A Forgotten Roman Road In Cheshunt | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

forty years ago a group of amateur archaeologists discovered a wealth of roman finds in this park at chescent in hertfordshire they were told to keep quiet about them because the british museum thought they might be really important particularly because a huge horde of roman coins had been found here at the turn of the century somewhere around here is irman street the main route to the roman empire's most northerly stronghold at york where we are now is about a day's march from london so am i standing on an undiscovered town or a military marching post or just a roman little chef time team have got three days to find out what these important finds are really telling us join us as we try to unravel the mystery of chestnut park [Music] so chesson park is set on a hill overlooking the chiltons and the lee valley just 20 miles from london it lies directly across the line of ermine street the major roman highway from london to york but there's no sign of the road in the park today back in the 1950s two families the mullingers and the howlitz excavated the site by 1964 they dug nearly 80 trenches they didn't find irman street but they did uncover the fragmented remains of several roman buildings they had no idea what they were and even visiting archaeologists from the british museum didn't know either gene mullinger filmed here in 1963 still lives by the park why did you ask us to come here in the first place well we thought that this had been hidden long enough really and you know we wanted something done about it why hadn't anyone ever done anything about it before nobody was bothered nobody was interested and my husband's dead so that was just myself left to say something so i thought i would well we're certainly very interested we've been fighting for the park for a long while and then decided to see what they could do about this why did your husband decide to dig here in the first place it was always a thing he had about romans everest has been a boy so he just thought there was something here he just felt there was something there all the time and um he took it from a military side and he said they always went to the top of the hill it was probably the first day's march from london anyway yeah how did he work that out well he watered himself from the manor house once in the war time from the manor house in london all the way here yes there wasn't any transport not down here but these weren't his grounds were they oh no no they belong to the devnet family and ms stepnum should freely give consent in fact she came and helped phyllis debenham's home chesson park house was demolished after she died and the local council bought the park she features in a fascinating diary of the whole excavation there's also a very detailed plan so detailed that it's almost impossible to follow they dug their trenches in a box grid and the drawing looks almost like a child's board game the first thing we've got to do is to see how this grid relates to the meadow as you can see our people have cleared great swathes of this field so we can do the archaeology and predictably where mick wants to dig is here yeah what's going on professor what are you doing there were excavations here 40 years ago which jen's been looking at it looks if we've got to go back over there doesn't it jen too to get some of the remains yeah i think it's taken an awful long time to go through the archive but now we've got the documentation and we're here on the ground we know that some of the archaeology is under there so this means that our people are going to be sitting around in the sun for hours waiting for all this lot to get cleared that is just the point tony it won't be for hours i'm advocating getting a big machine in there to strip that out not one of these little streamer jobs since the 1960s the local landscapes changed completely there are trees where the big house stood and the brambles where mick wants to dig conceal the garden and tennis court outside the garden railing we're trying to locate the old plan on the ground earlier on i overlaid this plan yeah in the aerial photographs with the modern map and set out this area which is where the buildings supposedly are yeah and that's just over there we're hoping this group of buildings with their strange features will hold some clues to the size and scale of our settlement whether it was a military stop a trading post or just a workshop our first trench will go in here to pick up this puzzling object perhaps a snake-like flu or covered [Music] drain concrete in the 60s they didn't have geophysics we have and john's got a completely new view of the meadow from the tests first thing this morning that's the iron railing along the edge of the field but then we've got all this noise here and a possible enclosure ditch right so this is occupation in here look at the xy plots i mean such a contrast between here and out into the field way quiet out there isn't it i mean it looks as though that could be a building yeah and when you look at the res oh crikey i mean the high resistance in black that's showing more foundations and so on yeah so it looks as if we've got a sort of round ended structure there isn't doesn't it and that's where the ditch appears to cut through it so the obvious thing is to dig there isn't it can you drop us on that well i've already done it oh we're there right so john's trench will go in here just a few yards from our first trench where phil started digging now that we've got the digger in trench one we should have the old backfill out by mid-afternoon we think that the best way of understanding this site will be to find out how the buildings relate to the road are they earlier or later did they run alongside or were they built further back so our next task has to be to find the lost roman road the north of our site irman street cuts a clear line through the hertfordshire landscape coming past the site here look stew but looking at chesham park from the south you can't see the road at all something after the roman period happens to that bit of landscape yeah where that road no longer has any importance right we do have uh some records of a medieval park here at cheshire right so they've dropped a park and crossed the roman road alignment yeah i've presumably made people go round that's exactly what seems to happen even now almost like a perimeter road goes down the edge of the park yeah so we ought to see coming out the other side then people indeed and with a bit of luck yeah we might see it coming through the park as a crop mark or a porch marked it's very dry at the bottom it's ideal conditions for parchment yeah but actually look in that field to the further to the east thank you mick through cropped field oh yeah you see that line going across it yeah there's a white line across that looks like it looks like a parched out road doesn't it right yeah that's really exciting to see yeah it just banged straight on the line of that road absolutely clear that's one thing i've got to i think i've got to have a trench across that so stuart might have our first new lead our incident rooms in the local primary school carrender and guy have met up with ros niblet a roman specialist from saint albans the finds from the earlier dig suggest that something rather important was going on here well they're pretty tantalizing actually we've got a complete roof tile here that's incredible question is does that come from a building or are they making roof tiles here and perhaps using them in a different context we've also got this rather unusual piece of pottery which looks to me very much as if it's a waster you see that distortion in the rim now that means they might be manufacturing pottery here what do you think ros well it's suddenly um warped but there's this concretion on it which seems to be slag which suggests to me it's been used for some other industrial process so what do we think generally is going on here then very good question but we have got a clue in the name because cheshire seems to contain two ancient components doesn't it that's right and that makes it very unusual in hearts the names derived from two latin words chess from castra meaning defended place or camp and hunt from the latin funta well or spring it's mid-afternoon on one of the hottest days of the year but surprisingly just a foot down the ground's very wet sure sign of local springs ah jan come have a look at this lunch down look at that it's that drain it's the top of that drain look what's that in the bottom there big where i see that that seems big square tiles i mean that i got in my pocket here we ought to be able to pick these up we got 20. so phil thinks this is a drain but is it and is it roman this one here this middle one is the chimp is a chimney grab over that so now we know exactly where we are and the old plans very accurate in trench two where we're looking for john's ditch there's nothing so far but natural gravel a few hundred yards away in the lower field mick and stuart are chasing the patch mark they saw from the air is this the field where you thought we might get a roman road because quite frankly i don't see much evidence of it you've just walked straight across it what do you mean this lump behind you earthwork behind you todd toddy we were in the helicopter you saw this parchmark coming straight through this field and when you get down to this end can you see this broad ridge starts here comes up over and back down here so there's about two inch difference in levels you wouldn't find anything different in anything no this is classically what you'd expect for the aggro of a roman road it wasn't the roman road it's the the metal in the line of the roman road itself you have to say though that you'd seen this earthwork before we went up and then to find the crop mark as well was brilliant fantastic yeah i mean all the evidence seems to come together there i mean if you don't believe it tony while we're at lunch john ran his razor over and you want to see what he's as well and with this man he's got the evidence right so there's three different kinds of evidence now we've got the earthwork and we've got the crop marks and the gift yeah to have three pieces of evidence all points is brilliant really so we're going to put a trench across here now hoping we can hit what should be a big stone bank underneath excellent it's good how big is the trenching if stewart's right and the line of the road follows the patch mark in the field it looks as if the road could meet our settlement somewhere in the woods near to where carrenza is ready at last to open trench four [Music] it's impossible to do any geophysics here so we've got no idea what we might find we know there'd been a tennis court somewhere near here but maybe no roman archaeologist survived back in trench one phil's joined by peter reynolds with his knowledge of roman industry and farming pete should be able to tell us what they were making here he too thinks the location of the road is all so we really need to push the story this way because we know that the road is is out there somewhere and we've got this gap and we want to find out what happens between the road and our building that's right hey how are you getting on oh it's just starting to look really good you see this cobbley yeah look at that well that must be it wasn't it this must be the surface of the road and then just over here you see this patch here i think that must be the ditch that runs alongside it so we're all just on this side of the road we need to go a lot further back together yeah well you said it was anything up to 30 foot wide yeah i mean presumably if there was any cobbles on the surface they've now gone and been robbed away and we're seeing here the bedding as it were for the road aren't we that's what it's looking like at the moment yeah there's no time to extend this trench this evening but we'll open it up to the full width first thing in the morning nick the amateur archaeologists who were here 50 years ago found a lot of stuff and they recorded it beautifully yeah it did yeah but they didn't really know what they'd got did they are we anywhere near helping them sorted out i think we probably are because of finding the road down the bottom end there we've now got it in the trench and we could see from the helicopter the alignment of it coming up the the field across there so what does that imply for our archaeology what it means is that that they thought the roman road was that side and therefore their their excavations related to over there we now know that the roman road is over there and it means that whatever this is down in these trenches is not right on the street frontage it's somewhere in the back garden at the back of the properties so what are we going to do tomorrow so tomorrow we move through into the bushes where we ought to be right on the street frontage and that's presumably where the most important buildings are so today it looks as though we've been in the roman back gardens and the roman potting sheds tomorrow let's hope we can get into the roman houses and offices and whatever's there join us after the break first thing in the morning and everyone's out looking for irman street [Music] what are they surveying they're lining up the line of the roman road through the woods why are we still looking for the roman road we think that we've got it further down there and surely what we're after today is the fronts of the houses or shops or whatever it is that the romans had where we've been poking around in the back yesterday morning's church um that's right but until we know where the roman road is on the exact alignment we won't know where the shops are on one side or whatever it is on the other side so we're going to put some evaluation trenches in here to look for the buildings and geoff is on the other side see if there's any buildings on that side of the road but we do need to know where the road is exactly to start with and we were excavating over there yesterday yeah so we're pulling the whole thing in that's why we're going to come back under the woods in our first roman road trench mick was expecting a stone bank but all that's coming out is gravel and clay harvey sheldon the roman specialist from london's just arrived and to confuse matters even more he thinks we're digging in the wrong place [Music] in trench one phil's uncovered more of the roman features in the 60s excavation their exact purpose eluded even the most eminent archaeologists but pete thinks he's cracked it now the only other place i've ever seen anything like this is where they wanted to superheat air to deal with metals right the fire i think is this end i mean and i think the hot air is being sucked through and you've got a chimney there so that's going to suck it this far so that's like acting as a draw through the piping that's it yeah then there's another one here so once you've got that drawing close it down open this one all right and then when you close that one down you hope it's going to go down the last bit and we got superheated gas coming through there into the charcoal you're immediately going to be hitting 900 to 1000 degrees which is the kind of working temperature you want in order to deal with metal iron or whether you wanted to make bronze to pour it into into moles so is this thing naturally powered by air you're not going to need bellows to fire that's the whole idea well you don't need balance you don't need the bella right so this this is an earlier metal work in establishment i think so what's this on the top of it then ah now that i think we're looking at two phases right when they excavated this they they found these piles of tile the pilai that's the little squares the little squares there yeah but presumably this that is the flu this is the flu area as the fire goes through here we've got to put these piles of tiles back again in a pattern right across this floor okay and it holds up a wooden floor right right and then you've got a foundation wall all the way around there and then probably a wooden shed over the top right but phil this is where it's gorgeous for you [Laughter] this bit i think is a malting floor door resicus mentions the fact that in britain they grew grain and they grew barley and they made beer out of it which he calls zephos a couple of points of zipper there's room for a brewer to start brewing yeah we've got london down only 15 miles down the road of course that's a big market for either the malt or the beer yeah but just as likely i suppose is that there was a pub somewhere out on the front up against the main road it's so small yeah it's much more likely to be a local pub with its own special brew that's my target for today i want to find the phone in trench two we'd been hoping to find the ditch at the back of the buildings and at last underneath all that gravel some flecks of brick or tile are coming up which suggests there's some sort of earlier deposit in trench four we're still pinning our hopes on finding some buildings closer to the road carrenza hi there how are we getting on i can see that this is different colors so presumably that's not natural yeah it's laid over the foundations of the tennis court so we reckon the tennis court was laid out from there up to about here yeah and then you see here where you can see it's very different it's also much darker brown with flecks of roman brick and tile in it we think that's undisturbed archaeology but it's absolute nightmare to dig through at the moment why is that it's incredibly hard the trees here sort of suckle the moisture out of the sun and it's like digging through concrete virtually yesterday john's roman road geophysics were spectacular but the archaeology in trench three is inclusive so since first thing this morning geoff's have been looking for the road nearer to the woods we think it comes through the land rover yeah and in this general direction so we're stood here now i can't see that very well john can we can we get it in the shadow or somewhere well let's go back and get it under the tree oh that's a little bit ah that's a lot of that is yeah that's a lot better so we're expecting the road to come somewhere on this line so you think that ready well it's possible it's confusing that it appears to stop so where are we actually going to put the trench well i think across this line here it won't take long to get a trench in and if this one comes up with the firm evidence we need we'll know how close the road runs to our settlement chescent would have been about a day's march from london when the roman cohort stopped for the night they'd have pitched a marching camp on high ground that was easy to defend [Music] friends romans countrymen i've gathered you here today because we're going to conduct a scientific experiment we're going to see if surveying techniques have improved in the 2000 years since the roman occupation what exactly was a roman marching camp it's essentially a camp that we put up by a unit of troops on the march for their protection over the night so the surveyors would have sprinted on ahead of the troops and surveyed and built it before the rest got here i think we depend upon the conditions i think it's quite likely that the surveyors would be coming up under some sort of armed guard well you've got the guard the cohort is marching up from london first what 500 men yes an auxiliary infantry cohort be about 500 men they're going to stay here the night so you've got to lay out the marching camp for them you see this road here that's going to be this road here you're going to do that side of it henry you're going to do that side of it how does your one work right this is a grow mark right that goes on top of there that's across it's called a stella right it's a line of sight instrument uh using strings you've got five strings hanging down uh with weights on the end so they all act as plumb lines so they're all vertical we can line this up down the center of our road by sight by sight my assistant here will go down there with a pole and we will get a line down there now because the cross at the top has got a right angle in you can now walk around here look down a line of sight again with these three strings because you've got a cross at the top this is vertical where our datum peg is will be our first corner of our section so basically it's simply about making straight measured lines absolutely using strings how do you do that well it's it's i don't use strings i don't have to untangle you have to untangle strings this is going to get really dirty instead of bits of string and sight lines um i'm using lines between me and satellites orbiting the planet so by triangulating the crossovers between these signals i can compute a point on the ground how long do you think it'll take you um within the hour i should have it done do you all know what you're supposed to do yep thanks very much here's your maps harvey will be the final arbiter good luck may the best man win thanks tony all right well good luck all right uh racing an hour well maybe the romans loved their right angles this groma is a replica of the type of instrument used to mark out pompeii we'll catch up with the marking out of the marching camp a little later phil who's looking for another piece of the road isn't sure if he's hit the remains of the surface or just natural gravel [Music] jen is opening a new trench to look for more buildings between the road and our brewery in trench one in trench four there are plenty of fines but no foundations and i wonder if we haven't got a fire here because here's a rooftop that's the way it goes up if you look underneath all that conspicuous burnt carbon you see yes yeah so what we might have is a building going on fire the roof collapses and that settles down on top of one of the burning rafters which of course is completely burnt away just leaving that carbonized residue underneath so other buildings surrounded the brewery even if they burnt down over in trench five phil's found what he thinks is a road ditch you can see here this is this the the natural orange clay you see it there and you can see that it's a bright orange clay there and the bit in in the middle is this gray stuff you see it's much different color darker gray color and and in places there are more little fragments of brick in it that's the in filling that's actually filled it up and to my mind it's the sort of thing that you'd actually get alongside of a roman road if it is a road then i'd have expected to see more solid foundations but if phil can find another ditch on the other side it must be the road on the other side of the hill millions of pounds worth of technology are up against pieces of string [Music] oh [Music] so well henry's finished pegging out his section and our roman surveyors will find out how long they took tomorrow archaeologists academics surveyors will you have a look at this this is what the children at the local school have just shown me what is this a road and what uniforms are these people wearing raymond therefore what kind of road is this katie raymond it is a roman reign we've seen anything remotely like this over the last day and a half yesterday morning you were so excited you promised me you'd found a roman road you'd seen it from the air you'd seen it at ground level you'd see it under the ground where is it all we've got is a deselectory piece of gravel oh goodness tell it we still we still got it all the evidence you've just articulated it's all still there it's telling us a big roman road came up through here and i think what we're seeing is a ghost of where it was it was never ever going to be like that with nice big cobbles on top of it was it i'm just still not convinced though because the gravel that we've got is actually sitting in what looks like to be ditches it's not there's not a piece of gravel with ditches either side and what the rubber rods have on either side of the pictures yeah but not with gravel in them if the roman road has slipped which they do and the course changes ditches get filled in that's been seen on other excavations that road is there and then it's coming through here maybe our preconceived ideas are wrong what did they build these roman roads out of presumably not tarmac well here in hertfordshire they built it out of gravel and clay they put a bank of clay and ran some gravel in it that's what they had to have so the classic sort of view that i've seen of different layers and so on he's he's a bit of a model a bit of an ideal is it really suddenly as far as this neck of the woods is concerned and they didn't follow the textbook they did it as cheaply and quickly as possible using the local stuff yeah what's up phil hi great great news pot roman pot oh oh oh oh oh this but you can tell me a bit more about it than that but that is the best piece of news we've had all day we've been talking about roman rhodes we've been speculating about it this means it is a roman road absolutely this is 4th century pottery so it is a complicating factor because that means it's looking like a later road and we've got other road surfaces around so this isn't quite what we expected but but you know i don't really give a damn how old it is i'm just so over joined it's absolutely brilliant in trench two i thought we were looking for signs of a ditch at the back of the buildings now all of a sudden an almost complete pot's coming up so what do you think it is well i think it's one of these black burnished kitchens made right the way down the south west in dorset right so what earth is it doing here yeah one of the answers is it's sold in vast quantities of the military right the way up in the north right as well which makes me think this is tom was right this was military stop well it's quite possible but i mean it does give us a date because it's a fourth century jar watch your time what's what's it in there is it a ditch or a pitch or something i think it's been thrown away discarded as a piece of rubbish into what looks like some sort of pit or trench yes and then it's just been filled in over right do you use that kind of earthenware for cooking after you've had a few meals out of it it's going to become contaminated with the foodstuffs it's not glazed so it's completely useless so they just chuck it away it's a totally different set of values we think that's something nice we put it on the shelf and look after it no for them it's a universal container bang it away get another one you should coming out [Music] if this is a rubbish pit then we're much more likely to be at the back of the buildings by the ditch just before it was thrown away this pot might have contained food or drink made in cheshire even sold at the roadside pub perhaps to passing soldiers it's been a very frustrating day today if we have found irman street it's not very clear and until we're absolutely sure we can't make sense of our settlement join us after the break when in our final eight hours we uncover the fines and clues that we need to give us a clear picture of what the roman cohorts would have seen when they marched through chesant nearly 2 000 years ago beginning of day three and mix drag me off into the woods again what are we doing here this time well i thought you ought to come and see a stretch of the urban street that's much better preserved than we've got on our site and although a lot of what you can see sort of medieval later woodland all the rest of it the this big wide embankment we're on is actually the aggar of the roman road as it runs north from our site so it's not just this little bit of nature this is a later track yeah the bits between the ditches from over there to over there so it's right from somewhere here yeah all the way kind of over to uh to this tree line and they were big weren't they well yeah i mean the area is defined by the ditches and of course all that we're doing today is about finding the ditches even if the mettling of the road has gone in the middle then the ditches define the width of the road as it plows through we've got to sort that out in relation to the settlement it is incredible actually even though these trees wouldn't have been here in roman times and the whole environment would have been quite different you really do begin to get a bit of a sense of what it would have been like when roman legions were marching down the road don't you [Laughter] it looks as though all our hard work's about to pay off our surveying team are now able to tell us that irman street runs through the woods 10 yards from where we're digging mickle put a new trench on the roadside because we're still uncertain about what happens where our settlement meets the road whether we've got a military canteen or a roadside pub there's plenty going on at the back of the buildings with another find in trench two where we lifted the storage jar last night it seems to be a a black burnished dog dish type but of course they weren't used for dogs it just looks like a modern dog dish a bit like a large cereal bowl [Music] nick we seem to have the line of stewart's road over there where kerry is don't we yeah that's the ditch on this side of the road the roads beyond that and is this an extension to see where the two join up uh it's the beginnings of it uh and there's already stuff in there that katie's finding what have you got katie well at first we were really worried that the tennis court that was built here in 1904 has actually damaged all the archaeology but in actual fact it stops around here somewhere where all this rubble core is and then we've got a feature going through here which may be a wall of a building and then we've got a cobbled surface which may be a street or a courtyard or something like that but roz you're not nearly as interested in stewart's road as you are in this little funny bit here that's right and i think we need to sort out what that is and how it relates to the ditch over there and how everything relates to what we've got in here which ditch over where the ditch over here this is in this trench yes on the far side of the that we did yesterday this one here was hardly anything there is there it's a wonderful ditch full of black silt where the pottery was found why is that so significant because of the date of the pottery and particularly because of the alignment of the ditch we know from the geophysics which this is it this is the ditch or part of it it probably went on here but the interesting thing about it is it's a slightly different alignment to that of irman street but it's on just the same alignment as a whole landscape of banks and ditches over in that area on precisely this alignment and the interesting thing about them is that they pre-date the medieval park and they appear from the pottery here to post dates in the very late roman period so does that mean it could be dark ages it could well be yes and that's a period we hardly know anything about is it virtually nothing about it in this part of hertfordshire it could be extremely important to the history of the area so where do we put the trench we take a trench along yeah come on meg i am i don't do running just where just about here you with us mick yep now you want to dig a pretty big trench over here not that huge but going through there quite big yeah yeah roz wants to dig a trench just here have we got time to do both of them in the world i don't know really i think it depends what roz is thinking of here i'm thinking of the small trench coming out here well i mean would you do this with a machine carefully yes well in which case we probably could yeah i mean i think that's very important in there we need to concentrate on that area you don't want to dig this other one do you well well i i'm interested in these alignments i think they're probably later but you know yeah i mean if it's smaller me you're such a diplomat i know your body language he's not convinced at all we'll dig it all right all right yeah yeah yeah screw his neck sometimes so if roz is right this settlement could have been in use into saxon times although pete thinks they'd have had to survive without the brewery we've got the flu in position so that the hot air comes from the fire goes under the floor and then comes up through the three positions in the the side walls and the back wall fills the whole of the interior with hot air and you can regulate that between about five to ten fifteen degrees right the way through to 100 degrees to malt the barley and then you've got the wooden floor over the top because when this blew they got the temperatures wrong they burnt the whole thing down because when they excavated the whole of that timber superstructure fell into the middle ouch yeah does it happen often well it seems to be a regular occurrence when they were making beer never a dull moment alongside irman street but what happened on irman street itself what were these roads used for were they just for moving roman armies about a lot of the movement would be of troops i'm sure but yeah essentially it's the movement of communications which is important too right is that this roman imperial post i keep hearing about yes it is and that would be serviced by a range of stations along the roads at frequent intervals and what sort of speed could they move messages and information i mean if you've got somebody in rome and he's trying to send a message to somebody in york you know is that going to take months to do that well there are one or two literary references which survive from the empire which do show that at times of crisis uh information can travel at well more than a hundred miles a day i mean presumably that's presumably when we must be dealing with relays i should think passing information on so if this place wasn't an official post it was just on the main road what would you expect to see there i personally believe that most of the places along the main roads have actually got an official nucleus to them and if obviously if you've got roman soldiers or roman officials of any other sort you'd expect to see the sort of buildings and the sort of amenities that they would be used to in their forts and fortresses so we're talking about pubs and brothels and places like that at the very least by the sound of it well i think we would you know if soldiers are getting money there'll be people there who will be providing goods and services of various sorts in a later period at last there's something to see in trench four we think it's a timber building you can see it's got a nice right angle turn there very sharp edges i think it's actually been set out parallel to a cobbled street that we had coming along here now we've taken all of that up now but it did come along here and then underneath it we have this feature coming through here which i think it's a load of flint packing that's a foundation for something but something quite big so we've got a late roman phase third fourth century maybe and something a bit earlier underneath that's looking good actually because that seems to indicate um what we've got at the moment it's this is where you are right this is the the roman road the main army street coming through it's in those trees over there we've got three or four ditches now we've got pottery out of them and ditches and so on time's running out kerry and ian are clearing space for our last trench here ross's trench is also underway to see how the boundary ditch relates to the settlement and the settlement to the road but as the minutes tick away stewart's desperate to prove that he's been right about irman street from the start hey harvey you found my roman road yet yeah i think at this time we have actually oh fantastic there's a very nice ditch running through here yeah which has got roman pottery and it's not clear what's happening on the other side of it but it comes up and you begin to get on this side of it layers of gravel which are actually rising yeah through here all the way up a bit loose affected by trees roots i should think the surface is higher than the modern ground side of the road and it's yeah it looks to be and then if you come over to where phil is he's got more of the metalling which is also nice and roman i mean the real this is where we got the real crucial evidence yeah stuart this stuff here this gravel is the actual road surface excellent when i when i when i dug it it was really hard you see at the bottom there's big pebbles and then above it much much smaller pebbles now that is individual loads of gravel going in to build up the level of the road that is not natural gravel this is fantastic yeah this is the road surface you've got ditch this side ditch that side and a 16 meter wide carriageway in between this has got to be irman street isn't it i think so yesterday we asked our surveyors to set out a roman marching camp pitting pieces of string against satellite technology the big question who does it quickest oh can't tell a lie it took me about half an hour to set out the principal uh principal points um compared to their three hours three hours the roman soldiers would have been dead none other than they started digging as soon as we put a line in you know because they wanted to get it all done how difficult was it we couldn't beat him for speed so we we tried for the the accuracy angle how accurate were the angles well i went back afterwards and surveyed in their points to look at how close they were to a nice 90 degree angle and on every case it was within a degree or so so it was all right well you're patting yourselves on the backs but if i look down there i see a little dog's leg at the end ah well it's not as much of a dog's leg as we thought there might be because we was using string to measure and i've got marked string it's waxed against shrinkage but of course over that distance which i've never done before we was obviously pulling the string it's stretching and therefore we nearly caught up with him coming down the hill i've never heard such a list of obscure excuses in the whole of my life [Music] now we can see what this camp might have looked like in roman times on arrival the auxiliary would have thrown up a defensive ditch and rampart about a meter high this would take about two hours after which they'd pitched their tents if they were under attack half would dig and half would defend each tent could sleep eight soldiers with two on guard outside the centurions or officers had their own separate tents at the end of the rose the auxiliary would go to bed at dusk and get up at dawn before taking down the whole camp and marching off to the next post and with just two hours to go karenza's new trench turns out to be unmistakably roman karinsa is this what i think it is it's a mosaic if that's what you're thinking it is blimey that's great news we were so surprised because ian was opening this trench up down here thinking we were looking for the road which we've all kind of forgotten about right now yeah i mean amazing what we're fascinated about is the fact we've got a tiled floor here yeah and then there's a gap between the two which we think might be a timber partition between the two floors and then this mosaic which is made up of broken up bits of the same sort of tile here but it's quite rough and ready i mean it doesn't look as if it's set in a mortar floor but even if it's rough and ready it's going to be higher status isn't it than the the brewing equipment out the back which we had earlier on exactly it's definitely the fancy end of the building so this is like the public bar rather than the store room around the back so what are we going to do now well it's it's stopped here the tennis court so it's going to be nothing more of it here but obviously it's vanishing into the side of the trench so there's a possibility that this might be the wide border around a much finer mosaic in there so it would be great we've got to find out it's ten to four we've got a lot of trenches still open that need recording oh so you'd like to stop on this one then no i'm with you on this one let's get digging everyone's working flat out to find more buildings there's now so much coming up that no one's sure whether we're looking at a side street lined with shops and houses leading on to irman street or a series of commercial buildings one behind the other although roz hasn't found any later deposits she's uncovering evidence of burning and there are more wall foundations with floors between victor's already made up his mind what the street frontage looks like although irman street hasn't presented itself as a textbook roman road there's no doubt in our minds that we've found it and that makes understanding our group of buildings much easier pete this is just a field now but what was going on here 2 000 years ago well i think what we've got is a beer production system this is where we have a flu we've got a grain molting floor in here on a raised floor so you've got hot air coming through making it germinate then killing it off when you finished with that what you do process it more heat and on this particular bulk here what we've got is a an area of burning over there and then as we look towards this way we've actually got butts of stone walls look and next door to them there's a half so it's it's the next process yeah it's a lot of heat and heating water needed exactly right you've got lots of heat lots of boiling up and at the end of the day you end up with beer so as we come through here the road over there we think we found where they sell it the pub and this is the pub we think this is the pub coming in gentlemen yeah there we are now down here we've actually found a tessellated floor and if you look just on the side there we think there's a slot running through and maybe where phil is is the ball so we're looking at roman lino in fact phil you're in your element you're where you've always wanted to be you're right in the middle of a pub well of course i am tony it wouldn't be me would it if i hadn't got something to drink off it too oh thank you gene when you were here 40 odd years ago you found two pieces of testosterone yes and so you left the floor for us yes i hope you think that the archaeology that we've done is up to your standard better much better and i think you've done a marvelous job i wouldn't have missed this diff or anything cheers me dude thanks [Applause] so our settlement had a pub shall we call it the centurion's head which was making its own ziphos in a big building at the back it might have been the heart of a small group of shops and hostelries earning their living from the passing trade on earman street on either side the butcher baker the sandal maker not forgetting our metal foundry probably all grew up around a well and of course any good settlement would be protected by a ditch at the back over many years this place became known as chesant derived from the old words kestra funta the defending place by a well [Music] you

Channel: Time Team

Views: 96,435

Rating: 4.926724 out of 5

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, Hertfordshire, Borough of Broxbourne, Cheshunt, London Metropolitan Area, Primer Meridian, Domesday Book, Eddeva the Fair, William I, Alan of Brittany, St Mary the Virgin, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Anthony Denny, Cestrehunt, Castle, erected by the Romans

Id: RERCxQkEVNQ

Length: 48min 40sec (2920 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020