5000 Tons of Stone (Hamsterley, County Durham) | S15E11 | Time Team

welcome to the castles a massive stone enclosure the size of a football pitch and for once on time team there's plenty of archaeology on the surface so what's the big mystery with 5000 tons of stone right in front of us this should be easy well in fact for hundreds of years this site's baffled everyone who's seen it it's been called everything from an iron age homestead to a roman prison to a dark age stronghold so what was it really when was it built and who was the king of the castles we've only got three days is that enough time to find out the remains of the castles lie near hamsterly 20 miles southwest of durham in the weir valley sitting on the side of a hill in a sheep farm the site's a huge dry stone enclosure measuring approximately 70 by 90 meters now overgrown with trees its crumbling walls still form a monumental structure but even so no one knows what it is or when it was built do we know anything about this site well the first mention of the site is the 1760 estate map where it's called the castles it's kept that name since that time about 100 years ago a local antiquarian excavated the site and i did a survey a few years back neither the antiquarian excavations nor my own survey were able to to provide a good date for the site so something of a bit of a mystery but this is a sheep farm why couldn't it just be a sheep pen it's a bit elaborate for a cheap bit massive structures to hold a few sheep in so what do we do phil well i mean basically we've got to try and find out what the function is and what the date is and there's three actual places that we can attack firstly there's a ditch that runs all the way around now that ditch might have environmental evidence that will give us some idea secondly we want to target the wall itself and if possible the old ground surface is sealed underneath the wall thirdly we've got the interior if geophysics is going to give us any targets so the team stormed the castles with our environmental archaeologist emma beginning to core the enclosure ditch this is the best place to find organic remains which might give us crucial dating evidence while emma gets her first taste of the site stewards scouring the perimeter of the enclosure to see how the stones stack up in the landscape [Music] and henry and phil begin to survey the wall to find a location for a trench because if we dig down to the foundations and uncover the ground it was built on we might reveal some fines to give us a date i'm just waiting for the satellites for a bit and then i'll get it set out for you phil it's a bit tricky with the trees i'm sure you're holding me out i'm sorry i know what everybody up sure you might as well get out the way then i'll get a tape measure although this massive site has always attracted speculation bizarrely it's only really been investigated once in the 1920s by a local antiquarian called hodgkin but is his work a help or a hindrance do we know much about the santa clarita his name was hodgkin he lived locally in fact he lived just over the hill over there now when he was on site he put a few trenches in he was looking for internal structures but he didn't find any unfortunately what about fines no there was no fines either uh but there is a list of local reports of things found in the area things like the arm bones of a youngest woman or fossilized tusks or a few flints what about the outside walls did he do any work there uh yeah as you can see he cleared away a lot of the rubble to expose the facing and he also exposed this great fantastic gate here it's really well preserved great isn't it but presumably we don't know what part of the structure is original and what part he just put back but more importantly around the back of that wall he discovered the most amazing guard house let's have a look oh mick have you seen this yeah it's fantastic isn't it is it really it's very difficult to believe that this is all original though isn't it what we have is photos right and the photos do show these openings into this guard chamber so it looks if it is original yeah i think it's got to be but i think the only way we're going to prove it for sure would actually to be dig a hole on the other side because when you get one guard chamber you get a matching one on the other side that's what i want to do next where this gorse bush is yeah well i think we've got to base it on this bit of wall here yeah so just go back there tell you what we can tell people where to put the trenches in there's going to be a heck of a lot of stone shifting we'll just mark it up and slope off so we're putting in a trench on the eastern side by the entrance to the enclosure to see if there is another guard house [Music] if we find one it'll tell us if the existing chamber's original and give us an architectural clue to the castle's date and function now we're moving laying siege to the entrance the archaeologists flex their muscles beginning to shift the mountains of tumbled stone do you know what have had to have done this in reverse when they were building it we're also putting in another trench across the north wall hoping to learn more about its construction and locate the early ground surface and dateable artifacts by digging on this side we've got less stone to shift since the walls least built up here [Music] surrounded by trees and gorse geofizz is stuck between a rock and a hard place so john's hooked up with frank the farmer to tap into his local knowledge and see if he can narrow down a target but there's evidence of rigid foe ploughing from the past in here well i would say the ridge and furrow would be done in the 1800s they've left this area in the middle i would say the reason they have left it was because they've obviously hit a an obstruction in hodgkin's report he claimed that the dumped stones in the central area here when they cleared it because it was so wet but if you're clearing land you wouldn't put your stones right in the middle you'd go to the side you'd go to the periphery especially when you've got all this area to dump your stones on so this could be a good target for us to look at in the first instance i would say it definitely does need looking at yes john begins to geophysically interior to find evidence of internal structures since working out of dates one thing but understanding its function is even more of a challenge in the entrance we're trying to discover if there's a second guard chamber but since the castle is basically a massive dry stone wall it's hard to tell fallen rubble from standing remains i've had any any kind of bonding material at all well sometimes with these dry stone structures they used to put clay bonding almost like a putty in between the stones but it washes out with the rain i think you're still in rubble there actually matt the longer we're here the more of a mystery this place seems to be it's one of county durham's least understood sites what are the stories about it in the first century this area was occupied by the tribe of the bugantes and their relations with the romans were quite turbulent at times and the theory goes that the castles could have been a refuge when they were defeated in a major battle near their main base near stanwick what else another one is it was a roman penal colony where slaves working in neighboring lead mines were kept now both of these suggestions are theoretically possible we're not that far from stanwick and there are lead deposits in the area but there's no real evidence for either so it's one of those things where people tell a story about a place and after a while everyone just believes it yes it's sort of fiction becoming fact or speculation becoming fact the castles is steeped in legend but this just increases our challenge to separate the fiction from the facts so what about the idea it's roman then i actually don't think i buy it because although we've got a very good roman military context 30 miles south of hadrian's wall just off the main roman penetration route deer street the fact is he's off the road system what about something later than romantic we know that sites such as bird oswald and binchester carried on being occupied as fortified places in the sub-roman period but of course excavation this part of the world has tended to focus on roman fort so that's where we found it so if there were sub-roman sites that weren't roman military to start with and ours was one of them we wouldn't really know about that we wouldn't have excavated them now what about the earlier period then one thing is quite clear that you do get prehistoric sites which are rectangular in shape with a ditch and bank around them with a single entrance just like you've got here at the castles there is no reason at all this could not start off life in the prehistoric period it might have later occupation within it through the roman period and so on but these enclosures could easily be of a type that had been occupied from the mid-iron age onwards so it sounds if it would actually be quite useful if you compared our site with as many sites like that in the region that would probably help us wouldn't it it would because one of the things we have found out looking at these sites is they have similarity of location where they occur in relation to high ground and low ground river courses and so on so the more information can build up and compare how our sites compare with those we do know about the more we'll be able to give it its date and its context so put your hat on with the gps in it so you know where you are on the north side things are progressing well phil and faye have revealed a face of the wall and are investigating whether they've reached the foundations on the original ground surface [Music] as we lift the stones in the entrance to the east the archaeology is increasingly complicated ian when we laid this trench out this morning we put it around this bit of wall because this lines up with that and we thought that that had to be genuine but now you've been looking at the photographs and have been getting me a bit worried the interesting thing is this big stone that we have down at the bottom of the trench which is currently lying flat i think what's been happening is i think maybe this edge here is an edge to receive that stone it's projecting slightly into the entrance corridor so that you can rest a timber gate of some form against it so you'd have had a gate up against that stone but then what would you have had i mean if you've got attackers what would they what what would you have had to stop them knocking the gate backwards one possibility is over here where we've got this and and this looks very much like some kind of bar hole feature that's been deliberately built into the wall to receive a pretty substantial kind of piece of timber which you would you know use to secure a timber door okay right problem is it doesn't quite line up it's not quite in the right place untangling the gateway isn't our only challenge the site's produced no fines yet and that's why emma's environmental survey is going to be crucial emma hi tony why is it so important to do environmental archaeology on this site well is this sort of potentially i ceramic um environmental archaeology will probably provide us with the best dating evidence that we're going to find through radial carbon dating which hopefully will get from seeds or you know other bits of organic remains that have sort of been preserved in these deposits what have you got here suffer unfortunately i've found three metres and not a loss i've got this very very sort of um fine almost alluvial what we'd expect to fly on a foot flood plain quite a way above the actual river itself it's a bit of a conundrum actually it's very unusual when you take this out of the cora you eat it don't you yes i do why to find out what component of salmonella is and what component of sort of finer ground sediment like silts and clays are and we can sort of get an idea of the ratios of sand and sort of silt and clay from eating it what's it taste like not very pleasant actually does that enable you to say how it might have been deposited because of the ratios of the yes it does basically if it was sort of relatively fast flowing water we'd expect to find a stanley sandy element but this is very very fine-grained so that perhaps suggests it was either standing or very very slow moving it's very very unusual so what do you do next well what i'm going to do is unfortunately because this isn't providing the evidence that we need i'm going to move to other areas of the site and see what we can find on there as emma moves inside to find organic evidence we've also begun to lay siege to the southern wall with a third trench since it's more built up here this will increase our chances of revealing a well-preserved section of wall one thing's for sure it's going to be a mammoth job we're hoping that this trench will give us an indication of the walls original dimensions and how it was constructed but at the north wall with less stone to shift phil and faye are well ahead of the game are we getting anywhere with this trench i think we are actually we've just started to hit a different surface or a different layer so it's a lot more compact so i think actually it's beginning to get quite exciting is that the old ground surface then it's a difficult one to call they see the surprising thing is you see we've only got one two three four five courses of wall if i'd push my trowel it in there there doesn't look to be another course there so down there where you've got these massive walls standing meters high that doesn't seem to have been represented here looks maybe as it's been robbed away but what is the big problem of course is trying to establish whether the wall is standing on an old ground surface or whether it's been cut into an old ground surface we just don't know so what are you going to do with this now we're going to carry on and see whether we can define our surface i'll keep my fingers crossed for that [Music] it's nearly end of day one and as work continues on the walls we're also clearing the interior to enable gfiz to survey inside to see if they can find evidence of settlement have we got a guard house francis no we don't tony and we can be reasonably certain about that and it's taken us all afternoon to sort it out and the answer lies in these ancient photos that ian's got yeah i mean basically it comes down to this large stone here we can see from this photo which was taken in the 1920s that the stone would have been upright and if it was upright it would have sat against this edge that's just come up in the trench down here now that means that this edge which previously we were pretty confident about is completely fake it's been rebuilt but this is a huge stone isn't it there's nothing else like it on the site if you're saying it's standing up like that that implies something rather more than a domestic dwelling or something it looks like defense to me i think so and it wasn't just sort of flush with the with the gateway it would have stuck out probably to to hold something like a a wooden gate but if this isn't a guard house what about that one there is that real yes we're very happy about that we need to know more about it but that's real yes i think we've actually cracked what this site's about i mean this is massive defense i mean there's even a slot there for a gate you know this is an entranceway that's protecting everything that's going on in there okay fair enough i buy the fact that we're narrowing down our options but what really excites me is what on earth was this place for and in order to find that out tomorrow we're going to go into here and start digging right in the very middle beginning of day two here at the castles in county durham and we're surrounded by this massive stone structure which is a real archaeological mystery yesterday we investigated the outside walls but if we want to know what this place was and how old it is then we're going to have to explore the middle aren't we how's the geoff is going well now we've cleared all the gores it's been a bit easier and look we've got hints of structures up on the platform there you can see there may well be a stone structure there so i mean i'd like to have a look at that yeah but we probably ought to put a 3x2 or something over just to see what that is because it does overlook the site doesn't it but the point is what it's not doing is getting us into the middle when you came here you slept across this ditch what we're thinking about doing is maybe cleaning up one of hodgkin's sections there and you see we've also got one of these little trenches in here hang on this is hodgkin's original treasure yes i just thought it was a natural struggle they didn't believe in reinstating in there no no they did so what we could do is clean up some sections in those we can actually learn first hand at whether or not he actually found anything in the middle of the enclosure so we can look in there and we can look in there there's actually another one at the back this this is an unrecorded change as well as we know as well so we're going to use that as another section it does feel a bit like a first world war battlefield yeah i have to say but you see also john has got the hint of some goes where disturbances is aren't you worried that we're getting over stretched because we've got people working all the way around the perimeter i don't think we're okay on that you're happy to get on yeah of course i am i was trying to look after your interests first time for everything so john's results have given us a target for the interior our first hint of a structure which not only might help us take the site but also tell us what it was used for yesterday we concentrated all our efforts on the exterior walls so that we could understand when and how they were built on the north wall faye thinks that she might have located the original ground surface and is still searching for any dateable fines we're also beginning to learn how the site was constructed as naomi and the team clear tons of fallen rubble from the southern wall while over at the entrance we've moved mountains to expose the gateway but how does it fit in with the original guard house yesterday francis was adamant that what we got here was a gatehouse and what it was guarding was this big entrance way here and on the far side of the entranceway there would have been some form of gateway represented by this stone structure and in front of it there would have been that big slab with presumably some kind of door or gate swinging against it so is that still what we think the story is um no oh surprise surprise i still think it's an entrance house of some sort yes but it doesn't go with the original construction of this fort ah underneath this slab the wall actually comes out now this is new it's stepped out and it would have supported that stone vertically so you've got a staggered wall of the entrance to the fort and then ian has found something similar on that side these walls over here which we've had right from the start what you'll see is that the alignments don't match up and in fact there's a very distinct step or a recess that matches the one we have on the other side so why does that mean that the guard house isn't part of this setup well basically what you would have had to have had would be another one of these big stones standing over here yeah and it doesn't work with this gatehouse so this gatehouse basically has got to be put in after that original gateway organization has gone out of use but that would look really impressive wouldn't it with two big stones and the big big wooden gates behind absolutely yeah yeah so the archaeology suggests that the entrance was fronted by two stone slabs flanking an impressive wooden gate and what period do you think that this entrance could be there's really no reason to think that this original entrance that we've got is an iron age the use of these absolutely massive blocks integrated into a kind of unitary design um it's very much the kind of thing you see further to the north the same kind of techniques of stone masonry being employed as you see in up in northern scotland for example in the iron age but i think what what is more intriguing is what date this cell is because you know i can't imagine anybody saying the later middle ages or the post-medieval period doing that tony wilmot doesn't think it looks anything to do with roman that only leaves us the early medieval period and if it was to be a dark age structure slotted into an iron age structure that would be very exciting so we're still looking at the span of about a thousand years yeah but if it's an iron age site modified in the post-roman period that would be absolutely cracking so the iron age gateway might have been modified in the dark ages when a guard house was added it's a lot of ifs but it is our first clue to the castle's date what's more both entrance phases look defensive helping us understand what it's for but something doesn't quite add up stuart this place is called the castles and you've got this massive stone wall here and you've got this big gully here which looks like it ought to be defensive but if you look up there you would imagine if it was a castle it would be nestled right on top of it but it isn't it's almost as though we're in the lee of the hill you sum this sight up really well because it's not defensive at all is it i mean you could you could stand on that slope then i'll almost lob a flaming torch straight inside that enclosure absolutely it's not a defensive feature it's chosen for other reasons it's a bit like iron age stone cladding that's the best way to think about it people starting to show off in the landscape demonstrating this is their area we won't probably understand it until we started to look at its location in relation to the stream valleys the hill slopes all around it's called the castles rather than the castle do you think originally it would have been lots of separate structures no i think that's that's a red herring to some extent it's just how farmers refer to things that they didn't quite understand it looks it looks like a collapsed castle to them so they call it the castles it's of no significance whatsoever that name in the interior the archaeologists have opened two more trenches on the site of the antiquarian's old excavations their central position is the most likely place for occupation hodgkin had found stones here and we want to check out whether they could be evidence of structures as the new trenches get underway our north wall trench has come to its end so i see naomi's doing the recording here does that mean we finish with this tree yep we're closing this trench up so what did you decide in the end well actually it's really interesting what we've actually got is them using the natural slope so here what name is sitting on is actually the natural right and it's that's the original yellowy stuff yeah so is that set back into the mound then yep yeah it is and the 64 thousand dollar question any fines from it no you were right none at all so we've really got no idea of date except for the type of walling it is that sort of thing yeah we have got the original warning i think that apart from that i can't say anything more although we haven't discovered any fines we're beginning to understand more about the construction of the site instead of being built on a surface the north wall was cut into the natural slope and after a day and a half mix keen to learn how the southern wall was constructed naomi why have you brought me to this dark dirty hole here well there is a good reason for that mick yesterday on the other side of this trench we had one facebook wall and we've discovered the other face oh right so this is the outer face we had the interface yesterday that's right yeah so is this original or is this a bit of hodgkin's reconstruction no i think this is the original wall because i think if it was rebuilt and reconstructed it would be much straighter yeah whereas this as you can see it's all starting to lean in and collapse slightly and that's just a process of time really so what are you going to do next with this well the plan is to carry on emptying out this fill and following the course of this wall down to see how many courses we've got and that's the important thing to see how the wall was constructed i think to help us learn as much as we can about the construction of the walls we've called in a stone expert to survey them [Music] and stonewall builders to see if they can replicate a section this is an absolute work of art how do you compare your work with airwork they put stone on that way what we call tracing tracing wart we would put stone in that way and we call that end in and out so that's actually giving it a lot of tail into the wall and really strengthening the wall yes that's right we would normally build what we call a batter right be two foot wide at the bottom and one foot wide at the top beneath the coping stone now for these walls and the walls we're replicating they've built it as far as we can tell nearly vertical there may be a very slight slope but nowadays we would build a batter and we would say that was stronger in the entrance we finally uncovered our first find but sadly it's not ancient eating evidence dating evidence i think dating evidence for a rather festive excavation what would you say portal madeira oh something like that isn't it yeah why did we put this trench in well this is slap bang in the middle of that big geophysical anomaly that john picked up and we we actually positioned the trench so that we thought there was going to be a wall line going slap bang through the middle there i can't see a wall though no it doesn't look like there's anything here what about the trench down there yeah well come here and have a look at it there doesn't seem to be much more in this one uh well you see the idea of putting this one in is is working on the assumption as francis said here we are in an iron age enclosure where is the most likely place for the building to be now if you look back through there we are slap bang in line with the main entrance and in fact we are a slap bang in the middle of the enclosure which is the most likely place for the host state it's built in now if we assume that anybody but mr and mrs clean and tidy was living here you'd expect to find some traces that they lived here but we know there was plowing here couldn't it be plowed out ah this trench is placed on a ridge so the archaeology is more likely to be preserved underneath it and the furrows are on either side in nearly 6 000 square meters of enclosure we still haven't found any dating evidence so have things finally hit rock bottom [Music] let me give you some figures length of the perimeter of this wall 320 meters right with this wall five meters right number of years it would have taken one man to carry all the stones to build this wall a hundred a hundred years a very old and knackered man weight of all the stones in this wall 5 000 tons yeah number of archaeological finds we've got zero yeah flipping zero we're dealing with people who are getting most of what they use on a day-to-day basis from around them they're using um stuff that rots away that we can't see it must be wood leather we can work all the rest of it but this isn't the getting all the stuff from all around the area age it's the iron age yeah but there isn't much iron about in the iron age it's when it's introduced but it's not that common it's not actually that common until the 17th century but in earlier societies probably 1995 of what they used was made of perishable materials so is it a mistake to think of looking for fines at all should we be just clearing away all the rubble from this place finding out what it really looked like and then just comparing it with other sites and get a date that way i think actually in terms of a date a more useful strategy is to try and find something in either the environmental samples or in the areas we're digging in the middle that's either waterlogged or carbonized that's charcoal or something we can get a radiocarbon date from it's going to be that date that gets us into the particular period it's occupied but that again is a long shot very difficult for us to understand but that's the reality of the the archaeology of this site at that time afternoon of day two and with no internal structures or fines the castles is still frustratingly mysterious so we're throwing every means of investigation at the site emma's still pouring and we're opening another trench in the interior but over at the southern wall the archaeologists may have made some progress really pleased about this mick we've actually got the bottom of the wall look at that oh good it's actually sitting on that yellow natural there yeah so is it on an old ground surface down there no it's not and that's really interesting because it means that they're going to have to have cut into the slope and created a kind of linear terrace to build it on and the reason they're about to do that is because we've now been able to measure from face to face which is another good thing 5.1 meters wide crikey it's a hell of a thing that's interesting because when i was talking to faye about the the top rampart that's parallel with this they did the same there oh really so it means they they terest that topping they tell us this one in i know what they did with the sides because they run up the slopes so they're either going to have to have got a sort of ramp effect yeah cut in or they're going to have to have done it in a series of steps aren't they so still no date but at least the archaeology is consistent both the northern and southern walls were built on terraces into the natural hills slope it's just so frustrating we've got no idea what the walls were enclosing are you two seriously trying to tell me that that jumble of rubble at the bottom of that trench could actually be the first archaeology that we've got inside the structure well i think it could be tony um the trouble is those stones down there are actually inside hodgkin's trench so we don't know whether there's something left there by him or whether it's the remains of a collapsed wall or something like that but it's the closest thing we've got i think to archaeology in you wouldn't like to hazard a date no no but tomorrow tomorrow we'll know but that is the only evidence so far that we've got of any kind of occupation isn't it not necessarily come and look at this trench over here because what we've got here starting to emerge of features can you see the difference in colour in the soil yeah is that some kind of edge there that's right it might be part of a curve and then this central space is where we might expect the bigger hot circles the bigger houses in the center the problem is we've only got a small area open we need to expand it to see if we can pick up the edges of something but if we're not going to get any pottery what can we get that will date it well big round houses you know in the middle of a monument facing across to the entranceway uh they are as good as any dating evidence it doesn't matter if there's no pottery nothing just those post holes and those gullies will date the site so does that mean that we're going to put your gateway and your guard house on hold for a bit oh good heavens no no no no no i mean we're down on the flag stands and when we lift those flag stones which we'll do tomorrow any dating evidence will be sealed underneath them so i think we've got everything to dig for over there tomorrow it's been a really frustrating day today but at last we've got stuff inside we've got stuff outside is our story beginning to unfold we'll know tomorrow welcome back to this mysterious stone structure called the castles here in county durham and after two really frustrating days we're finally managing to sort out the guard house the walls and the interior meanwhile emma's been eating dirt in a desperate attempt to sort out the environmental archaeology having daytona and have you been getting on up till end of day last night not particularly well but yesterday at the very very last moment i've found a piece of preserved wood probably at a depth that we actually be quite interested in melting just that tiny piece there what is it about this piece of wood then that's so significant that piece of wood lets me know that there might be seeds and insects that i can use to sort of establish what was happening when this site was occupied so what are you going to do with this now i'm going to take it to the river and i'm going to process the sample and we'll see what we get so beginning of day 3 and finally we might be able to date the castles while working with 6 000 tonnes of stone it could be a few grams of organic material which will give us an answer we're also beginning to expose more stonework in the interior to reveal its function so a lot of archaeologists in a relatively small space what's going on this middle area suddenly got more exciting and so we've brought a lot of people in to help with it what's so exciting um well the main thing is that big spread of blue clay yeah we had in what we thought in the middle of the house there um it turned out to be a pre-throw pit that's not very exciting what about the post hole yes it's a feature and it may be a post hole this excitement is almost defined by the lack of anything exciting ah but tony over here is real excitement oh well these stones there's so many more of them now aren't there well yes tony but the key thing is the stones over there they're well bedded in and look they form a distinct curve that looks like a semicircle you've got a curve of stones and that can only mean one thing well a roundhouse a roundhouse what do we need to find in order to prove that it's around we need to find that there's occupation in the middle and that's why we're stripping this area over here what might we find francis well if this is the center of the roundhouse then you're going to get a half or with any luck you might get sort of spread of ash from the half but there'll be something here i mean we're keeping our fingers crossed this is our last chance we've got to go for it it's our last throw of the dice to see if we can actually find this in the middle so it's possible that we've got a round house in the center of the enclosure but how does that fit in with the idea that the site's iron age it seems to me that from everything the archaeologists have been saying you've all pretty well concluded that this structure is iron age or at least the first phases is that fair yeah i think that's pretty much right i mean everything everything we're seeing from the the architecture the nature of the the stone walls and the the lack of fines really from the interior all of that points to an ironic site what do you think it would have originally looked like i mean we've got this sort of massive substantial square enclosure that we that we saw when we got here with a fairly elaborate timber gateway across that and then in the interior it's difficult to know we might expect some form of central round house either right in the middle with its entrance aligned on the the main gateway or perhaps slightly offset and then around about it it's more difficult to say there might be smaller buildings perhaps no buildings at all perhaps just areas where stock were penned where you kept your animals close close by you that sort of thing how many people do you think would have lived there probably not that many i mean we're really i think talking about an extended family group rather than anything beyond it and i think one of the interesting things here is that when you look at the size of these stone walls a lot more people would have been involved in building this site than would actually have been living inside it and if you'd like to learn more about iron age communities and the places they lived you know what to do log on to the time team website as digging begins to uncover more about the castle's date and function our wall survey has revealed how it was constructed peter this site has proven to be a hell of a problem to date in places we have original build and then in other places we have hodgkin's rebuild is there any difference we know that hodgkin's says that the lower few courses on this wall were original this with the smaller stones thinner stones this is hodgkin's rebuild i cannot notice these steps are they to get up onto the top of the wall well that was hodgkin's belief but i'm not convinced there are steps if you look at them there's not a scrap of wear on them anywhere now if these have been used as steps the edge will be quite rounded and worn and there's no sign of that i think this is the result of this part of the wall falling um in ancient times maybe a couple of thousand years ago leaving the ragged end here which they've consolidated with big stones and then they've rebuilt this slightly thinner as peter and phil unpicked the individual stonework stewart and henry continue to survey the standing remains so that racehand can reconstruct the bigger picture of the site we're also extending the trenches in the middle of the interior where we're hoping to expose a half or post holes which will confirm whether we've got a roundhouse meanwhile emma's finally found some organic remains which might provide us with dating evidence but will the paving slabs in the entrance be equally rewarding it is not underneath yeah so that's continuous with this lot of cobbling yeah that puts quite a big camber on the road we now know that the entrance was built with a finely cobbled surface covered with paving slabs this is a heck of a long trench what have you done to justify it well we've got both sides of the original wall now from that flat flag to that it's 5.1 meters we've bottomed the wall on each side and demonstrated it's sitting on a terrace it's deliberate artificially cut terrace overlooking this this slope down if we've got that edge there and that edge there but then on top of that you've got all this rubble doesn't that imply that originally the wall would have been much taller oh yeah five meters wide width just screams height to me three meters wouldn't amaze me as an original height and that overlooking that valley would look incredible from that far side that's almost as tall as you what we got on this side well naomi's just putting in a little extension there what's the extension for naomi well tony as you can see we've got these stones here i know the stones absolutely everywhere but these stones are much flatter they look much more purposeful as opposed to those tumbled angular stones over there so what are you going to do with them well we want to take this back and just see if we've got something real don't those look rather like the ones that we found up there well that's the whole point really the way they're pitched in the size of the stones even in the material they're set in they're pretty much exactly like the stuff in phase trench up there so do you think it could be something like the base of a round house well we're hoping so fingers crossed yeah we can only check it out can't we can only hope yes after two and a half days of struggling to find any evidence of occupation we might have found not one but two roundhouses within the enclosure our potential roundhouses fit in perfectly with our iron age model but as digging continues in the interior things are beginning to go pear-shaped that now looks like a bit of a bend at the end of a straight line of stones doesn't it it's not looking very roundhouse like more like a boat yeah and also we've got more stones coming behind me yeah um so i think we've got quite a bit more work to do all very well but it's nearing the end of day three and there's still loads of work to do to confirm whether we've got our other roundhouse by the southern wall earlier on our environmental archaeologist emma got really excited about one patch of soggy earth down there oh absolutely um this is the best water log deposit we've got from the site it's gonna have the seeds and the beetles in that i need to tell us what was going on in the enclosure how did you know there's seeds and beetles from a long time ago why couldn't they just have dropped here in the last couple of years well they're sealed by the top soil and they're at the same sort of level as all the floors across the site would you like to see something yeah yeah there you go and are there any seasoned beetles in here there surely are would you like to see what i found yeah yeah well we got seeds that suggested that there's a lot of activity and disturbance in the enclosure which could be humans or animals but we also got beetles and we've got a specific sort of beetle that's associated with accumulations of like quite nasty sort of waste associated with human habitation and dung and manure so that's what this earth's made of there's a good chance thank you for sharing it with me no problem have it back so francis did we get this house then um well no no we didn't mick um we thought we'd get a half we didn't get a half we thought we'd get post holes they're locked post holes but what we have got there are some plow marks which suggests that this house has been plowed away the center of it right what we have got is over here look yeah so these are the stones mick that we thought were part of the roundhouse lot cleaner now isn't it well it is it's a lot cleaner but as it's been cleaned up we've seen that these stones are straight and form part of a rectangular building right right so um it's it can't be iron age i don't think but at that end it's cut by those furrows so what date are they 1780 was when this land was enclosed so right so a pre-18th century building but but not roman or medieval presumably no no um i think you're looking at something a little bit earlier than that earlier than the medieval you have that cell thing over there yeah that might be dark age so are we really thinking this is a dark age building well because a wow if well it is a speculation but yeah it could be couldn't it so it looks as though any iron age roundhouse that might have been here has been plowed away and instead we found a square potentially dark age structure which would have been contemporary with the dark age guard house at the entrance tony you've been fettling away all day trying to sort out whether this is just a tumble of stones or whether it could be something to do with the iron age people we think lived here have you come to any conclusion yet yeah i'm pretty sure it's structural now tony why do you say that well the stones are nicely laid they're nicely flat they have exactly the same relationship to the underlying ground surface as does the main enclosure wall they're just covered with this hill wash but these stones here they're not really flat are they no that could be the wall which encloses these uh these flat flag stones so what do you think they might be well we've got the geophysics um just in this area we've got we've got a nice square edge on each side of it just about under the polythene there a little way that way so it's not a round house it's not a round house it could be something like a stockyard something like that a sort of rectangular stockyard under the shelter of the wall it's great that last we've got some kind of structure inside our enclosure isn't it it's a real relief that's absolutely great although this round house has also turned out to be square we still believe it's iron age since it was built at the same time as the enclosure and was probably used as a cattle pen lying in the shelter of the wall it's so frustrating isn't it three days digging and nowhere have we got a find or any kind of dateable evidence from the site at all yeah i mean it is disappointing but that isn't actually the only way we work when you come to a site like this and work on a project like this there's all sorts of other things you can use the the comparative size and shape of the site itself you look at its position in the landscape and see if that tells you anything and we've done that and they've been very productive update so we can say quite firmly this is a late iron age enclosure this is essentially a farmstead a very elaborate one but a farm stayed probably of the late iron age period can we say any more than that what we can say is we've got evidence for this site in northumberland at south hidden where there seems to be a largely pastoral economy towards the end of the iron age and that's quite important because we can then compare that with other sites where you find big enclosures but there's only a very small number of houses in them what's all that other space used for it seems to be because you need space to bring the animals in they're your investments that's your power base as it were in this bit of landscape within which they live so our three-day siege has brought us closer to untangling the age-old mystery of the castles the enclosed farmstead was built in the iron age its five meter thick stone walls would have stood three metres high and the eastern entrance was fronted by two massive stones flanking an impressive wooden gate there would probably have been a large stone roundhouse positioned opposite the gate stone cattle enclosures were built in the shelter of the walls which would have protected the livestock later in the dark ages the gate was modified and a substantial guard chamber added the central roundhouse was replaced by a square building this is our best bet for a building but what strikes me is the contrast between the massive presence of this monument in the landscape and the few fragments of evidence we've got for the people who lived here even though i'm standing right by something they built the only things that we've found that got anything to do with the people are these tiny bits of beetle this monumental structure has been an enigma for centuries but by pulling together a team of experts from archaeologists to stone wall builders we're at last clearly beginning to see its identity even if the identity of the people who actually lived here remains tantalizingly just out of reach you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 414,410

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, Hamsterley, County Durham, 5000 Tons of Stone

Id: GV1MMcr32X4

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021