A Port and Stilton (Stilton, Cambridgeshire) | S14E06 | Time Team

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 finds 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 why all 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 [Music] [Music] stilton sits just off the a1 near peterborough and it's close to the nina 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 oh there's another one there there's a bit there look oh gosh yes it doesn't come very fast it's not pretty braided isn't 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 where was the flag and found the wagon was actually found just down there in the ditch washing out of the side it was taken to peterborough museum and identified as a third century roman wagon so what's cropped up since then a whole range of things from metal wood kiln material um glass and the cheese press and the cheese press we haven't found another cheese press yet no no we haven't done it but we had to come here we did cheese pressing stilton so mustard isn't it but we have got lots of archaeology down here the whole layer of pottery running right through here but you see it's all about a meter and a half to two meters down what directions going on well i don't know it looks like this could be just occupation but of course there are roman portuguese nearby if it's that deep francis how are we gonna dig it in three days we'll only do that with some big equipment but aren't you liable to damage some of the fines if you do that uh no the point is that they're down here but they're buried under what meter and a half of river-borne flood clay alluvium so there'll be nothing in that you can whack that off completely safely you won't hurt anything so we're not wasting any time as we're going to have to open a very big very deep trench before we reach any archaeology if the previous finds or anything to go by it'll be worth the effort as any site producing stuff like this has to be significant and it would seem that roman stilton was a very different place from the landlocked town it is today it's on the edge of the fence almost a million acres of land that two thousand years ago were marshland full of streams and rivers and that put stilton at the hub of an impressive roman transport network we've got a major roman road coming right through the middle of it here the ermine street we've got a huge uh roman town dura brave the fortress of the bridges an industrial suburb on the neon valley we've got one of the major pottery production centers of roman britain running down the noon valley so it's pretty much in the center of things in the roman world and then you've got the fence out to the east and what impact would the fans have had well huge i mean they would have been extremely wet for a start basically in the summer it would have been very lush grazing but the most important thing i think from the romans in this part of the world's point of view is that the finland waterways and you know the head canals were pretty sure of that and rivers were an important means of distributing heavy things and the obvious heavy thing is pottery so maybe stilton was a center of the roman pottery trade if so then somewhere around here should be kilns big industrial units producing the everyday crockery of roman britain and one possibility is this area of high ground where the farm has been uncovering all sorts of roman ceramics for years in recent times we've noticed it a bit more in a couple of circles in this field discrete clusters yeah yeah yeah and i think so it's even the untrained eye can spot these clusters mark what's actually going on here well i mean you've just got to stop and look around helen we've we've got bits of pottery there's stone things like this this is part of a kiln bar that would have actually been a whole series of these coming off a central pedestal radiating around that would have formed the floor of a kiln if we can find one i reckon we won't get on with it i think time is of the essence what do you mean if you can find one oh you've got oh look at that what now even you phil might even spot that yeah i mean there's two clear kilns in this complex one that appears to be on its own and then the other one with presumably workshops and waster heaps around it yeah presumably that's in a ditch you know they've just chucked the waste products out so where do you think we ought to go this one that's so clear or this one that's got all the all the stuff around it i i don't know i'd say that one to start with get an idea of how well preserved it is because it looks the less complex kiln yeah start on that and then maybe move to that so our first trench in this field goes in over the geophysics blob [Music] do we know how deep it's going to be no and john's in no doubt what they'll uncover fantastic responses these are classic kiln anomalies that's a bit of a jump isn't it from good responses to it being a kill oh no they clearly are the first geophysics was actually used not far from here over 50 years ago alongside the a1 looking for kilns we know exactly what the responses are like and did you do that geofiz [Laughter] well much as it pains me to say it it does look like john may be on to something [Music] i won't say i told you so oh look at that yeah it's got good edges how thick is the wall of this thing going to be about that thick about that thing yeah good thing i could have told you that hey yeah but i'm a professional oh yeah in fact john's so confident of his results he's now put in another trench over a second anomaly which he also swears is a kill well we're certainly on some kind of something totally different to what phil's got in his training it's just before lunch on day one and if the geophysics are to be believed this site already has all the hallmarks of a classic roman industrial site but the results of our field walking suggest it wasn't just the romans who were here we were 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 friends really are starting to come up oh my helen well i suppose it's it's when you look very hard you're gonna find things on these interesting bumps of land what's this one it's a celtic silver unit oh my god 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 a hundred 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 shatters 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 what are things on it well i think it's stylized hair and originally roman coins had heads on them so we've got the stylized hair of a person there and what's on the other side of the porcupine well again it's uh um it's roman coins being copied and this looks like a roman standard or a little altar that's been sort of gone through lots of permutations and ended up looking like that fabulous fines for so early in the day 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 archaeology to deal with here and if that wasn't enough of a surprise for halfway through day one i've also just found out that stilton cheese isn't made in stilton in the 18th century the landlord of the berlin in stilton his relatives invented stilton cheese in leicestershire and they sold it at the berlin to people going up and down the great north road so so that's why it became famous in the length and breadth of the land because it was such a cracking good blue cheese and it's still made to this day in leicestershire nottinghamshire and derbyshire so what about our roman cheese press does that tell us that there might have been a similar industry going on around here 2000 years ago well it could be that there was a stilton cheese 2 000 years ago in this area and that the cheese press a reflection of that the alternative suggestion is that there were specialist potters here making cheese presses for people the cheese makers elsewhere so were the cheese makers in stilton or elsewhere well knowing for certain what was actually going on in the top field would help but the archaeology refuses to be straightforward because john's now slightly less bullish about his absolutely definite kiln in trench one i must admit i'm surprised we're not seeing a clear structure yet that's you know that's what i wonder whether you're just picking up areas of burning just random burning there's obviously been a very very intense heat 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 has totally gone and what we're looking at is the clay underneath that has been heavily burned it's possible yeah be disappointing but the real shock is in trench two where we've just discovered the last thing you'd expect on an industrial site well we definitely seem to have got the the shin bone here but then look a very nice set of metatarsals which our footballers are very fond of breaking and some phalanges what we seem to be missing in the middle is the whole of the ribs and the vertebrae which we definitely need yeah it would be marvelous if you could um get the skull out in good order especially the mandible 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 its sex yeah in fact we seem to have two burials as matt's just uncovered some more bones at the other end of trench two 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 it is completely well someone said it's nearly circular it's unusual well it is i mean i don't think it's anywhere near big enough to be a kiln no no it's not but but i do think that it is different from anything we've had up on the site so far because of the amount of stone meanwhile back in the ditch field our first trench just gets bigger and bigger over 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 matt 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 so i think 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 with 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 um we've had a bit of plow activity in this region but um you know we've got the lower jaw and look at its teeth it's fantastic what do the teeth tell us yvonne oh well the teeth are having teeth are marvelous because we can then give some kind of age to the individual so if you look here at this tooth this is the wisdom tooth so the fact it's erupted it's out we can see it in the jaw tells us this individual is more than 18 years old can you sex the skeleton yet we'd like to be able to and i'm sure we will get some information especially if we can lift the jaw out and have a look at its angles and various things and also look at the brow ridges which are always rather heavier in the mail it's only the end of day one and we already have a multi-period site with ancient british and saxon coins burials loads of roman finds and other stuff we've no idea about oh god we absolutely certain what this is and what makes it degrade in this way how on earth we work out what it all means is frankly beyond me because as far as i'm concerned we still haven't decided what's in the first of the three yes three so-called kiln trenches that john's dug at the moment whether or not it's a kiln i really don't know john let's be fair this morning you patronized me yes yes you did i said i said it's a big leap from a big spike to saying there's a kiln there oh don't worry you said my 97 years of experience tells me there'll definitely be a kiln there that's a kiln that's a kiln as far as i'm concerned it'll be an even better kiln tomorrow mick you're nodding yeah because there's so much burnt material there you can see the things diving down i don't think we've dug farther enough down into it to see it yet i think if we do that tomorrow if the remains in the bottom we shall see it we haven't finished i'd like to see something really substantial and you john yeah i i want to see more of it i've got more of it you couldn't see less of it john it's there what about all these funny little holes yeah well we've got line of post holes across here which must be post roman we've got burials over there which could be post roman it's all looking like something late or post rome which is going the right way from my interest i think we all agree this is turning into a pretty exciting yeah yeah we've got not only these post holes we've got evidence of kilns but we haven't quite got one yet have we john we've got over there we've got a couple of skeletons coming up we've got a strange thing in phil's strength we don't know what it is but it's a thing isn't it and we haven't even started excavating over there in the site where that beautiful roman flagon came up so end of day one still all to play for beginning of day two here in the pottery strewn fields of stilton in cambridgeshire and we found two very interesting skeletons but we haven't yet found a pottery kiln at least that's what i think although some of the archaeologists disagree we are all agreed though that we found a very interesting thing in phil's trench although what it is nobody seems to know that's right it's too small for a kill isn't it well it doesn't look like a kiln but we've got to do a bit of work on defined out and we feel oh yeah it's not we don't understand it at all what do you reckon mark could it be a kiln it does look a bit on the small side for a pottery kiln although it's very well made i'm wondering whether we've got a more specialized activity perhaps like metal working a little furnace or something oh i feel very very constricted yeah i want to make the trench bigger yeah it's got to be bigger to see the whole thing yeah basically we seem to have roman industrial activity in all three trenches in this field don't damage my shovel and john's convinced they're all kills but there's so much archaeology to contend with that nobody else can say if he's right in trench one we've got a massive circular area of burning but we're also trying to make sense of all these post holes look we got one yeah you got two more post holes there yeah we've moved back this way and there's more coming up here look i've got one there and quite close up to it actually there's another one there and i think that's another one there as well so these are coming in the line as well that's fantastic in it i mean we thought originally that was a fence but i mean if we've got a roll coming off and we might actually have buildings yeah could be forming a rectangular brilliant and look the crucial thing is it cuts through all that roman material brilliant it's also going to be some time before we can understand the roman element of trench 2 as we're still working on the skeletons that were buried on top of it this is a strip of metal of iron and the reason i'm so excited about it is because the first thing you think of when you see a lozenge-shaped piece of iron with a hole in it is that it could possibly be a ship rivet i know that's probably going to sound completely insane but there are burials that have parts of boats over them and they're incredibly rare found up the east coast of england and we are not that far from the east coast and according to stuart that little town over there that was actually a port town as well but amazing with so much happening on this site stewart's role in understanding how it fits into the landscape could be crucial as this area would have looked very different two thousand years ago in the roman period we're looking at all this area being the bug right up to the up to the urban street there along up to that ridge up there are we where the church spire is that's right well i mean people say that the fens are flat they're not especially on the edge of the hill well if you can see that if you come down here you can see that really clearly where the where the burials and kilns have been found i mean what's interesting what you get down here can you see the ridge where the barrels and so on how it rises up it's actually on on a piece of high ground amongst this fine land isn't it he's standing proud of the of the land surface this must have been dry during the roman period oh it would have been yeah roman and saxon period and of course the other thing to bear in mind is that we're standing on flood clay if we've been back in roman times we'd be at least a meter lower down so those islands would be even more in relief so the concentration of archaeology on the top of this hill could be because it was the only permanently dry part of an otherwise boggy marshy terrain but it wasn't just the geography that made this a prime industrial location it was also the geology the land around stilton was packed with clay deposits and we want to see how useful it is for making pots so we've asked rick the field walker who invited us here but who also happens to be a master potter to build us a roman kiln this is a perfect replica of what we're hoping we're going to see up in the top field eventually when the excavations are completed is it smaller than they would have been yeah this is a much smaller version but it's absolutely right in detail with the bars and the flu and the stoke pit in front of it so can we give you a hand with this yes you could uh what we need to do now is build a framework over with those with ease and then we can start doming over the pots which have dried overnight have already been loaded into the kiln and now need covering with a dome made from willow twigs and local clay does it matter if they touch the pots no not at all because these will burn away completely right but we do know that they used with is like this because we find pieces of kiln material with the burnt out impression right so is it mud now is it it is all that's left to do now is to set a fire and let the pots bake and cool for the next 24 hours it's far too long to be anything like a ship's rove isn't it i think now it may be yes back at helen's trench we've now dismissed the idea of a ship burial but she's convinced we found something special i'm still hoping that it might be early anglo-saxon why do you think anglo-saxon why couldn't it be something to do with a a christian burial or you know early christian oh there it goes there it goes yep now oh it's got some shape to it lab analysis of this small piece of metal suggests it may actually be a coffin fitting evidence that backs up helen's theory that we've chanced upon an anglo-saxon burial ground what i'd be expecting up here on this hill quite a long way away from any habitation is not actually christian burials it's virtually the opposite you'd expect either early anglo-saxon burials that are attracted to this lump in the landscape or possibly maybe even more likely a 9th or 10th century execution burial those they're not common but they are attracted to lumps in the landscape right away from any kind of habitation like on a parish boundary it looks like we've now got a distinct period of later anglo-saxon activity here as well as the earlier roman stuff [Music] and steward believes that this roman industrial site wasn't as isolated as the modern landscape suggests this is nice here mick you can see the urban street goes right through stilton that's the old road there that's it and that the modern motorway goes around the edge of it yeah but there's a route where that comes from stilton heading east towards oh sorry i'm crossing this area here that's right because stilton looks like a crosstalk yeah it does yeah route coming through to the east yeah and that potentially gives us a link out to the island where the burials and so on are found so you're seeing the the island there's on the end or sort of peninsula sticking out that's right yeah we should view it as being stuck out in the middle of nowhere yeah it is almost on the end of the fingers of stilton spreading out into the into the fed stewart's also got a theory about our first sight we're still trying to reach a rich layer of archaeology at the confluence of these two ditches and it's a side steward believes is perfect for another link into the roman trading network you've got the irving street then you've got a lot of dry ground heading down towards the edge of the fan right and at the edge of the thing you've got two streams that come off the high ground yeah that come round stilton yeah they come to a confluence just where the cheese press was found believe it or not all right so we know it's coming from stilts at least as far as down in the corner here now right yeah so the corner of this field was once on the very edge of the vast complex of the finland waterways perfect for transporting heavy loads of pottery and the like into east anglia and the midlands we started this dig looking at this little ditch down here but quite frankly over the last day and a quarter most of our concentration and excitement has been on the other side which is a few fields away in that direction and that's because the fines there were only a few inches below the surface but if you look here i mean this is industrial scale archaeology we haven't got down onto anything yet have we haven't we oh yes we have you see that dark lair turning up there yeah that's the roman level and i'm so excited because i was worried i thought it could have been removed by the water but laid down the floodplain but it hasn't so what is this stuff that we're looking at well that massive clay above the digger bucket that was laid down at a very thin layers like sort of a millimeter a year over the best part of a thousand years and it's flood clay that's coming from the river knee and so it's actually buried the roman surface intact underneath it so actually the quality of the archaeology might be even better than what we've been finding over there oh much much better because it's a good chance it'll even be quite wet 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 about 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 that hasn't been broken by the bucket no that's all brakes you can see the dirt on the sides there francis can you see it's got all this shelly stuff in it 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 exciting normally a layer of archaeology this crisp and pristine will have every digger on site straining the leash at the moment most of our resources are focused on lifting the skeletons at the top of the hill as we hunt for more clues to the anglo-saxon element of this extraordinary multi-period okay site this looks as though it's going to come out now oh wow that's come out that's pretty well fantastic look at that is fabulous now just look at the shape of that jaw let's take that little bit off what do you think it's quite gracile isn't it it's not it's not robust it's and this part of the mandible it's not you know really chunky or 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 two 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 in kind of what how old that would be what is that yes look at that you look at that tooth there it's very small so that's you could almost say that it wasn't it's milk tea still yeah it's adorable you know coming through there they are there's an adult one there you see yeah it's just coming up i think that makes this is a pretty young seven 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 three phil now has something that's beginning to look remarkably kill-like you need to know where the flu is in order to order to start digging it i mean have you got any clues of where we're where we're looking for it well the only gap in the circuit is between there and there yeah because of the absence of this um yellowy clay that's right yeah okay so that so it comes out of sections then when can we get a section through it and start well i want to finish cleaning that off i want to get steve in to photograph it and before i do that before it dries out too much just get that polythene on that will make it sweat and that should keep it as moist as we can expect it to do lovely job and now that the burials have been removed we can also confirm that trench two contains a kiln 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 archaeology in the ditch trench oh crikey look at that lot you see the amount of pot we've got yeah brand into the center there so i mean this is presumably occupation oh yeah i think it's occupation with knobs on i i suspect i mean that much pottery yeah some of it's very fresh it could be a kiln as well i mean you know and settlement we know it's settlement because you've got bits of lunch oh yes you've actually got the cut marks on the bones so somebody's at least eating down here aren't they yeah absolutely yeah crikey but there's a heck of a lot of pot isn't there yeah and i mean the other thing about it not only is a lot of pot but you see the dark color of the soil there's a lot of charcoal in there and of course there's waterlogged wood in there not a lot but it's there guys that's quite incredible i mean it must mean there's a whole lot of stuff under this field wasn't it extraordinary with only one day left we're still confident we can deal with the archaeology from both the roman and saxon periods that is as long as nothing else happens but of course this being time team up on the hill something else just has look at the new geophysics can you follow my finger and see that huge enclosure oval shaped enclosure oh yes yes yes yes yeah like an egg good lord if you hadn't told me it was there i wouldn't have known but as soon as you do it's obvious to me that is prehistoric yeah to francis it's heaven what do you think it is then francis well if you look very closely there you can see that the three dark marks that's a clue this is a ditch that isn't dug in a continuous length but in segments right and it's a it's a cause-weight enclosure so with ditch segments separated by causeways and if it is what we think it is it's going to be about 3500 bc and he's dug them he knows about them in this area so we've got four thousand years worth of activity and one of the jobs was to see what the chronology was over a long period so we're finding it very difficult not to think we ought to do something with this and find out if it's actually there and what date it is if that's prehistoric you can forget your classic cool anomalies why well this is far more important oh so you're prepared to accept that there wasn't a kill there no it doesn't matter andy's forgetting about the post-roman stuff never live with that guy can you beginning of day three here in stilton in cambridgeshire and this is the trench that everyone's getting really excited about yesterday they were speculating that in it is a neolithic cause wade 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 hang on what do you say are you saying it is a neolithic ditch that's been reused in anglo-saxon times or you're saying it's not neolithic at all i'm saying if it was neolithic and reuse 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 you have barrels it all starts to look like an anglo-saxon settlement 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 break open the champagne well now we've dismissed the neolithic we can throw all our resources at investigating the complex roman and anglo-saxon archaeology on this side the saxon element has already yielded burials coins and a rare enclosure ditch and there are now all sorts of mutterings going on between the archaeologists although no one's prepared to share their theories with me just yet and as for the roman well it seems john and his geophys results were right all along they do show kills in each of our three original trenches but the archaeology shows they all had different functions mark what we're looking at here i can't even see a kiln here no i know it's a bit more ephemeral than what we've just been looking at in phil's trench but what we have got here is this dense spread of bright red material this is all the clay that's derived from the temporary dome structure that would have gone over a kiln and we've also got a few larger bits of fired brick which are probably lining elements of the kiln trench one with its big orange concentration of burning actually appears to be a tile kiln unfortunately trench two the one where we discovered the burials has left us stumped we can tell by its construction and a concentrated area of burning that it was a large industrial unit it's just that we've got no evidence to tell us what it was used to make but further excavation suggests that's probably because it was completely cleaned out to be reused as something else it's just that we don't know what it's a deep pit it's a deep structure um if it's not a water tank or a plunge pool i honestly don't know what it could be but wouldn't a plunge pool be part of a bath house complex with things like a warm room and a hot room and hyper course and we found like one solitary piece of flue tile well if it's not a plunge pool then it's definitely some it's designed to hold water it's some sort of system or something so all that we can say is it's probably some kind of water holding tank some kind of system i'm inclined to think it's more industrial than domestic because we've got so few finds i can't really imagine that people were living here for any length of time so um more problems than solutions oh it looks all right there's some pots in there definitely pot hiding in there yes other parts of our investigation here have been more straightforward thanks to some experimental archaeology we've now established that the local clays around stilton were perfect for the roman pottery industry so how do you feel that went as a firing then rick well as a piece of experimental archaeology i think it's been very um successful yeah we've achieved what we set out to do we've got a range of different um vessel forms typical neem valley forms but you didn't lose many did you i i think i expected to be more broken ones and then there are no it's been a successful firing from that point of view there's very few breakages i mean that's the thing that surprised me how few actually have broken or developed faults during firing it's basically an intact kiln though ready as you say for market what's also useful is that the broken bits and pieces of our experimental kiln match the archaeology phil's uncovering in trench three this is just like you were whacking on yeah we'll find exactly the same thing as that when we open the kiln right um the doming material the straw grass and straw will have burnt away and left the impressions just the same as that so this is a collapsed dome yeah i mean what i've come down onto now at this end here look you can see it's gone really really red and orange very very and it's it's tilting up that way i did wonder and i still wonder whether or not this this sort of setting of art of stones is part of a central sort of pier to support the floor to to allow the fire to go round it could just still be collapsed but it it's it's getting really red there's a lot of burning going on there so at last a picture of what this hill looked like in roman times is emerging this little island in a waterlogged landscape would have been a hive of manufacturing producing the pots the tiles the day-to-day stuff of roman life it was the ideal location to be roman stilton's industrial estate when you get into the roman period the major change occurs and that that's obviously irman street whacking its way straight it's almost like a coastal road up here rather than being in land well you see what you've got is a road actually coming right out from where stilton is now from irmi street yeah along this ridge it's like a finger pointed out into the mirror so all you then actually need is a little causeway across there and you're on to the island they've got peat for fueling the kilns they've got fish um you've got rushes which you need it's actually a really nice economic unit and with the because you're out here on the edge of the marshes pottery kilns are ideal it's not going to set fire to your buildings basically and things like that but irman street wouldn't have been the only route to export stilton's goods we're now finding evidence in the massive trench we've dug on the corner of these two ditches that suggests the romans were also using boats kerry tony all finished now we are and we've got a massive different things in there we've got a series of iron nails we've got building stone possibly kiln or a trampled uh pot uh a pit or a post hole it just goes on it's like a pick and mix stall isn't it yes it screams out settlement but then you've got the nails and that screams out big timbers and why would you have big timbers yeah warfage landing stages bridges something like that you think there would have been that much water here in those days i reckon so pretty damp place and i reckon they've spread this on to try and make it a bit less soggy and what we've got are elements of the superstructure left as well i must admit there's a part of me that feels quite bad about this we came here to look at this area this is your patch you invited us in and at the end of the day we've only dug one trench in some ways it's disappointing because you'd like to know more but in other ways this is the perfect evaluation we've confirmed what this part of the site is about and we've done it in such a way that we can preserve the rest of it which is great the best thing to do now with this complex piece of archaeology is to re-bury it preserving this possible roman warf for the future in just three days we've uncovered another outpost of the roman pottery industry and established the location of a port from which its goods were transported we've now finished the original job we set out to do except this site's got even more to offer a second story 300 years after the romans left 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 it may not be beautiful middle anglo-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 i mean i know it's building castles in the air but an anglo-saxon ditch and with an 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 centre 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 my goodness and that wall was cut by the graves oh gosh that's an awful lot of strange happenings all at once they've created an app so they've taken a circular structure and they've created an absolute thing thing i immediately think of with that cider building is at what date do they do this burials apses you know it's all sounding awfully church like now suggesting a bit of reused kiln is possibly part of an early church seems a theory too far to me and in fact it probably is but for the archaeologists this isn't some bizarre leap of faith we could be on the verge of discovering something really special i think this kiln is disused stable overgrown before these these posters being put in so post roman and apart from roman finds the most common find on this site has been middle anglo-saxon so i would like them to be middle anglo-saxon and in fact ben and i have been hypothetically building um religious houses out of them for a while yes what do you think two different periods on one side yeah well definitely post roman like you say the fines the skellies the ditch you know some sort of middle saxon community on this hilltop and the local parallels for that are hermitages is that just like a little hut where a hermit lives yeah kind of a little sort of community the interesting thing is we don't actually know what the sites look like because all the other sites grew into fantastic abbeys so crowland ely thorny they all start off as hermitages and grow into big abbeys so we just don't see the early stuff hermits were effectively the first monks and if this is a middle saxon hermitage we've found something incredibly rare because most hermitages now lie under some of britain's most impressive abbeys and cathedrals we know the way the early church was organized that's what people did they went and lived mars from anybody else on retreat we'd call it today wouldn't we sort of you know in isolation and this sort of fits that same pattern so is it anything more than speculation to say there was a hermitage here 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 a what 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 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 the only problem with the theory is that hermits demand isolation and our work here has shown that in roman times this hill was a busy industrial site but the final work by henry and stewart shows that this landscape changed dramatically after the romans left yes i mean what happens in the saxon period is that the the island actually acts as a bit of a dam for all the sediment that's being washed down the hill and it all gets dropped in this air you get alluvium the water slows down drops the material it starts building up backwards it actually covers over the settlement the area that kerry was digging over here that's why you got that high depth of elluvium in that area but what that does also it sort of further isolates this island out here it ceases to become part of the economy there's no need for a settlement as it were out on this remote little island except by certain people except by you yes it becomes an ideal location for a little monastic absolutely just like the sunset level stuff i've been looking at every little island has got some crack but all chap living on each you know it was in retreat sounds ideal for you again sounds absolutely right so this was once a small isolated religious community in so many other places this would have evolved into one of the great saxon and medieval abbeys 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 it's been a good day for you hasn't it you've got your kiln and you've got an anglo-saxon enclosure yeah now it's been much better than that been a fantastic lot of geophys that has yeah look what i've got for you another explosion where 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 i think that's that's your prehistoric one more likely to be cause weight enclosure than than before why why'd you make that assumption because often there are concentric rings of these interrupted ditches aren't there any causeway enclosures so we're suddenly back into the neolithic again we found more here at stilton than we could ever have hoped for in fact the only thing we've failed to find is any evidence of master roman cheese makers you're going to love this because i made it well it's not fair is it you made it really but it's not going to stop us having a nibble on some of that particular delicacy it was the amazing amount of pottery in that field over there which led us to the kilns in this field here which thankfully we found at last but in fact it was the discoveries on the final day that really got us excited not least the possible anglo-saxon hermitage complete with an enclosure in fact this whole story has gone from the neolithic to the anglo-saxon and now in the final half hour back to the neolithic again with john's dear fizz and what we think is a neolithic enclosure not that we've got time to dig it but given that francis lives so nearby i'm sure that at some time in the very near future he'll be back again to help us resolve this final definitely uncheesy twist in the stilton story that is not my joke that was [Music] foreign

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 229,892

Rating: 4.9534321 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, time team, time team stilton, time team cambridgeshire, time team s14e06

Id: DZTsAh2frfI

Length: 47min 40sec (2860 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021