dated your house yeah which was you know every little bit extra just makes more of the story and you tell a better story but what strikes me as really ironic is that the people who put that house up thought they were harking back to their ancient ancestors of 400 years previously but in fact they were harking back to their ancestors 3000 years previously amazing isn't it really to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 165,545

Keywords: Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team, time team series 18 episode 9, time team south wales, time team wales, llancaiach wales, welsh history, english history, history, dig sites, Time Team

Id: ek_PKCDx-pM

Length: 47min 35sec (2855 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022