Commanding Heights (Dinmore Hill, Herefordshire) | Series 17 Episode 12 | Time Team

two years ago a couple of local archaeologists stumbled on this a vast undiscovered earthwork hidden here in these heritage woods they thought it could be man-made even prehistoric but they got really excited when they discovered this aerial photo which appears to show a large curve here in the snow which is in this field adjacent to the forest and they wondered if the bank and ditch there might be linked to the curve here except the two features are 500 meters apart if they're at opposing ends of one big structure encircling this entire hilltop then the archaeologists believe they found one of the largest iron age monuments in all britain but are they right we've got just three days to find out [Music] our site is here in rural herefordshire dinmore hill is a vast promontory flanked by escarpments to the north and south and surrounded on three sides by the wonderfully named river lug and it's the setting for a curious puzzle [Music] we were up here in the winter surveying through this woodland and we came across this way and came up to this big bank here as the county archaeologist discovered there's something mysterious lurking in these woods you can see then a huge ditch but that's not all is it well we went back to the office and looked at the records that we had and further along here uh there's a what looks like a big bank and ditch on the outside there too and you reckon this could all be iron age well it's certainly of the right scale it's a massive earth work massive bank ditch on the outside have you noticed that in the ditch there's an ex-president of the council of british archaeology francis you've been poking around in there for some time do you think this could be an iron age hill force well the scale's certainly right tony but the thing is hill fort just means almost anything it could be about soldiers um it could be a communal center it could be a village it could even be a large cattle coral but of course that begs the question is it iron age well exactly that's the other thing tony i mean some of these hilltop enclosures could be up to 6000 years old keith what other information have we got about this site has any other archaeology been done no any survey work so apart from an aerial photo and an old ditch and your assertion that it could be iron age really this dig could be about any period in history couldn't it well that's life that's time team francis well that fills me with confidence this site feels suspiciously like the lucky dip at the archaeological fun fair still iron age hill fort at least we know what we're looking for the purpose of hill forts is the subject of heated debate but they do at least all have one or two things in common a set of vast earth works in one continuous circuit usually with a couple of entrances and some houses or storerooms inside so if we've got one here it shouldn't be hard to miss except this site is more than 40 acres it's huge we've got our work cut out just surveying it which is why john's recruited a small army of geophysics boffins to lend a hand and there's no hanging about down at the other end of the site either it's not even 10 30 and we already seem to be opening our first trench i haven't even finished my tea yet francis hasty putting a trench in already isn't it the thing is tony it's an enormous sight and we can't hang around you've only got three days so i thought i'd put a trench right across the defenses here why did you put the trench here do you remember that air photo it very clearly showed something that looked like ramparts precisely here so early this morning i told john to skip his breakfast and to do some geophys how'd it go john not very well no i can't see the hillthought defenses at all to be honest i mean you can see all the canes stretching off into the distance and these are the results i mean ignore these speckled they're just stray bits of iron at best we've got a sort of trend that follows that line but i'm not seeing a ditch and to be honest when i look in your trench i can't see a ditch no it does all look uniformly brown francis it doesn't look very hopeful i have to say tony um at this stage but you know we've got to keep on we've got to keep on so what i plan to do is go down a little bit further see if it's looking ditch-like right and then i'll double up the width and we'll go back about 40 meters 40 meters well there are basically two things we've got to discover tony we got to get the ditch and then we want to go on the inside because i want to get the very inside of the hill fort if that's what it is oh and a third thing um we might find some structures on the inside might we john i don't think so i've got a slight feeling of doom about this dig in spite of there being no sign of anything much on john's dear fizz we've opened our first trench here we're looking for the big ditch and bank we saw on keith's aerial photo and as always we need fines pottery bone metal work anything that might tell us what this was and when it was built cool that's a bit nice over at the other end of our site phil's checking out the earthwork in the woods that is a serious bank it is yeah and you can see the stone right at the top i mean a lot of the work has actually been done for us because this is the bank and this bit here is just a bit of a bit of muck that's fallen down all we got to do is is clear this out of the way we'll have a nice clean section through the bank itself and just down there will be the old ground surface hopefully yeah just through there because this isn't the end of the bank it's just where it's been cut through to create this track so the bank would have continued round through here so presumably then the best place to get a section through the ditch is going to be down in here because we don't really want to go into the woods do we well yeah and you're just standing to towards but not at the middle of the ditch there phil so if we run a trench through here and out through that through there yeah and then through across to where the bank was that's the way to do it let's have a digger in and get on with it hacking away the undergrowth has revealed what an impressive earthwork this must have been so phil's going to dig a section through the big bank in the woods here out in the field next door john's team have been investigating what francis is calling an intriguing mound looks more like an unappealing bump to me it's clearly there on the ground um but we've not got an enclosure around it or anything but what is exciting at this end of the field we've got these ditches now could they be internal divisions of the hill fort francis does this geophys help you decide what we should do next um yes it does actually tony okay so we didn't get much around the mound um but it's so prominent um i think we got dig there but those ditches over there are really intriguing i mean if they are prehistoric i think we've got to have a go yes but what i really want to do now is go back to the ditch in the wood because what we can see on the surface looks pretty tasty it does seem as though this site is going to be a bit of a struggle but there is one big plus in that wood there's something that's man-made it's big it's not modern and we don't know what it is and we've still got two and a half days to find out this is dinmore hill in herefordshire and in that wood over there are a bank and ditch which we think might be part of a huge iron age fort that's the good news the bad news is that the bank and ditch which we think might have been associated with it down there we can't find and in this field frankly john the gfiz has been pretty desolatory i think that's fair don't you last time you looked it's getting better it's definitely getting better we still haven't got any joy around the mound that's at that end but if we look at this end of the field now we saw ditch lengths earlier now we've expanded the survey the ditches are continuing and these blobs they could well be pits these are the sorts of responses you might get inside an iron age hill fort yeah but you might get those in medieval times yes you might or in the 18th or 19th century yes they might even be natural they could be victorian for all we know i'm sorry i i don't want to be too negative it's just that francis i don't really understand why you're focusing so much attention on this part of the site when we've got superb archaeology in the woods and yet you seem obsessed by this dribbly stuff well look tony those huge ditches were dug by people for a reason they just didn't dig them for their good health you know this was an important place to them it was the top of the hill it was a place where they probably lived um they probably buried their dead here those pits were where they stored grain we'll probably find post-built granaries there's all sorts of stuff here this is crucially important in fact i would say it was more important than those ditches so you could say that the only reason the digits were dug is because of this part of the site absolutely i've just argued myself totally out of my original position thank you go away anytime [Music] i do like to be accommodating flying in the face of my skepticism francis has decided to focus attention on the interior of our site so we're opening a third trench to investigate one of john's pits if we are inside a hill fort tracy and faye should find evidence of occupation houses and domestic hards used by the living graves and burial mounds occupied by the dead no sign of either yet but it's early days is that going to be the back of the round part yeah it looks like a rear investment wall possibly there's stone underneath there back in the woods we've found the first tantalizing signs of how this huge bank was constructed that's nice and it laid in there it's classic this could be really well built there's another one there yeah yeah yeah yeah but this would be an indicator that it might be an iron age construction not only that it could be an indicator that this is an entrance this is great if this does turn out to be the entrance to an iron age hill fort it'll be an exciting discovery on the other hand we shouldn't be surprised this entire landscape is packed with prehistoric monuments some are two and a half thousand years old and iron age some go further back into the bronze age others earlier still into the neolithic but if there's one type of prehistoric monument herefordshire has in spades it's iron age hill forts as our historian bethany hughes is finding out this is classic hillthought territory here we've got major river valleys cutting through the landscape we've got the river lug coming up here winding its way around the site and up to the north we've got the river arrow coming in here and we've got a number of quite famous hill thoughts in this area for instance we've got croft ambrose up here we've got credon hill down here sutton walls here i'll tell you anything that bothers me though that we know there's bronze age activity here so why are we obsessing about the iron age why is this not some special bronze age we've got to remember that you know the world doesn't start with the iron age there's there's what these two three thousand years going back to the neolithic period but before that and if something's good in one period it's going to be potentially good strategically in another period so we've got to to some extent keep an open mind about what might be on here well if there is a hill for here kind of embraced by the river lug it's going to be a pretty enormous one it is i mean that's slightly worrying to some extent because i've had a look at the area if it is a hill fort it's going to be 43 acres which is enormous crikey if this place really is 43 acres that's twice the size of any of the other hill forts in the area and that's not the only thing i find baffling where have fae and tracy gone why is there no one in that trench it was only put in about an hour ago yeah well they're saying it's natural i there's nothing man-made there but john that was where you said that there was going to be pits and ditches well i hope there would be i did actually say there's a possibility it's just natural features yeah the geology's making things difficult it's difficult to see things that's why we've not seen the big deep ditch because of all the geology on top and is that why you've put in this one well this is i'm even more hopeful about this one sure you're going to say i'm clutching at straws but look at the results now in amongst all this detail here can you see that curving arc i can just in case you couldn't there now we've put the trench in there i'd like to interpret that as a central pit half and part of a round house they're going to prove me right or wrong that would be good wouldn't it because if we've got some kind of entrance to our iron age hill fort if that's what it is and if we've got some kind of bank and ditch there's got to be some activity in the middle yes and this is the best we've got so far so we're having another stab at finding signs of life on this hill by putting in a fourth trench here [Music] it's very clean you get isn't it yep i mean if it is a roundhouse and john's right about the feature of this end if it is a half pit or fire pit or something like that which should show up fairly clearly but you didn't show that clearly for a fire here not on the gfo it might be painfully slow going up here but over in trench one we've had our first big breakthrough wow matt so it was all colluvian it all yes hidden underneath this there's your ditch there it is look there's the uh well you can see there's the grey natural there there's the line of the edge of the ditch and then there's the fill of the ditch the kind of blue grey silt perfect better still our environmental expert mike allen has got an intriguing find look at that that's oak in there yeah this is oak and the auguring did show that we might have water logging at the bottom of the stitch and indeed we have and this is as you currently say it's probably oak but it's also probably a steak so a wooden stake driven into the ground and it's now falling into the ditch and you've got um bits of charcoal and all sorts in here i mean it's rich isn't charcoal all over the place bits in here and here so this is part of the occupation within the site or part of the destruction but that's not all we have got here other pieces of wood other than the stakes badly preserved but for upland sites it's washed wood this is more like it we've found the giant ditch we saw on keith's aerial photo and it looks like it may have been defended by a palisade of sharpened stakes on the bank behind it the archaeology in the woods is beginning to look pretty spectacular too that's fantastic but you've got real stratigraphy i know it's a cracking section it's a very very complicated story see i think right at the beginning is this one that's coming over like that and going right the way down there and you can see what they've done they've really really carefully built it because they've capped it off with these lovely flat slabs of stone and i do wonder whether or not that phase may have had a palisade at the front because look at the way these two stones tip in like that just wonder whether there may not have been some sort of timber palisade there but then you see after that what they've done they've actually enhanced the the bank made it bigger by putting in that rubble there and then finally they've capped it off with all this material that sits on the top so you've got at least three phases possibly four it's a very very complicated story but the best if you like is yet to come because here's the back of the rampart look at these stones tipping down like that that's the back of the round part and there's a it's separated by this it's a solid stone wall look we've got these vertical pitch stones there and vertical pitch stones there and the whole gap in between is filled in with these horizontal packing stones i mean for all the world that looks more like building than rampart doesn't it is crucially important what the site must contain this is great stuff evidence of phases indicates that whoever built this bank came back to reinforce it again and again over some considerable time more importantly it looks like there may have been a wooden palisade at this end of the site too but whether these are two sections of one continuous earthwork that encircled the top of this hill we don't yet know back in trench four there's no sign of john's roundhouse in fact there's no sign of anything much at all and does make me question if we don't start to begin to find stuff in here whether we had any occupation up here at all evidence of settlement up here is proving elusive but it being late july there's a far bigger problem brewing the weather and unfortunately it's turning out to be a typical british summer lovely i think it's above and beyond the call of duty for you to keep digging in this rain what is it that's kept you going it's really exciting tony it looks like we've got a bank up at that end of the trench and it looks like actually had some kind of stone lining where's that well if you look underneath peter's feet there you can see the stones that's the top of the stones if you follow the line along there's some pale clay there's another couple of stones there on the edge of the bank the rest of them have slid all the way down and they're in a pile down at the bottom there and how long do you think it's going to be before we get to the bottom of the ditch well i thought we were only a couple of inches off the bottom but mike did an auger down there and we've got about 40 centimeters to go this has been a really frustrating day when we started out we thought we had really good archaeology with the bank and the ditch in the wood which might spread over to here and then into that far field there but the more we dug the less evidence we got that is until late this afternoon when suddenly we realized we didn't have nothing actually we got a big something we've got this huge ditch a big bank we've got this stone lining this is really well engineered but what is it what's its date we still don't know still we've got another two days left although according to the weather forecast the rain is going to get even worse [Music] [Music] beginning of day two here at dinmore hill in herefordshire and i was right this site is doomed i thought the problem would be the archaeology but in fact it looks like the archaeology is going to be really good the issue is the weather it's rotten rotten rotten rotten 25 millimeters of rain forecast by four o'clock this afternoon in fact it's so bad that none of us really knows what to do we're excavating what we think is an iron age hill fort at least we would be if it wasn't pelting down [Music] well that looks a bit dodgy matt then it's not as full as water as i actually thought it was going to be i thought it was going to be a swimming pool it's the sliding which is going to be the problem isn't it yeah and you also get there's a danger of a mudslide too i don't think we could possibly put people down there so i'm afraid we'll just have to close this down for the time being and um call it a day sorry about that folks yeah there it is back home but even if work's ground to a halt here at least the woods provide some cover down at the other end of our site aided by this state-of-the-art weatherproofing kit brought in a huge expense where do you get this stuff from some local car booth sale or something look at this here i'll tell you what the longer you stand farting around with it the more it's going to break well let's put it over the trench you do your second best thing stop talking oh no i'm directing [Music] pitching a tent in the rain is bad enough but at least it's better than having to do gf's this is ridiculous well ventilated well it's well ventilated and we got some light that's the main thing and we're driving this will be a good place to work are we going to be able to dig here all right today good too right we are rather lit working here than out there but the problem is the ground slopes that way isn't it all going to run into the archaeology well considerate of you to mention that but uh we have loads of dealing with that yes at least we'll be dry yeah they have no idea how they're going to dig today no idea what have you got here we've got the most amazing bank i mean it is a superb thing look at it you can see it's not just built in one phase is a series of events where people have actually made this thing bigger and bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger and stronger in defense the wonderful thing about it too is that we've got this wall stub end of a wall coming out what does that tell you francis well i think that could be what they called in victorian days a guard house they're very characteristic of hill forts in this part of the world basically it's a sort of semi-circular building just inside the entrance way and for all the world that looks like to me a guard house in which case we are in an entrance way into the hilltop and then the other thing that we do have here also is the ditch we want to get a complete section through the ditch because if we can demonstrate that the construction of this ditch is the same or different to what matt has got it will help us to understand whether we're dealing with one side or two sites and that's our problem at the moment we've got two bits of unconnected archaeology the big earth bank in the woods here and the ditch down at the other end of our site the question is are they part of one big monument to find out phil's extending his trench to excavate the ditch you've done this before the last lesson is on friday if both sections of earth work are constructed in the same way then most of our archaeologists think we've got one big enclosure and more than likely a giant iron age hill fort most that is apart from stewart who as usual doesn't agree with anyone in fact he's now found something exciting in the woods and he's keen to show it to bethany we've all heard that one before so we're still walking along the top of the bank and it starts to get quite interesting when we get just to this dip over here as you can see we're starting to to drop down very rapidly oh yeah definitely and it's a nice flat area there's no sign of that bank whatsoever but when i get to here i'll tell you i'll just stay down here you can you can go and investigate out there you see i'm back up on top of the bank again i can see it heading off that way big ditch outside it the bank starts again so what we've got here is a very genuine gap it's not the sort of thing that you get where the tractors bust through or anything like that modern yeah i think this is a genuine entrance through this big bank and ditch here well it does raise the possibility now of course that if this earthwork is not one long thing but it's composed of a series of sections with more than one entrance and if what they've got over there is an entrance then that may push it further and further in back in time because you get boundary monuments which are built in sections so we have the possibility that we've got a monument that sort of starts here in the perhaps even in neolithic period continues right through in use and andy's still here today i'm so glad you brought me here so we've narrowed it down something's going on it could have been a thousand years ago it could have been 2 500 could have been 3500 years ago great good stuff stuart if this earthwork isn't continuous but has a series of gaps through it stewart suspects it could be several thousand years older than the rest of us think to resolve that one way or another we need dateable fines frustratingly that's one thing we haven't seen at all on this site until now look what i've got here charcoal mashes and mashes of it i'm starting to collect it look at that oh black as your hat lovely lovely charcoal and it's not just the fact that it's charcoal look it's where it comes from look there's the charcoal and there is the bottom of the ditch oh i think there is you think you're right yeah so it means that that charcoal was dropped in the bottom of the ditch pretty soon after it was dug so that should give us a date basically for the bottom of the ditch absolutely it's just been the most crucial thing we wanted to try and find out when was this ditch dug we were hoping hoping them who knows we might still get some pottery but in the absence of pottery this charcoal should allow us to radio carbon date phil's ditch it's a big breakthrough even if what this extremely puzzling place was remains a mystery virtually all our archaeologists are absolutely convinced that what we've got up there is an iron age hill fort and not just any old iron age hill fort but a massive one one of the size of somewhere like maiden castle so obviously they're pretty excited about that but on time team there's always a fly in the ointment and he's sitting over there behind that table stuart what's this i hear that you're questioning the notion that what we've got is a hillthought and when you start to look at the physical evidence that we've got it it's very interesting now this is where phil's digging just here we can see the bank and ditch it comes through the woodland down there it's very well preserved but no evidence at all of it coming round here as you would expect with iron age hill thoughts it doesn't happen here and when you look at all hill faults they've all got continuity of defenses around circuits that's a very common thing absolutely no evidence that's ever occurred at all what do you think it is well what we've got i think coming across here first of all is something called a crossridge dike now this is a sort of land boundary this is iron age well they can be used in the iron they often actually predate the iron as it can be bronze age in day and continue to be used through into the iron age and even beyond that as boundaries but what about all this archaeology here well that that is interesting because uh again just if you if you look at this aerial photograph here this is where phil's digging trench there we've got what appears to be a crossridge dike which comes down here which goes across the ridge the postulation was that that was one large hill thought coming all the way around here there's no evidence these features come back along here if you look at the aerial photograph closely can you see that bank and ditch which was extant in 1946 when this photograph was taken actually turns a corner and comes back around here there's absolutely no evidence it continued towards the escarpment edge there have you told the others yet not yet you can do that stuart seems determined to blow our iron age hill fort theory out of the water he thinks the ditching mats trench doesn't carry on to complete a full circuit of this hilltop but turns back on itself and could be a small iron age farm and he's convinced the earthwork phil's excavating is a cross-ridge dike built two thousand years earlier in the bronze age if he's right we could have two completely separate bits of archaeology built at two completely different periods in pre-history oh dear we may be splitting into opposing factions but at least phil's happy he thinks his ditch is one of the most impressive bits of prehistoric archaeology he's ever seen what is it that's so wonderful about this trench then it's just the sheer scale of being in the bottom of this ditch and you really have to get into the bottom of it just to appreciate just how big it is look when you cast your eye up there look at the top of the rampart yeah think about a lot of this material that's in this ditch would have come from the top and that ramp just think of the scale of it and this was all cut by hand absolutely tony it all cut through this solid rock just using people with their bare hands and literally iron tools and picks i mean it's taken us half a day to do this with a machine just think how much longer it would have taken to do it by hand how long do you reckon it is in either direction in either direction about 300 meters so it's at 600 meters overall and the interesting thing is it looks as though we've probably got the entrance here this massive ditch is not something we expected to find is it no but i mean it is it is just a privilege and a pleasure to be able to dig it and stand in it it's astonishing to think that an army of people must have hacked this 600 meter earthwork out of the solid rock using brute force alone [Music] out on site the chaos continues francis this is madness you closed that trench down this morning because it's raining so much but you stuck in another one well the thing is tony we can't just stop we've only got three days and i'm not having people digging these trenches but just being done by a machine so there's no health and safety problems i actually extended that other trench over there but there's a flat fit behind the bank and that's where normally you'd expect to find houses we didn't find any so i then came over here but this is another flat area you can see we're in a natural hollow and this again is where you'd expect to have houses because you're protected from the winds blowing over there and have you found anything nothing absolutely not a sausage so are you going to keep on digging more trenches or are you going to stop and think now i'm going to stop and think and have a bath i think it's the end of day two we've dug here here and here but we've failed to find any evidence of people living on this hill and yet we've got two giant earthworks this place is still a total enigma so despite the rain we've hit two magnificent ditches mats and phil's but of course we still don't know whether or not they're linked but you think they are i do tony i mean they're so similar both to ditches i mean the fillings similar and the sizes and the depths so i think they are the same you're shaking your head straight yeah i disagree with that i think we've got two distinctly separate monuments one that goes right the way across the ridge when we got here uh but over in the field where matt is i think we've got good evidence that's a distinctly separate monument what fascinates me about this ditch though is the amount of work that must have gone into it how many people do you think it would have taken to build the whole thing oh a lot of people tony hundreds maybe even thousands so why are there no signs of life at all on the entire side well that's a good question tony but we've just discovered that here there was a probable entrance way into the interior of the hill fort now we know from other hill forts but just inside the entrance way and that would put us over there in the other field that's where you have most of the buildings and most of the evidence for people so i think tomorrow morning that's where we start digging first thing it's been a quite extraordinary day even though we have had so much rain and one of the most extraordinary things is that the weather forecast said the rain would stop at six and i think it's stopped dead on six and they say that tomorrow is going to be much better and maybe not any rain at all fingers crossed beginning of day three here at dinmore hill in herefordshire and you see it's not raining the weatherman actually got it right and if that isn't enough cause for celebration take a look at that trench you see the side of that ditch all made of rock all cut by hand it's got to be one of the most dramatic pieces of prehistoric archaeology that we've ever found and hopefully we're going to be able to date it later on today and if we can't date the ditch then we may be able to date that ram party thing behind it and in addition you see these stones here they could be part of some kind of building which is tucked in behind that mound so we're going to extend this trench and have a closer look at that and over here on the other side of the site things are also looking pretty good we had to close down all the archaeology in this field yesterday for health and safety reasons but matt presumably now it's full steam ahead it is i mean it's not in a very good state at the moment though i mean you can see all the water in there and not just that but the collapse shows how dangerous these trenches do get in the rain but when the weather's turned now so we can get going but still got a lot to do so when you say it's full steam ahead it isn't full steam quite yet not really tony no we've got to make this trench safe so i'm going to get ian in with the big digger and we're going to batter the sides back you know they're going to be people working right at the bottom that we must get it right fair enough before we can start digging again we need to clean out and secure our trenches [Music] back at the earth work in the woods there are still no fines but soil scientist mike allen is in his element this may look like a pile of muds to you and me but mike can read it like a book what we do have is about this horizon here a nice intact in-situ soil this is the land surface on which people would have walked so this isn't a woodland soil so we know therefore it must be after the woodlands have been cut down and the landscape opens so it's this dates to after the early bronze age i've also said this hasn't been plowed and we know this landscape was plowed very intensively in the medieval period so it has to be pre-medieval okay not a good date pre-medieval post early bronze age over to you so basically that gives us a window of like i don't know two and a half thousand years it's better than you had before well no no no we will definitely try and refine that nice try mike so we're still struggling to date this earthwork and we still don't understand how it fits into the story of this place though stewart has a theory of his own here's our sight here's the river log coming coming round here now at the northwest of this bit of high ground there's a an iron age hill fort called ivington camp this has got lots of banks and ditches around it it's a classic hill fort in every respect to the word but on the opposite side of the river look there's risbury another hill fought again with classic bank and ditch around it and this finger of land that comes down from here points into this territory over here this is the point of contact between them it's almost like a gateway between what's going on over here in the iron age and what's going on over here so i suppose in a way this this whole place is like a kind of formal entrance from one world into another i think the whole thing is that's a brilliant way to put it the whole thing is the entrance to the landscape of ivinson camp surprise surprise stuart and bethany have arrived at a completely different interpretation of our site they think dinmore hill was crossed by a pair of dikes making the whole hill a formal point of contact between two hill fort territories centered around ivington camp and risbury out on site francis is determined to prove otherwise he's opening trench six to try and find the continuation of the earthwork if it's here it should line up with the big ditch and bank in phil's trench back in the incident room mike's pouring over the remains of this wooden stake from trench one painstaking microscopic work like this tells us as much about this site as the big archaeology does this is almost definitely oak it's a branch or a stave that's been selected from woodland specifically to make a fence post or a rail of some kind now how can you tell that's been specifically selected because we can see that it's a nice round piece of wood yeah and so they've gone into the woodland and selected pieces very carefully which are nice and straight and round for building or fencing and that has lots of other really quite subtle and interesting implications like what like if they're doing that they're probably managing the woodlands the woodland isn't just a load of trees it's a resource which they are using and utilizing so from this little piece of wood we can suggest there's quite a complex organized society somewhere out there managing the woodland for construction if mike's right the people who built the earthwork were also coppicing trees to produce wood for fencing and cutting back trunks for bigger timbers back on site there's no sign that the earthwork continued through our new trench phil's face says it all this place is proving such a tough nut to crack time to step back and have a rethink the big question that's really puzzling everybody is do we have a huge iron age hill fort that starts around about here somewhere and goes right through into the woods or do we have two entirely separate pieces of archaeology how do we resolve that well we get gfs to work all the way over this field and see what clues they come up with which we've already done looks pretty interesting doesn't it except that this interesting looking big line here is a much later trackway that appears on the tide map so that's no use to us and these intriguing lines here are all natural geology so really there are no clues here at all so we've got less than a day left and a massive question that's entirely unresolved francis you're the leader of the pro-hill fort faction aren't you well i am tony because i like simple explanations there are hundreds of hill forts in britain and they have large ditches they have high banks and we've got large ditches and we've got high banks we've got them over in the wood and we've got a ditch over here which we don't yet fully understand yes he's right we have got very big bank and ditch over there and we've got the ditch evidence over here what we haven't got is the connection between the two around the top of the hill which is usually how you define a hilltop enclosure a hill fork but the people who were constructing that bank and ditch over there were doing so with the same care and the same complexity as they did with something else and so i don't think it's just a dyke i'm glad we're all agreed on that then but while the bickering continues our residence geophysicist is waiting in the wings with a big smile on his face i thought you were just watching the scene but actually you had an ulterior motive didn't you yeah well that's the plot you were looking at we hadn't survived this area and that's where francis wanted the ditch to extend through but look we've now done it you see this clear line even with the possible entrance at that point so we've got the ditch well i hope so i mean the only problem is the reason we haven't done it is the sound aerials are actually at that point there it's just possible it's an effect of those so we're gonna have to move the aerials i think really we need to steve come here you're the sound man can we move your aerial well of course that's all right then the archaeological stalemate has been broken thanks to john who thinks he's found the continuation of matt's ditch along with another possible entrance here digging it should resolve what this place was one way or the other meanwhile stuart's grand focal point of contact between two hill forts theory is about to come tumbling down flatter areas are in red running through to the steep areas which are blue so that's each side of our hill um now this is where phil's been digging and you can see the bank running through there yeah actually really clearly slightly inside you can also see it continuing down through here as well so you've got where where matt's matt's trench is across here you can see actually that ditch features running right through here is there anything that suggests the two are actually physically linked together that's a really tantalizing questions to you because if you look here we've got the bank and ditch which feels me working here's where matt's one should come in now between the two you can see this pale blue line now that is an area which is slightly flatter i think they're terracing this area you make it artificially steeper so what we have is an earthwork it changes form into this terrace then becomes a bank and ditch again going around so it looks like we have an enclosure so maybe it is continuous so we've got nothing absolutely concrete that they all join together yet have we no i did i feel confident it is complex isn't it there's nothing simple about this hilltop no not at all this is a big step forward and our pie in the face for stuart henry's convinced that the sides of our hill have been deliberately cut back to make the escarpments harder to climb so that means we haven't got two separate sights it's far more likely one giant earthwork encircled this entire hilltop so it's all down to our final trench to find the missing piece in the puzzle found it yet matt oh hi john ian holden tech um well i think we're just getting to the top of the natural there can you see the gray can you show them exactly where we are then we've put the trench in what we think is the break the entrance here this has to be a ditch whether it's iron age or not that's up to you if we can complete the circuit we'll have proved beyond reasonable doubt this was an iron age hill fort with just five minutes left we haven't got long really issues whether this is actual real it could be no it's not is it collapsed oh hang on no that is is that hard that's real that's it that's the edge there it's six o'clock it's been tough wet and muddy but our time's up oh you got something yeah well the geophysics showed this huge ditch coming along here with a break in it just in front of me that's what we've got i'm standing in the terminus of it here at the end and you can see it's massive cut straight through the bedrock do you think that this ditch aligns with the other ditch that you were digging down there yesterday yeah it does we've clearly got on the geophysics going straight through this field then curving off around there francis has been a site all about ditches it has tony and what ditches i mean over there in the wood that sensational deep ditch and the bank that went with it typically iron age and the way that all the ditches we've looked at are subtly different suggests to me but they were probably dug by different groups of people who came to this area as a sort of central meeting place think of it as a sort of iron age stonehenge it's where people came to meet fines keith well that's the remarkable thing now tony we are beginning to turn up fines not lumps of pottery indicating permanent occupation but evidence of feasting what we've got here is an antler and attached skull from a red deer at last we've got confirmation of a single giant earthwork but this was no ordinary hill fort a radio carbon date from our final trench indicates that its earliest phase was built three thousand years ago in the late bronze age so although stewart's vision of a cross-ridge dike wasn't right his instincts were spot on we think the western section was reinforced a thousand years later in the iron age to form a grand entrance the gateway into a giant assembly area where surrounding communities gathered to perform religious rights and celebrate seasonal festivals but it would be willful not to make one last visit to our fantastic ditch which i reckon must be the best piece of iron age archaeology that we've ever excavated on time team phil great piece of engineering it is an incredible piece of engineering tony and remember this trench here is only a fragment of the entire ditch that goes around the hill but why is one side of it virtually vertical and that side slanting it is the ultimate defensive weapon i can climb down there relatively easily but when i get here i'm met by this vertical sheer rock face and if there are people up there hurling rocks at you you are not going to get out of here you know that rock was worked on by hundreds of people over hundreds of hours using metal tools might not seem to us as dramatic as swords and shields but two thousand years ago that would have been a really powerful statement in the landscape by an iron age tribe saying we are here to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 168,693

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 full episode, time team season 17, time team season 17 episode 12, time team dinmore hill, time team herefordshire, dinmore hill, herefordshire, british history, dig site

Id: lo__tNh-Dik

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021