➤ Time Team's Top 3 SUMMERTIME Digs ☀️

this is the village of nether poppleton just outside York as you can see most of the houses are modern some are Victorian a few are 18 Torah to push 17th century but from up here it looks very different even I can recognize a traditional medieval village layout with the Main Street running up for the church and lots of little plots running off it and those Earthworks to the side of the church are an officially registered medieval site but the locals think it's older they think they can trace the route to their Village back to the Normans or even the Saxons are they right we've got just three days to find out ladies and gentlemen how many of you know what you're supposed to do next [Applause] about a third of them we want you all to get back to your homes with your pet archaeologist in your hand and start digging all right off you go [Music] as they all set off there's a great sense of community Spirit about many people are digging in their own Gardens or they'll help out their less able Neighbors they'll bring all Their fines to the incident room we'll analyze and date them and when we've identified the oldest we'll decide where to put trenches in tomorrow divided the village into five sections each one with its own archaeologist to make sure that things are done properly across the village test pits are opening all over the place and everyone's doing their part when you dig a trench if it's a meter at the top it must be a meter at the bottom in other words the sewage of the trench must always be absolutely vertical this means that the the layer that you've got exposed actually on the bottom of the trench you can actually see it in section so don't just dig in the middle of the hole dig right up to the edges keep them straight there's there's Phil's gospel lesson for the day [Music] good morning we're well on our way to explore bring this side of the village where the Main Street and houses are but over here to the east lies the church it was built in Norman times so it's possible there was something else there at that time [Music] the church is usually a central feature of the community so if you're going to understand now people have lived here we need to look at the church is that one Norman I think Norman in his present form there must be earlier in later stuff as well do you know much about the actual history of this site Sarah well the church is dedicated to some everilda who's a very unusual dedication there are only two churches dedicated to her in Yorkshire she was 7th Century Saint we think that Bishop Wilfred who was Bishop of York encouraged her to settle in Yorkshire with two other nuns in the 670s and around them a community at set of up to 80 nuns soon formed back in the village people are beginning to get the hang of things nope nothing in that one and some fines are coming up if there's tabs a bit of green glaze over there oh yeah yeah it's uh it's almost as old as I am you've got a good imagination yep oh the early signs at least in this trench look good that's what I'd call proper medieval you're like 13th 14th century um Junctions it's local stuff probably made some around York these haven't traveled far at all so I mean I think you could well be on top of some medieval archeology but you never believe would you that no I'd have never believed this was here at all so you've got a pipe there Phil anything else yeah you'll see here Tony got a little child burial just one of those things really I mean you know it's a burial ground what you're gonna do with it um we're going to give it the the due respect it deserves and just leave it alone funnily enough it doesn't actually detract from from the objectives of what we're of the trench here which is well you see if I get my shovel see if I slot it in there yeah now that is the base of the foundations so the whole church is sitting on big Stones like this the main thing is that there is nothing no walls coming this way so in fact we know that there was no it doesn't look as though there are any oils or transepts coming this way because we thought they might you see that curve yeah yeah yeah looks if there's a an opening in there and we thought that something might come off here so it might just be a door I think it might be more like a sort of Tomb set in the wall or an Easter Sepulcher or something clearly it's not a structure coming out this way so this answered that so now you've answered that do you have to continue with this trench okay no no because we know that it was not wider what we've now got to prove is whether or not it was longer so that's when you wrap around here wrap it around the corner across the village even more test pits are opening up there are now 32 of them three o'clock day one and this whole area is checkered with test pits there's one down there by that yellow bucket then two gardens along there's one over there then another three guns Along by that guy in the red hat there's one and then way way at the end of that same Garden by that blue tarpaulin is another one well this worked now Paul and karenza are complaining they've got too much to do um you can just put them down there somewhere 9am and there's frantic activity in the incident room outside the locals are gathering to find out what we can tell from the test pitch yesterday [Music] inside we're still trying to work it out we've got no Saxon Pottery at all from this end of the village and it's not till we start heading west through the village that we get a few fragments of Saxon Pottery tiny triangle here showing just a few grams of pottery tiny little amount there a bit more here as we head West and then even further west in this completely different bit of the village what looks like a different history well I think we've got to build on what we did yesterday take this test fitting strategy and apply it to this area we've got to look at the Randy or Stables The Granary you know the space at the back of the incident room let's get some trenches in there and get some more local people involved in digging those take it forward so up by the church we open a test pit here and here and another here foreign physics in and around the church to see if we can find other targets mix getting more and more excited it's not just Saxon he wants he thinks that there was a monastery here that would mean a settlement 400 years earlier than the present Church could he be right Meg you've closed down this trench yeah well it's told us all we needed to know that which is the church doesn't go on further east but that means we've still got this 400 year old gap between the time the nun died here and the time they put up this church in memory of him yes but I think looking it as a gap is probably wrong I mean we're pretty sure of what would have happened during that period well what do you think happened well what turns out is when you get somebody who's turned into a saint you you often have a monastic Community with it and that is unlikely to have survived more than a couple hundred years because the the Scandinavians coming through here well the old Vikings yeah the Vikings and they burn everything down they destroy everything if there's ever another here it just evaporates Steward's survey of the earth works around the church has thrown up some interesting results here's the church there's a medieval moated site just here but there's also a whole other system of Earthworks this seems to be a roadway from the river heading straight towards the church there also seems to be a large platform at the top of it and off to the side is a large lump in the ground another platform it looks like it could be a boundary ditch of some sort so we put a trench just here to see if it is [Music] what's nice here is we can see two distinct phases of archeology we've got the later War which looks to be 18th century handmade bricks running down the garden and they're overlying straight on top of this earlier cobbled surface which contains 15th century and therefore probably dates to that point too if my oldest and see this I've laid some of the fines from the test bits out sort of in chronological order uh give you an idea what's going on we've got the Romans down there all on their own um they're a great big gap here this is the black hole of 400 years yeah this is the the early and middle Saxon say 450 to 850 A.D there's nothing so far and then we arrive at the late Saxon now I'm saying late sax and I suppose what we really mean is Viking age 850 through into the 10th Century then we've got this stuff which is all the Norman period stuff 11th to 12th century so those people who were saying that this is a medieval settlement we've we've proved that that's wrong we've got a lot of normal oh yeah we've got Norman and we've got pre-norman so I think from the Potter we've got here there's very little doubt that there's there was a settlement here in the Norman times the pottery we found proves that there were people living in and around nether poppleton right through the medieval period and right back to the 11th century that part of the village occupied by houses was laid out in the medieval period but there was already a Norman community living here so we closed down all the test pits in the village they've answered that question out in Phil's trench he's now reached the bottom of this feature the Saxon Pottery he found came from the other side of the trench but what does this side tell us so what did you reckon what have you got out of this now not quite what we expected me you remember on the geophysics there was that that white line which we thought was was going to be a beam slot a building that sort of thing well there's no way that this is a building this is a massive ditch it's going to come out what at least that sign I was going to say because you've only got one half haven't you the other half gonna be that's over here somewhere and have you got any dating for that dude yep we've had pottery from about the Norman Conquest right through to about the 14th century it's it's within those sort of three or four hundred years and and I think that what we're looking at is activity here in the early medieval period at the same period as that church starts so what do you think we have got here I think it's probably something to do with well the Norman period you know the the church is all of that sort of data later we'd expect some sort of Mana house to go with it probably somewhere in this area if not down on the the mooted mound and this is one of the land divisions associated with that the main thing is I think that we've actually got people living around here yeah which of course you don't have now up on the top of the hill here you look at it now yeah there's just one house here there's no no Village at all in those days this would have been thriving but what of Mick's missing Monastery here at the East End Of The Village around the church do we have any evidence for that well we do is because it's an old River Channel coming through there the Saxon ditch we found is most likely in this instance to have been from a monastic settlement a church seems to have been built on the site of a former church or Monastery its dedication to a saint who died 400 years earlier is an important clue and the topography on a prominent tree is similar to that of many other monastic sites [Music] so now we just have to explain all of this to the people of poppleton what can we tell them after three days of exploring mix can I borrow a minute so we've got Anglo-Saxon here Anglo-Saxon here yeah you must have some sort of Hamlet here well to begin with they were right their Village is older than it looks Pottery shows us that there was occupation here in Norman times and in Saxon times in the Saxon period there was an enormous enclosure surrounding a monastic settlement it would have had a church as the centerpiece houses and a few Workshops the Promontory it's situated on is perfect easy access to York and a bit of height to give it some security in Norman times the present church was built and a settlement grew up around it the good news is that because of what we've discovered you're going to be really busy for years to come thanks for having us [Applause] time team is a hundred percent independent and funded by our incredible fans joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more please join us on this exciting Journey we need more support to make more episodes welcome to a ditch in Cambridgeshire but this isn't any old ditch right here two meters below the surface is a layer of Roman fines in fact this is a pretty Bountiful ditch because over the years it's produced hundreds of examples of high quality Roman Pottery like this lot including this beautiful find a perfectly preserved Roman flagon which is all very intriguing but we really knew we had to come and investigate this site when this was discovered a Roman cheese press while the excitement because this is Stilton the place that gave its name to the world famous blue cheese mind you that was invented about 200 years ago what was happening here 2 000 years ago how long has cheese had a role in stilton's history we've got just three days to find out Stilton sits just off the A1 near Peterborough and it's close to the Neenah Valley a major center of the Roman Pottery industry for 250 years so it's no surprise that the fields around this town have been producing bits of Roman pots bowls and vases for years look at that four there's just pieces on there's another one there there's a bit there look oh gosh yes it hasn't come very fast I'm pretty braided is it but it's the sheer amount and quality of the fines coming out of these ditches that have really caught the team's imagination so we're not wasting any time and we're going to have to open a very big very deep trench before we reach any archeology previous finds or anything to go by it 'll be worth the effort just about to do a scene about this coin that Philip has just found when there was a yell from over here so let's have a look at this one too I really are starting to come up aren't they Helen well it's I suppose it's it's when you look very hard you're going to find things on these interesting bumps of land what's this one it's a Celtic silver unit goodness oh fantastic this Celtic or native British coin dates to the first century BC suggesting there was trade or at least activity going on here at least 100 years before the Romans arrived and what's the coin that we were going to do a scene about well it's silver and it's actually a penny but for some reason we call them Shadows or Skeets these days and it's one of the most common kinds of Series E dates to the early 8th century and they're found all over Eastern England and Holland as well Fabulous Finds for so early in the Dig but do they actually tell us anything well it tells us that activity stretches back a few hundred years before the Romans were here making pottery and a few hundred years afterwards as well so it looks like we'll have more than just the Roman archeology to deal with here I think the signal is so strong here that there was undoubtedly a kiln at this point so could could could it be possible that the Kiln is totally gone and what we're looking at is the clay underneath that has been heavily burnt as possible yeah be disappointing but the real shock is in trenched too where we've just discovered the last thing you'd expect on an industrial site we definitely seen them have got the the shin bone here but then look a very nice set of metatarsals which our footballers are very fond of breaking what we seem to be missing in the middle is the whole of the ribs the ribs and the vertebrae which we definitely need because from the teeth where we might be able to say something about the age of the adult and from the shape of the skull we might be able to say something about it sex yeah in fact we seem to have two burials as Matt's just uncovered some more bones at the other end of trench too this site just gets curiouser and curiouser and we now have two very different investigations on this small hill so as the delicate unpicking of the burials gets underway The More Physical industrial dig continues with Phil and John opening a third trench over another anomaly that John's also convinced is a kiln look at this burnt clay that's coming around there and it comes around there back along there which is completely well I want to say it's nearly circular unusual it's not what it is however on the other side they're still digging through meters of dark thick clay but over here just inches below the surface we've already got a really good archaeological story haven't we met yep you can see we've got the second body here head to the West there feet to the east it's very delicate very thin bone something it's probably quite a young child or something like that um we don't know the date of it yet but it looks to me like it's cutting through these layers of all the pottery and bits of broken up Kiln in it so definitely post Roman post kill so would your best guess be Anglo-Saxon could be yeah and the first body is over here you've got the skull yeah it's a bit of a jumble mess because we've had a bit of cloud activity in this region but um you know we've got the lower jaw and look at its teeth it's fantastic Kerry come over here mate so what are you seeing on that level what we've got is a much earlier uh Roman surface to uh well at least one and a half two meters below and it's absolutely stuffed for the pottery wow and that's from One Sweep of the bucket and that hasn't been broken by the bucket nope that's all breaks you can see the dirt on the sides there Francis can you see it's got yeah it used to add shell it made the pottery dry better when they were making it so what's your strategy going to be now I'm going to do is finish this and get up to the section there then we'll clean it up and then we'll dig down into it it's not it's mandible it's not you know really chunky we've got no big kind of muscle attachment so if anything that's looking more like a lady but as we start to remove the skeletons from trench too it becomes apparent that we haven't just got two burials but the remains of up to seven different individuals including children and babies I just wanted to show you this so I heard you talking about the teeth there can you see oh wow molar popping through so obviously it was a young child I was wondering kind of what how old that would be the way is that yeah you don't put that tooth there it's very small so that's you could almost say those in its milk tea still I think that makes this as a pretty young it's about seven about seven yes it's now clear that this was a significant Saxon sight the task for us is to try and work out what was happening here 300 years after the Romans left I do think we have finally got the full extent of it I reckon you're right thankfully the Roman element of this complex field is beginning to make more sense in trench 3 Phil now has something that's Beginning to Look remarkably kill like and now that the burials have been removed we can also confirm that trench 2 contains a kill although it seems to be of a different construction to the one in Phil's Trench I think what you've got actually Helen is a stone-lined cut in other words it could be the actual chamber of a kiln and this is the like the stone lining for the cut that's the Kiln interior and then you would have had the fire bricks or clay lining the inner face of that wall forming the actual furnace chamber for the Kiln it's now almost the end of day two and it feels like we've got more to investigate than ever and that doesn't even include the masses of newly uncovered archeology and the ditch Trench right here look at that lot you see the amount of pot we've got yeah brand into the center there the other thing about it not only is a lot of pot but you can see the dark color of the soil there's a lot of charcoal in there and of course there's water like wood in there not a lot but it's there oh it's quite incredible and it must mean there's a whole lot of stuff under this film isn't it extraordinary and this is the trench that everyone's getting really excited about yesterday they were speculating that in it is a Neolithic Causeway enclosure which is very very rare Francis has only ever discovered one in his life Francis now you've had a look at it is this the second well I'm very excited Tony first thing this morning we found this superb Neolithic Flint it's beautifully sharp and you know I'm very excited about it well I was for about 10 minutes and then we found this and this is a piece of anglo-saxon Pottery that's just as exciting reused an angle angle and times where you're saying it's not Neolithic at all I'm saying if it was nearly thick and reused I'd expect a great deal more Flint than this um I'm afraid I think it's Anglo-Saxon end of story so why is that exciting well because they don't turn up very often and to actually have the ditch we have post holes we have barrels it all starts to look like an Anglo-Saxon settlements that's tremendously exciting this is time team we find something we think it's very exciting it turns out to be something else it's even more exciting yeah that's it that's it that's it there's some pots in there definitely pot siding in there yes other parts of our investigation here have been more straightforward thanks to some experimental archeology we've now established that the local plays around Stilton were perfect for the Roman Pottery industry so how did you feel that Winters are firing then Rick well as a piece of experimental archeology I think it's been very um successful yeah I mean back on the hill more evidence from the Anglo-Saxon periods emerging brace yourself for treasure even I as a romanist would recognize that as a significant object absolutely yeah middle anger Saxon eighth ninth Century so it fits in brilliantly with the shatter and with the pottery that seems to be coming out of the ditch which is really tremendous it's really exciting oh I mean I know it's building Castles in the Air but an Anglo-Saxon ditch and with Anglo-Saxon ditch round an island yeah it's beginning to look like oh it could be a monastery there are now all sorts of theories running around the site that we may have discovered a significant Center of anglo-saxon religion oh my goodness what's that what is that it's another wall and it's butting against the wall of the kiln somebody's built a wall into the kiln goodness Hermits were effectively the first monks and if this is a Middlesex in Hermitage we've found something incredibly rare because most hermitages now lie under some of Britain's most impressive abbies and cathedrals we know that the way the early church was organized that's what people did they went and lived miles from anybody else on Retreat we call it today wouldn't we sort of you know in isolation no it is speculation but it fits the archaeological evidence for that period so you know I'm really reasonably confident that's what we've got if it is a Hermitage how important a site does it make it well every so often we do a program and I think what we find that'll go into the textbooks because it's a good example of this or or a better example of that and I think this is one of those you know you've got an enclosure from the geophysics you've got um Saxon Pottery you've got burials you've got post hole buildings that's the sort of thing that's going to get mentioned in any discussion about this period or this topic so I think it's one of those in so many other places this would have evolved into one of the great Saxon and medieval abbies and monasteries of Britain for some unknown reason that didn't happen here and as a result we've uncovered the rarest of archaeological finds a Hermitage and this site still offers more as the end of the day approaches it turns out that the Saxons and Romans weren't the first people to recognize the importance of this small Cambridgeshire Hill been a good day for you hasn't it you've got your kill and you've got an Anglo-Saxon enclosure look what I've got for you another enclosure where where where look once you focus in on it you can see it if I turn it that way it's like a pair of spectacles but this is a double one on this side isn't it yeah I I think that's that's your prehistoric one so we're suddenly back into the Neolithic again it could be we found more here at Stilton than we could ever have hoped for time team is 100 independent and funded by our incredible fans want us to make more episodes joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more and you get to have your say in the process as we develop new sites this unprepossessing Mound on the Isle of sheppey may not look much but underneath here are the remains of the last great Royal Palace of the medieval period queenbra Castle was built by King Edward III for his beloved Queen Philippa and by all accounts it was a very impressive and important building although strangely very few images of it remain and those that there are seem to contradict each other some give it round outer walls for instance others give it square ones the castle was built at queenborough on the Isle of sheppey in Kent in 1361. it's located at the end of the creek running from the river Swale Queen Bruno itself was the last Royal New Town of the Middle Ages and was built by Edward at the same time as his castle however we've got all these conflicting reports of what the castle looked like which one do you favor well we've got a couple we've got this interesting elevation which is by Wenceslas holla 1640s I think we can rely on him he's a good artist isn't he I think so it looks pretty believable to me but I think really interestingly you have this this plan a couple of hundred years after the castle was built around here we seem to have a perfectly circular moat just inside that a circular curtain wall within that another range of masonry structures very much like a rotunda over here I think just about pick out a gate house and on the other side an inner gate house but the problem is we don't actually know what the scale of that is or indeed what the orientation of it is I love this little round thing in the middle what's that seems to be the castle well as far as we can guess if you look behind us yeah we think it's over here cool let's have a look Phil but I think that's probably a tile might be Medieval Time Of course for sure you can see there's not clay inclusions in it in the edge of it trench 2 should give us the scale of the castle by stretching from the Rotunda to the curtain wall and the moat Beyond [Music] back in trench one Phil's working on the Rotunda wall that he found earlier we got Stone down here it might just be in situated I think we've actually got part of the wall there's just not one random Stone down oh no no no no no listen to me look there's one stone comes along there and then there's this whacking great face here there's another Stone there Bridge o-ring we got King Edward's Castle if our plan's accurate the Castle's full of curving bits so Phil's could be any of these three shapes the angle of it suggests one of the towers but that would make this an outside wall which would surely mean the Rotunda was too small to fit all the rooms in the 2D plan of the castle is difficult to visualize and as a 3D architectural model it's beginning to look pretty peculiar and then when it gets to there it turns back on itself so it looks like the actual front of the wall is built as a sort of series of lobes but what we're really getting excited about look we've got the back Edge and it's why it's about two meters wide isn't it cracking this is zonking Great Wall yeah I know I never thought we were going to get that you see there's two concrete blocks because they're modern aren't they they're modern but they might actually Mark the site of this this sort of edge coming around yeah and then beyond that of course should be the motor of the castle around about here yeah the moat seems to be full of Masonry which looks like it's part of Edward III's Castle but we won't know which bit until we've pulled it all out [Music] just hold on for a couple of seconds I'm just going to quick look down here it's going back onto this Stony Rubble but it might not be a solid a wall if it's just marking a road yeah meanwhile Phil's extended trench won by 13 meters in his bid to find the outer rotunda wall fell yo are you getting home well I've lost my castle mate we've lost the castle that's very careless of you what's going on oh no well you see we're supposed to have along this side here somewhere the front of the royal Tundra if you look behind you look there's that road iron all right yes it ought to come through here somewhere and all we got is Clay I mean is this natural that you've got here this is Clay well it looks it but it got Chalk in it I shouldn't have Chalk in the clay no so it's contaminated with something it's something yeah Phil's gonna need to find the elusive outer wall if we're going to work out how big the castle rotunda is [Music] by tea time on day two raksha has uncovered a good chunk of the curtain wall which surrounded the entire Castle this is basically the extent of it here yeah we still have some of the stones are packed in the bottom but the rest of it is just gone this doesn't look as big as I expected Oliver on that history of the king's words no it looks absolutely massive it looks to me as if the front portion of the wall is actually gone so the wall would have been a lot wider but it's still a pretty pretty decent medieval wall it may only be half its original size but at least we now know where the curtain wall is though we still need both walls of the Rotunda to work out the scale of the castle everyone has been saying for the last couple of days how unique this Castle is but I don't really get a sense of what that uniqueness is now most royal castles are multi-phase buildings they're rebuilt over over many many generations their plans are added to queenborough on the other hand it seems to be a single phase Castle it's planned in one Fell Swoop so Edward III seems to be employing his Masons to to impose what's almost an ideal Castle onto the landscape this is a rather bizarre one-off or did it actually influence British architecture we've got an interesting plan in front of us here this is deal Castle which is down in Kent it's a couple of hundred years later it's a it's a castle bit by Henry VII if you put the two plans next to each other you can see there are a couple of features that they have broadly in common it's basically this idea that they have very very symmetrical designs as a line of symmetry here at queenborough it's down the middle likewise a deal and also the fact that they repeat circular form so this is 200 years later but there's a there's a level of similarity there meanwhile Matt's found some foundations where he was expecting to find the other Corridor wall but they look very different from the wall he found yesterday [Music] the two corridors are crucial to understanding the use of the castle they would have forced any visitors or Marauders to take a circuitous Route Around the outer walls of the Rotunda either exposed to fire or forced to admire the full Grandeur of the castle before entering the inner Sanctum what Phil's got there is a piece of curving War below the ladder there and then another curving wall coming off it underneath the bucket and the Spade right well if you look at that on the plan the only thing that fits with that is the junction of one of these walls with the main wall of the castle right yeah but if you put that over the top of that then none of the rest of it makes sense that we've done you can't get it all to square up at all so presumably that either means we're misinterpreting the archeology or the plans wrong I'm not sure we're misinterpreting the archeology because we've looked down this trench for any other sign of any other wall to go with that and it isn't there now you've got another conundrum here as well because if that interpretation is right and that's the curve of that and the well is in the right position and that's the that's the corner of the wall there and the well there that distance is only 12 meters so you've got to fit all that tower all these rooms Gatehouse Courtyard and well into 12 meters it won't work like a sand castle skyscraper tiny people the problem is this damn thing we've been using this for two or three days now and relying on it and there's clearly something wrong with it so throughout the whole two and a half days this has been a one piece of certainty and Sanity and now it looks like this is complete should be about four meters wide curving through on this line if the only thing we can rely on is the archeology I'm confident that it's curving whether it's Castle or not it's up to you okay we have to keep digging so trench 5 is located over another part of the Rotunda which might help us work out whether the plan is the wrong size or the wrong shape [Music] looks like a wall further round the Rotunda Bridge has been looking for the grandest part of the castle you can see behind me got loads of white material here basically it's made up of mortar and it's made up of stone just rammed together now we've got three options of what that could be either it's intact medieval archeology bit of Castle associated with the castle number two could be demolition associated with the castle dating to about 1650. so what where people have taken the good Stone out and then Chuck back all the rubbish and off cuts and mortar yeah and then use the stone somewhere else okay number three it could be associated with the construction of the initial pump house that was on the top of the mound here that's Victorian that would be victorious you've got 600 years to play with yeah and the only defining feature in this trench is this cat that runs all the way down here we've got what looks like natural on this side and then we've got the white material on that side bridge is hoping that Jonathan will be able to date the mortar to either the construction or demolition of the castle I mean but both both are contenders either 1650s trash or it's it's medieval you know Cheapo wall filling rubbish the medieval Builders had a kind of cornflake box approach to having two good firm outer walls and you stuff the Middle with ill-fitting rubbish that all settles during the building of the castle yeah I'll start at this end of the trench you can see we've dug down a little we've got this huge cut coming straight in down there if you follow it back it comes up again in a straight line there and across here right I thought this was a wall but I'm not so convinced now because on the other side of it actually coming in here we've got another big cut that comes in across there and down there and my current theory is this this is no longer the wall this is the path in between straight up to the middle of the round right so you had a wall coming across this way and a wall coming across this way both the walls though have been robbed away the direction and size of this Corridor means that we can now say with confidence that the castle faced the West looking down the High Street and we're hoping that raksha's wall will help us with the Rotunda well if you look here there's a nice line curving there and there's another one curving that way so it's all going around that way so we can say this is the castles the only big circular structure the wall curves towards Phil's trench but sadly doesn't help us identify whether it's the inner or outer wall so with just an hour to go Phil decides to expand trench one towards a geophysical anomaly which could just be the outside of the Rotunda [Music] that compacted surface and all the stone work is what we're seeing in the resistance um that's to me not the outer wall no I quite agree with you John but what I'm saying is let's nail this come on in let's get on with it my money's on that's yes I think you probably are right [Music] see now we're yeah [Music] the cub an edge there isn't a there is an edge in the one is it there the question is the edge of what race hands hard work on the model has been a waste of time so he's begun to work on a computer-generated version of queen philippa's castle yeah it brings out really nicely the way the castle but it's like a great wedding cake doesn't it we know it's packed with literally scores and scores 50 or more separate rooms we know there's a hall various Chambers a kitchen guard room stores absolutely packed with rooms yes let's not forget we're talking about a major Citadel Palace details such as 407 doors and windows towards its closing stages these must some of these must have been of the highest quality it is after all no accident that perhaps does look like a beautiful Chateau with those beautiful pointed turrets because she was after all very much a French noblewoman and must have felt therefore very much at home here having located what could be the remains of the missing outer War Phil's ordering the middle of his trench for signs of the interior of the Rotunda could Lord live I mean that is a big hole that's been opened for a long time has filled up with water the question is why is there a big hole where there should be a big structure of all the trenches that we've dug over the last three days this is the one that's given us the most problems well yeah and we still don't know what's in it do we well I'm not here to be contradictory but I think we do actually I think what we might have is of a very large rubber trench going all the way around the top rob it robbing out the outer line of the Rotunda because it makes you think that well on the mapping we've had this feature which is a wide ditch round the top of the hill which will come through here at 12 meters wide in places and I think that's what we can see here in the cut and Over The Far Side in the cut and what we've got is a huge grapes rubber trench digging all that out and we actually have a bigger Castle than what you've been thinking but it feels trench Stuart shows a circular feature doesn't it with a wall coming up to it now these are the only circular features that's the only thing that makes sense with that doesn't it yeah it does and the width of this makes it 24 meters you know to center it on the well well Henry VII fixed up this Castle in 1536 and then built pendennis and Moors and around the coast deal and warmer and they're between 20 and 30 meters this is 24. so why shouldn't this have been a model for Henry where that Phil's trench is the outer wall I'm just going with the archeology as I see it if you go with the archeology you have to end up with it and the argument continues on right until the last moment when almost three meters below the surface that is more Phil finds a final clue well maybe there is a structure here after all Stewart was right the hole in Phil's trench was a massive rubber trench from the demolition of the castle but traces of the cellars under the Rotunda were picked up by the augering Phil's inner wall was the junction of the inner wall with the gate house and 40 rooms would easily have fitted inside the massive structure of the Rotunda at last we're able to visualize how this unique and beautiful building would have looked to King Edward and Queen Philippa as they admired their Newcastle in the 1360s hello my name's John Gator time team is fan funded by patreon this vital support helps us to make new episodes joining patreon gives you access to exclusive 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Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 42,123

Keywords: Team Team, 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

Id: zPAfOeqip28

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023