Castle in the Round (Queenborough) | S13E8 | Time Team

this unprepossessing mound on the isle of sheppy may not look much but underneath here are the remains of the last great royal palace of the medieval period queen brook castle was built by king edward iii for his beloved queen philippa and by all accounts it was a very impressive and important building although strangely very few images of it remain and those that there are seem to contradict each other some give it round outer walls for instance others give it square ones so what was it like and what was it for was it essentially defensive or could it have been a retreat from the plague which was currently sweeping through europe as usual we've got just three days to come up with some answers [Music] the castle was built at queen brook on the isle of sheppy in kent in 1361. it's located at the end of the creek running from the river swale queen brewer itself was the last royal new town of the middle ages and was built by edward at the same time as his castle oliver we've got all these conflicting reports of what the castle looked like which one do you favor well we've got a couple we've got this interesting elevation which is by wenceslas holler 1640. i think we can rely on him he's a good artist isn't he i think so it looks pretty believable to me but i think really interestingly we have this this plan a couple hundred years after the castle was built around here we seem to have a perfectly circular moat just inside that a circular curtain wall within that another range of masonry structures very much like a rotunda over here i think just about pick out a gatehouse and on the other side an inner gate but the problem is we don't actually know what the scale of that is or indeed what the orientation of it is i love this little round thing in the middle what's that seems to be the castle well as far as we can guess if you look behind us yeah we think it's over here cool presumably we're gonna have to wait for ages while john does his cheer fears yeah yeah i mean well you'd think such a big target would be quite easy yeah the site isn't easy from our point of view there's lots of clay there's lots of modern disturbance on top of that clay it's going to take us a while so we're stuffed no because i think topographically we can we can start because of the way to sort of dome like structures he drops away on each side that we could just go with the topography and go from more or less the middle where the well is straight down the slope tear along the dotted line mr b not very straight phil there's nothing wrong with a spray can is to take the end straight the medieval well lies under this concrete cap and gives us the center point of the plan we're going to try and work out the scale of this unique castle by placing trench one across one section of what should be the rotunda which is the part of the castle housing all the important rooms bed chambers formal rooms chapel kitchens and dining rooms let's have a look phil but i think that's probably a tile might be medieval time of course for sure you can see there's not clay inclusions in it and the edge of it while trench one gets going and gfiz start working their way around the mound i'm interested to find out why edward chose this location for his castle the context is one of the many wars with france the most famous the hundred years war the longest of the lot very much edward the third great project if sam's right and the reason for the castle was the hundred years war then surely it wouldn't be stuck in land here it would be out here on the coast well when the castle and town are planned it's all part of one functioning unit the castle's here because you need room to lay the town out around the harbour which is like the pivot of its commercial interest so the castle is both protecting the natural harbour and it's allowing the town to be built around it so it can attract all the income that goes with it but isn't this a 19th century map can you really construe what was going on in medieval times from that i think you can because with a single high street from the castle wide at one end which is where you have the markets divided off either side into long thin plots this is a very typical medieval street plan it's kind of fossilizing patterns of the past whoa there's a pipe in trench one phil's finding it slow work as he picks his way through unmarked utilities he had much of a point he's all full up one buck so i don't think he's very very important do you want to drop down in front of it the people of queensborough are keen to get involved and one of the many spectators has brought us one of her heirlooms to look at so what we've got here is this beautiful replica of the castle keep you said could you explain a little bit more about how you came to have you know this absolutely i mean it's stunning well my grandfather bought it from a house sale in queen borough about 150 years ago the man that lived there was a cabinet maker and he made several items this being one of them apparently the wood was from the castle itself i'd played with this as a little girl it was my doll's house and now your granddaughter's playing with it and my granddaughters play with it and you play with the queens in the castle yes so he sleeps right in there and when she gets up she goes down here breakfast oh fantastic some of the castle wood may have survived in this model but we don't know how much of the structure was left after cromwell's parliamentary commissioners tore the castle down and sold it off in 1650 but by lunchtime phil's beginning to get some answers i mean i think what you're looking at is literally the robbed out wall you see look along there you see one of the the brown stuff steps down yeah i reckon that's the outside edge of a wall trench and i think we've got another one in the section on this side and look at the stone that's in it we've got that which is a nice blue piece of moulded stone and this looks like that yellowy white yorkshire stone yeah well then how about that then oh that's even better yeah i bet that's the magnesium limestone that's it i bet that's it and there's the green sand as well this is from ryegate isn't this that's right yeah well that's all the building materials that's recorded isn't it have we any idea which wall of the castle this is though well i'm assuming it's part of the rotunda i think it's the inner wall because i think it's coming round here yeah and i think the outside wall is probably going to come down or i don't know probably somewhere around here right so what do we do now i've got a little job for you come over here beware of men with little jobs tony you know we reckon this was the well in the middle yeah right well stuart has a has measured out on the plan and he thinks this this rotunda this big tower on the top is 40 meters across right yeah so if you take the end of this and run out 20 meters yeah hang on a sec and i'll stop you that'll be the radius of the tower a bit more that's it take that rope around and keep the tape taught rexxar can you move henry's what's it for me on a bench tone that's it great [Music] well done i bet you're knackered now aren't you so what did that proof well i think what it proves if you look at it that it's a hell of a big structure it's a lot bigger than i thought it was so what are we going to do about it we've got to go into a stewart now yeah because we're going to dig another hole i'm going to lie down first stew that's a heck of a big building on the top there from your measurements big royal castle you're sure your calculation's right i think so because the evidence we've got from the mapping gives us a set of concentric circles which are here in the landscape so got the inner parts there then just there where the tape dips down you've got an earthwork going around in a curve around there which was actually measured and put on the map yeah and then outside that beyond the paper cup it dips and rises up again which is what the map showed as a moat so all the evidence says yes that's the that's the right measurement right look that dotted line is the line you've just run around yeah right the red is the high resistance stone rubble for the inside of the castle then we've got courtyard the outer wall and then the ditch beyond i mean stuart and i were thinking a long trench yeah along that line that's where we've put the tape on the ground so we'll be inside the castle yeah hang on can i look at this that are you saying that we do a trench which starts here and goes trench two should give us the scale of the castle by stretching from the rotunda to the curtain wall and the moat beyond [Music] back in trench one phil's working on the rotunda wall that he found earlier that looks better doesn't it oh there's that big stone too what the devil we got stone down here that might just be in situ i think we've actually got part of the wall there's just not one random stone down no no no no no listen to me look there's one stone comes along there and then there's this whacking great piece here there's another stone there bridge i reckon we've got king edwards castle oh that goes on it goes on down underneath there we'll see if that just curve round what part of the castle does this make it then the only the it might be the curving bit if our plan's accurate the castle's full of curving bits so fills could be any of these three shapes the angle of it suggests one of the towers but that would make this an outside wall which would surely mean the rotunda was too small to fit all the rooms in the 2d plan of the castle is difficult to visualize and as a 3d architectural model it's beginning to look pretty peculiar it's lovely and i don't want to be cruel but what's the point well a model like this it's an excellent device for letting us really visualize what is a castle with a with a unique concentric design we have a wonderful description contemporary with these plans particularly the one by the parliamentary commissioners who described the castle as being circular built with stoner with six towers and certainly out officers there unto belonging within which circumference of the aforesaid castle is one little round court paved with stone in the middle aware of is one great well which gives you precisely what we've got in the plan and the drawing it is a funny looking thing isn't it it certainly is it's it's an odd looking castle no two ways about it however i think it's also important to remember that it's a castle that would have been a a very impressive icon of edward's authority we know that a man called henry yvell a superstar of his time was employed um in the works um and a number of other very very high status masons so really only only the best we used here at queenbra on the mound phil's hunting for more of his rotunda wall look at that and that appraised peter what are you giggling about phil oh look the most amazing amazing point he's just chucked a bit of clay away from that soil he's got the other side of the wall looking brilliant hey show me look let me take you back to here we've got the wall coming down here and it comes along there and then when it gets to there it turns back on itself so it looks like the actual front of the wall is built as a sort of series of lobes but what we're really getting excited about look we've got the back edge and that's why it's about two meters wide isn't it cracking it's a zonking great wall i know i never thought we were gonna get that in addition to attempting to understand this important castle we're going to try to work out the layout of the town that edward built alongside it we're starting in the high street great period piece stuart isn't it where stuart and jonathan are hunting for the remains of the medieval town in the cellars of the oldest houses dating to the 18th century variety of different sort of stone work and stuff down here i like this grain this is stone yeah and soft mortar yeah look there let's see it's powdery stuff yes yeah but you've got bricks there as well but there those are tudor dimensions those let's have a look there should be about two inches sorry isn't it just a little under maybe two inches yeah and then these look at that these are more like three inch depths these are big well all this stuff here is going to be your 18th century house but it's built on what looks to me like you know two other phases of of construction and right the way down the bottom there you know i think we're back into the middle ages and your cellar could be the last vestige of edward [Music] so by the end of day one we found the first signs of the medieval town of queensborough and back at the castle we've got part of the rotunda in trench one and trench two has expanded most of the way down the mound as you can see we've started digging this trench in earnest now but there's a big problem this is a scheduled site so we've got to respect and scrutinize every little feature that we come across and near the surface most of these features are likely to be later rubbish tips stuff like that and we know because we've seen it in that trench over there that two meters down is the castle so there's this real tension between how much we examine the surface stuff and the fact that we've only got three days to find out what we can about the whole castle but there is this feature here isn't it indeed um i think we just got a vague indication that we could be on the top of a masonry spread if you look over here with the eye of faith if you squint just a little bit you could be on top of a wall line the outer curtain wall of the castle we'll have to see this is one kg archaeologist but we know we've got the inside of the castle over there maybe just maybe we've got the outside here we'll know tomorrow beginning of day two here on the isle of sheppy where we're excavating the last royal palace in england and yesterday the temperature got up to over 32 degrees so as you can imagine digging was rather inhibited but the temperatures dropped a bit today so we're putting most of our resources into this long trench where we're hoping to find the outside wall of the castle yeah around about here somewhere yeah see those two concrete blocks because they're modern are they they're modern but they might actually mark the site of this this sort of edge coming round yeah and then beyond that of course should be the motor of the castle around about here yeah the moat seems to be full of masonry which looks like it's part of edward iii's castle but we won't know which bit until we've pulled it all out over in trench one phil and bridge are trying to make sense of the wall they found yesterday i think it's pretty straight is it i know think engage brain fill now then going on it being sort of in that neck of the woods we got maybe that curving wall is going to be that and then this one going off is going to be that if phil's right he's found this part of the inner wall of the rotunda now to find the outer wall in trench two we've removed some of the masonry dumped in the moat there's another one of these blocks coming down there look jonathan they're all the same they've all got the same shirt but yeah and what do you think i'm just looking at the stone there you see where it split away it looks green it's uh i think it's rye gate stone surrey stone right and it's in the records isn't it for the 1360s building yeah that's the crucial thing but what do you think it is because it's a lot of it's got this curve on it look at this one here look at that one well it's all the same it's from one feature i think right i was thinking uh maybe a stair vise you know turreted staircase the other possibility i mean is that it it's something like the well we know there was a well on the top but we know that's been altered um i wonder if it could be that because that could be an overflow couldn't it for water or it looks like a water channel doesn't it what what is me though you look at what's coming out with this stuff you've got plastic bottle is that antifreeze yeah i mean it suggests you know this has all been dumped fairly recently the materials to construct the castle in the 1360s would have been brought up the creek leading from the river swale which runs round the west side of the island [Music] we've got to remember in the 14th century all this was an island it was completely surrounded by water the isle of sheppy itself was known from anglo-saxon times as the isle of sheep and edward iii built the economy of his new town of queen bra on the wool trade from the river you can begin to appreciate the strategy of placing the castle in this location stu if the french had attacked here where would they have come from they'd have come from the open water which which is out there tony and seth sailed in the direction where we're moving in now the isle of chef is almost like one of the first landfalls if you if you're wanting to to invade this this part of southern england so if you were coming down here and you wanted a safe anchorage somewhere to you know to base your your fleet or or to land you need somewhere sheltered to do that and around the corner where the swale goes around is a safe place and that's where the castle was placed i mean can you see where the church tower is standing and that's not a very high church tower so you can imagine there's a big castle standing behind it dominating the landscape i mean if you were a frenchman sailing up here would you want to try and land there with that big castle i don't think i would presumably they realized how strategic it was when they were building it there oh i think so we've looked at edward iii's foundation charts and we know from that uh the king was acutely aware of the maritime importance of the site the charter talks about a deep and broad arm of the sea where ships can be put in at so they're certainly aware of the significance [Music] back on dry land raksha is exposing the curtain wall and the moat and other features in trench two are providing us with some interesting finds this is fantastic for the site because it's medieval pottery it's shell-tempered wear and it dates from 1200 right through to 1500 and there's so many varieties of it but we've actually got two different types of prop coming in here this one here which is a rim shirt but it would have been a large or relatively large bowl once we've got this one which is more of a dish shaped object this stuff that you'd have in your house yeah it's common stuff i mean everybody would have used it for cooking for using on the table it's not a high status and what about all these shells i mean it looks like the only thing they're eating was oysters yeah they always just by the bucket load it's i mean they live by the sea it's all they ate and some historical sources actually say they got so fed up with eating them they didn't want to see them anymore but so this is pretty typical of this it's very typical of everyday life perfect for the period we're meant to be working at the same time as edward iii was building this innovative castle in queen philippe's name the account state that he commissioned the church said to be the only surviving medieval building in the town you know if edward iii is building for philippa a new church here for her honor i mean you could have done better than build what looks like a barn with vertical crazy paving i i've rarely seen royal building frankly this bad the windows are the wrong shape the door is the wrong shape it's it's it just doesn't feel 14th century to me and there's one school of thought by hasted the county historian who reckons that it was all rebuilt in the 17th century so it looks like none of edward's building work survives intact and there is something in there of the 17th century actually that might interest you and it's this little beauty oh magnificent isn't it font 1610 and it shows the post and gate of the of the castle which was still standing when this font was made by that day what do you think it's beautiful it's very rare to find an impression of a castle's back gate we still need to sort the orientation of this castle outlook on and if we can work out which way it faced we should be able to locate it i think we've got some pretty strong clues myself the first clues we've got is from the history of the king's works itself yeah where it describes the outer gate and poston took west and east outer gate to west west and boston to right so that's going to be like that with north or that's right that also ties with the map evidence we've got when the the site was actually standing as earthworks which had a a gap here which was probably the the poster but this the main gateway and the the outer area here that would be firmly under the the school car park there where we've got the dining bus and catering and everything what about you oliver the clue is this place over here minster basically over there so that's a view from the west then isn't it so the records indicate that the castle faced the west and john's got a suggestion for a trench that would help us confirm it what we want is something to investigate this rotation yeah and this is where the eastern gate is and look oh yes how about if we do a trench that's the logic that line is and try and tie that down so trench three will attempt to locate the corridor which would confirm that the castle faced the west let's hold on for a couple of seconds quick look down here that's going back onto this stony rubble it might not be as solid a wall if it's just marking a road meanwhile phil's extended trench one by 13 meters in his bid to find the outer rotunda wall phil yo are you getting on well i've lost my castle man you've lost the castle that's very careless of you what's going on oh no well you see we're supposed to have along this side here somewhere the front of the road tundra now if you look behind you look there's that road iron all right yes it order comes through here somewhere and all we got is clay i mean is this natural that you've got here this is clay well it looks it but it's got chalk in it you shouldn't have chalk in the clay no so it's contaminated with something it's just something yeah phil's gonna need to find the elusive outer wall if we're going to work out how big the castle rotunda is [Music] the residents of queenbra are proving incredibly keen to get involved so that main gatehouse offering us the benefit of their local knowledge and bringing objects that they've found these are these are quite interesting to some people they're into the military idea yeah they are i mean these are brilliant i mean you've got musket balls you've got pistol balls and they date to run out 17th century onwards yeah so that's really nice but also you've got some items dating actually to the medieval period here in particular this item which is part of a large cooking pot and this is a handle from it and it would have dated to the later medieval period so when roundabout when this was still in occupation [Music] by tea time on day two raksha has uncovered a good chunk of the curtain wall which surrounded the entire castle this is basically the extent of it here yeah we still have some of the stones uh packed in the bottom but the rest of it it's just gone this doesn't look as big as i expected oliver on that history of the king's work looks absolutely massive it looks to me as if the front portion of the wall has actually gone so the wall would have been a lot wider but it's still a pretty pretty decent medieval wall it may only be half its original size but at least we now know where the curtain wall is though we still need both walls of the rotunda to work out the scale of the castle and phil's throwing everything at it there's no side of this outer wall phil strange in it well if it's in a metre of where on surveying we'd see it you would have thought it would have been there though i mean that's there john just disconnect and go away will you during edward's reign queen bro and its castle enjoyed a brief period of wealth but after that it became more famous for a succession of disreputable mares and eccentric happenings queenborough is the kind of place that's just awash with bizarre stories and my favorite is about a chap called john taylor who was a thames ferryman and called himself the water poet and in the year 1614 he made this extraordinary journey from london all the way to queensborough in a boat made of paper and to help us recreate that magical moment i've got a pair of nutters here this is abs and this is tim tim why did he do this bizarre journey he was always doing bizarre journeys like this taylor he walked barefoot to edinburgh to borrow a pound from ben johnson the playwright for a point of beer i think the the paper boat was probably his most successful mission so how are we going to make this boat made out of paper we've taken some hemp paper which is what taylor used and um got a bit of an example here of this uh sample i've done with a bit of brown paper we're going to stick it together lack of the surface of it what do we lacquer it with we've used a traditional kind of lacquer that he would have had at the time so uh here's a tiny model we made earlier oh you're kidding no i'm not we're really going to maybe we really are going to make that give us a hand can you be so kind yeah if you care to just hold that corner there and we're going to fold that end over get it up level with the other side oh boy and if we can just lift that up for a moment you begin to get yourself a boat shake it is a precious i have to say it's pretty floppy we're hopefully gonna have some some rolled up tubes like sort of extended toilet rolls hopefully you may think that it's ridiculous though wait until you see the oars for the oars um what we're gonna do is taylor used uh ores made out of here we have we've got a piece of dried cod taylor's oils were big dried stock fish but we we we've gone as close as we possibly can to them and uh they're they're what are hopefully going to propel us through the water enough stink it doesn't it hasn't british television gone downhill back to relative sanity and kerry is trying to fit together again the curved stones that we found in the moat and they seem pretty convincing as part of the medieval well which would have stood in the centre of the castle [Music] most of the masonry was sold off after the castle was demolished in 1650 which could explain why there's no sign of the outer wall of the rotunda in trench one but we're having more success with the inner wall phil what have you got there mate we've got the turn of the wall neck oh wow let's have a look but that's what we had before yeah with that edge coming that way and now look we've got another one coming this way now i'm just wondering where that fits into the plan well see what i want to do is i want to strip all that lot out yeah to find out whether that wall actually continues on through or whether it stops and literally just turns if the wall does turn it could be the entrance to the rotunda this was linked to the postern gate by the corridor which matt's been looking for in trench three well it looks like we've got the beginning of a wall here it's not substantial as the ones we've had elsewhere on site but look we've got all the stones here mortar it looks like it's been layered up with clay in between right and on this side of it coming straight down here is this huge ditch so is that what you'd expect to see with the geophysics there i i think i think we could be on to it the wall goes with the high resistance there in red and that's through on that line right just as we expected the thing is there should be a second wall probably five meters that way if we can confirm that then we've got the line leading right into the centre of the castle all the bits of the castle jigsaw are beginning to come together now we're starting to get an idea of its size we even think we know which way it faced but tomorrow we're gonna dig here which is this which if we're right would have been the big central facade of the castle the place that would have confronted king edward and queen philippe when they swept into it but as i say that's if we're right we're into our final day at queensborough on the isle of sheppy where we are investigating the castle edward the third built for queen philippa one of the great things about this dig has been this lot who've not only been watching what we're doing for the last three days but they've been talking to us and bringing stuff in and one of the things that a local historian brought us has turned out to be golden it's this picture of the castle which is unlike anything else that we've seen so far isn't it yeah i mean if that's what the inner courtyard looked like it was very grand so where is that on our drawing i think it's actually this little turret sticking out into this in the courtyard and it would be the first thing you see as you came up this entrance the antiquarian reconstructions based on designs of the castle that the artist found in paris and although we don't know the exact nature of them they seem to fit in with the rest of the evidence [Music] so trench four will try to locate what we can see in the drawings meanwhile in trench three we're attempting to confirm the orientation of the castle by locating the corridor into the rotunda matt found one wall and is expanding trench three to find the other everyone has been saying for the last couple of days how unique this castle is but i don't really get a sense of what that uniqueness is now most royal castles are multi-phased buildings they're they're rebuilt over over many many generations their plans are added to queenbra on the other hand it seems to be a single-phase castle it's planned in one fell swoop so edward iii seems to be employing his masons to to impose what's almost an ideal castle onto the landscape is this a rather bizarre one-off or did it actually influence british architecture we've got an interesting plan in front of us here this is deal castle which is down in kent it's a couple of hundred years later it's a it's a castle built by henry viii if you put the two plans next to each other you can see there are a couple of features that they have broadly in common it's basically this idea that they have very very symmetrical designs as a line of symmetry here at queenbra it's down the middle likewise a deal and also the fact that they repeat circular form so this is 200 years later but there's a there's a level of similarity there meanwhile matt found some foundations where he was expecting to find the other corridor wall but they look very different from the wall he found yesterday [Music] the two corridors are crucial to understanding the use of the castle they would have forced any visitors or marauders to take a circuitous route around the outer walls of the rotunda either exposed to fire or forced to admire the full grandeur of the castle before entering the inner sanctum meanwhile stuart and jonathan have been trying to work out the layout of edwards queen bro let's get see what measurement is showing are these things they've identified a property on the high street which looks like it's retained its medieval dimensions that's about 11 and a half feet right now they're looking for evidence of similar footprints in other buildings look at that that's lovely these are perfectly good medieval walls to me actually this this is the width yeah so this is a measurement we really want isn't it so that is 11 feet that's very similar to what we measured at number 60 isn't it on the surface isn't it almost identical really really nice so the width of the cellar under this georgian house suggests that three timber-fronted shops would have stood in its footprint when the royal town was laid out in the 1360s and i think what we've got is a town which has got two different maritime characters in a way you've got the bit around the creek here which is the warfage where all the loading unloading et cetera will be going on for the town the kind of commercial back side of it if you could call it that but at this end where the high street heads you've actually got what is a fairly formal approach into the new bearer heading straight down towards the castle back at the castle trench one is causing chaos the more phil exposes of the inside rotunda wall the more it looks like an outside wall and that doesn't make sense with any of the other trenches let's say we take those two bits of wall down there yeah right and we line those up over our two bits of wall there then phil's stuff he's actually you know in avoiding in an open space he's not actually on the wall at all what phil's got there is a piece of curving wall below the ladder there and then another curving wall coming off it underneath the bucket and the spade right if you look at that on the plan the only thing that fits with that is the junction of one of these walls with the main wall of the castle but it looks all right yeah but if you put that over the top of that then none of the rest of it makes sense that we've dug up you can't get it all to square up at all so presumably that either means we're misinterpreting the archaeology or the plan's wrong i'm not sure we're misinterpreting the archaeology because we've looked down this trench for any other sign of any other wall to go with that and it isn't there now you've got another conundrum here as well because if that interpretation is right and that's the curve of that and the well is in the right position and that's the that's the corner of the wall there and the weld there that distance is only 12 meters so you've got to fit all that tower all these rooms gatehouse courtyard and well into 12 meters it won't work like a sandcastle skyscraper the problem is this damn thing we've been using this for two or three days now relying on it and there's clearly something wrong with it so throughout the whole two and a half days this has been our one piece of certainty and sanity and now it looks like this is completely wrong it should be about four meters wide curving through on this line if the only thing we can rely on is the archaeology i'm confident that it's curving whether it's castle or not it's up to you okay we have to keep digging so trench five is located over another part of the rotunda which might help us work out whether the plan is the wrong size or the wrong shape [Music] looks like a wall smoke now are you further round the rotunda bridge has been looking for the grandest part of the castle you can see behind me got loads of white material here basically it's made up of water and it's made up of stone just rammed together now we've got three options of what that could be either it's intact medieval archaeology a bit of castle associated with the castle number two could be demolition associated with the castle dating to about 1650. so where people have taken the good stone out and then chucked back all the rubbish and off cuts and mortar yeah and then use the stone somewhere else number three it could be associated with the construction of the initial pump house that was on the top of the mound here that's victorian that would be victorious you've got 600 years to play with yeah and the only defining feature in this trench is this cat runs all the way down here we've got what looks like natural on this side and then we've got the white material on that side bridge is hoping that jonathan will be able to date the mortar to either the construction or demolition of the castle i mean but both both are contenders either 1650 is trash or it's it's medieval you know cheapo wall filling rubbish the medieval builders had a kind of cornflake box approach to having two good firm outer walls and you stuff the middle with ill-fitting rubbish that all settles during the building of the castle either way it looks like she's onto the castle and the shape seems to fit the inner rotunda wall which should help us with the plan [Music] we're almost ready to recreate the final stretch of john taylor's eccentric paper boat journey from london to queensborough where the town welcoming committee awaits our boat builders have transformed several layers of hemp paper into a seaworthy vessel complete with ores of dried cod all we need is for the lacquer to dry it's taken us two days of really solid work to mess this up this badly i mean look at it you're cheating you you've got these things that's perfectly fair he had buoyancy aids he had bulls bladders blown up so we've got four of them not bull's brothers i do accept as the original taylor had them blown up by women of ill repute because he believed that they were born to be hanged they could therefore never drown a bee and so therefore logically he reasoned that their air must float he's a genius really [Music] we must let go that all we're in no way okay we're out in the boat we have buoyancy [Music] any one of them turns problems to be heavier than the other which we hadn't really accounted for are you actually using the buoyancy or is it just dangling there it's just dangling the horse could have stayed at home it could frankly have taken the night off the only problem is we're now drifting past the pier anyone for shearness so while tim attempts a watery u-turn next stop cns matt had a change of direction in trench three where he's completely revised his interpretation of the corridor walls i'll start at this end of the trench you can see we've dug down a little we've got this huge cut coming straight in down there if you follow it back it comes up again in a straight line there and across here right i thought this was a wall but i'm not so convinced now because on the other side of it actually coming in here we've got another big cut that comes in across there and down there and my current theory is this this is no longer the wall this is the path in between straight up to the middle of the round right so you had a wall coming across this way and a wall coming across this way both the walls though have been robbed away the direction and size of this corridor means that we can now say with confidence that the castle faced the west looking down the high street and we're hoping that raksha's wall will help us with the rotunda well if you look here there's a nice line curving there and there's another one curving that way so it's all going around that way so we can say this is the castle it's the only big circular structure the wall curves towards phil's trench but sadly doesn't help us identify whether it's the inner or outer wall so with just an hour to go phil decides to expand trench one towards a geophysical anomaly which could just be the outside of the rotunda [Music] that compacted surface and all the stone work is what we're seeing in the resistance um that's to me not the outer wall no i quite agree with you john but what i'm saying is let's nail this come on in let's get on with it my money's on that seat you're probably right i think you probably are right [Music] see now we're yeah [Music] there is an edge there is an a there is an edge in there what is it there the question is the edge of what with all the confusion ray sands hard work on the model has been a waste of time so he's begun to work on a computer-generated version of queen philippe's castle yeah it brings out really nicely the way the castle looks like a great wedding cake doesn't it we know it's packed with literally scores and scores 50 or more separate rooms we know there's a hall various chambers a kitchen guard room stores absolutely packed with rooms yes let's not forget we're talking about a major citadel palace details such as 407 doors and windows towards its closing stages these must some of these must have been of the highest quality it is after all no accident that perhaps does look like a beautiful chateau with those beautiful pointed turrets because she was after all very much a french noblewoman and must have felt therefore very much at home here having located what could be the remains of the missing outer wall phil's auguring the middle of his trench for signs of the interior of the rotunda good lord alive i mean that is a big hole that's been opened for a long time is filled up with water the question is why is there a big hole where there should be a big structure of all the trenches that we've dug over the last three days this is the one that's given us the most problems well yeah and we still don't know what's in it do we well i'd like it to be contradictory but i think we do actually i think what we might have is a very large rubber trench going all the way around the top robert robbing out the outer line of the rotunda because well on the mapping we've had this feature which is a wide ditch around the top of the hill which will come through here at 12 meters wide in places and i think that's what we can see here in the cut and over the far side in the cut and what we've got is a huge grape rubber trench digging all that out and we actually have a bigger castle than what you've been thinking but it feels trench stew it shows a circular feature doesn't it with a wall coming up to it now these are the only circular features that's the only thing that makes sense with that doesn't it yeah it does and the width of this makes it 24 meters you know to center it on the well well henry viii fixed up this castle in 1536 and then built pendennis and moores and around the coast deal and warmer and they're between 20 and 30 meters this is 24. so why shouldn't this have been a model for henry where that phil's trench is the outer wall i'm just going with the archaeology as i say if you go with the archaeology you have to end up with and the argument continues on right until the last moment when almost three meters below the surface that is mortar phil finds a final clue or maybe there is a structure here after all stewart was right the hole in phil's trench was a massive rubber trench from the demolition of the castle but traces of the cellars under the rotunda were picked up by the auguring phil's inner wall was the junction of the inner wall with the gatehouse and 40 rooms would easily have fitted inside the massive structure of the rotunda at last we're able to visualize how this unique and beautiful building would have looked to king edward and queen philippa as they admired their newcastle in the [Music] 1360s [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 103,923

Rating: 4.9667149 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 series 13 episode 8, time team season 13 episode 8, british history, time team queenborough, queenborough castle, time team full episode

Id: e49Z5Lnvz20

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021