Early Bath (Ffrith, Flintshire) | S13E11| Time Team

this is freeth in north wales it's a small village of about 400 people with a main street about three other streets no shops and two pubs so they've got their priorities right here anyway back in the 1960s in the back garden of this house and a few other houses down the street some local archaeologists dug some trenches come on this way underneath that concrete and under that glass house they discovered a series of walls and some bits of pot and tile and some roman coins and they thought they'd got a roman bath house but is it and if so what's it doing here time team i've got just three days to find out freeth is here in north wales just across the border from chester the center of roman occupation in the north west people have been finding little roman bits and bobs here for centuries but the reason that the local archaeologists want us to dig here is because they think this is really special and it's never been properly excavated harry have you any idea how important your garden actually is no idea so i just believe there's some roman walls underneath and that's about it really what have we got well we've got a collection as how he says of roman wall so excavations carried out here in the 60s and we found various plans which show possibly some rectangular buildings possibly a circular building possibly a building with an apps on it a semi-circular projection on one side um but the fact of the matter is we don't really know what the building is what's that look like to you mick well it's been suggested it's a bath house but i think the problem is all the plans are different and really if we're going to understand it we ought to re-excavate it and see what it looks like in the ground is that good archaeology to re-dig something that someone's already dug yes in this case where we're trying to reinterpret this building we're trying to work out what this might be i think it's a very good case for going back to these trenches and looking again seeing what we can find what's your priority for this morning well the first thing is to actually check any records that we've got and to actually try and survey in where the walls are supposed to be so that we actually know where to put our trenches i've got a sneaking feeling it's going to be under the gray house myself do you love your greenhouse and your concrete and your lawn i've got a feeling that i did love my greenhouse my grass and my concrete i think it's going to go soon there will be no more say bye bye bye the evidence from the 60s is very strong these are all walls which they found when they joined the dots they came up with this shape which resembles the layout of roman bath houses found elsewhere in the country we plan to look for these walls then we'll try to find other sections of wall to see if the dots are all joined correctly if they are then we've got a bath house here our first problem though is working out exactly where the walls are your wall should be if we take a straight line through that one there best off buildings and a straight line coming through there where they intersect let's go into about there and up so in other words that roman war well at least it's not underneath your greenhouse it looks like it's underneath your path can you not get rid of the greenhouse anyway we do that as well yeah we but you don't mind the path coming up that's all though we'll give you a quote on a green egg [Laughter] this is where we'll dig in harry's across the fence in another garden there are two more important walls this long one and this one in the corner taken together they look like they're curving we're beginning to dismantle harry's garden it's taking a bit of time because of the path and the stuff around it [Music] then it comes to sun again look no snow in it next door phil's moving a bit faster he just had grass to go through [Music] oh stone again there look i think you're in danger of having a wall there phil no the fence between the two gardens just has to go it'll be easier to work without it the village itself runs north south and the main street follows the line of office dyke the dike built in the 8th century is now under these houses behind them is the village playing field it was scheduled as an ancient monument because roman material was found along the edges the authorities have given us permission to have a look at it well it looks as though we've got some people working here already well somebody started 20 years ago they've already done the trophies is it any good though john well it's rather crude i mean they've actually presented the results by stippling with a pen it was pre-computers yeah can you see anything on it well look these thicker dots are presumably where they've got higher readings it's resistance survey so that could be stone buildings can you tell anything from it well it's quite encouraging to be honest i mean it suggests we need to resurvey the area so you've started that already yeah we're on with this yeah would you rather on this place well this is the biggest open space in the village and although it's got um ridge and furrow covering it that it's very shallow it won't have destroyed much and if john's happy that we can get good geophysics results then it's the best place to go the walls found here aren't the only evidence of roman occupation hypercoarse tiles used for underfloor heating particularly in bath houses have been turning up for hundreds of years and in the 60s they found masses of stuff 41 boxes of it including shed loads of pottery we begin to sift through the old fines for clues as to what might have been happening here this little lot looks pretty random does it tell us much much more than i thought it would to begin with you see that little brooch broken it's just the kind of thing you might find on almost any roman site in the country so it wouldn't tell us anything more than that the place was roman but these are really important these are bronze fittings from roman armor so it means there were soldiers here is there anything here that tells us there was anybody else other than soldiers though well unless they were very camp there's all these glass beads which suggest that there was somebody wearing necklaces or jewelry and also these bone hair pins so i think there must have been women what about the rest of this stuff well of course what brought us here was traces of buildings i mean that's what we know about now there's a building tile which has a military legionary stamp on it but there's also wall plaster but rather nicely over here we also have the remains of a bronze key so clearly there is a structure what's this little thing here every time you wrote an official document or religious document something that was important to you you would tie the document up with a piece of string run it through this little box pour wax into it stamp your seal on it and then bring over the lid it's evidence for reading and writing but possibly also official documents which is exactly what you might expect in an important site associated with the army it's pouring down now so the incident room is suddenly very busy yeah well it's the problem stuart and henry are looking at the overall topography so this is the 3d map of the area victor ray san and sally a roman bath's expert are looking at what a bath house might have looked like we found which is ashted it's got the most similar layout although it's half the size and john has now got some geophys results for the playing field these are the results from 20 years ago that's our area we've surveyed now if you compare the two take their results almost perfect match very very similar aren't they i mean it really is good yes it is it must be the same anomaly that we're saying you could look at that and say you've got three rectilinear buildings yeah aligned to the main street yeah or it could be you've just got an outcrop of geology oh no with ridge and furrowed flowering cutting through i mean through it because you can see ridge and flow on some of the oil photographs can't you yes you can feel it if you would see it in the right light i mean the only way to find out is to dig it this is where john suggests we dig so helen opens a trench we hit the ridge and furrow right away and then it starts to look very dodgy where john thought we might have a building we found some stones but what are they we thought that this looked like a shaped stone what really kind of put the icing on it was it looked like this might be water but the more we've cleaned it the more um that it's turned into kind of creamy nudge really well i tell you what it doesn't look desperately wrong it's not really squared off enough it's not proper dressed in the way that you might expect good roman stone to be made it doesn't mean it's not and that just looks like a break on that looks like a natural flaw in the stone but there's something else much more important really i can't see any trace of roman brick and tile if you were on the site of a roman building you would almost certainly have quite a lot of fragments of that very obvious orange roman brick and tart and you've got none of that have you so that could just be natural shaping yeah it's just not good enough really [Music] the two gardens are coming along nicely have you got anything yet matt well we've got a few random stones here but they've still got modern bits of glass and stuff underneath them and stuff so keep going at the moment keep going yeah okay getting like the sum isn't it oh that looks a bit better phil that looks like we've got on here doesn't it well it is what you got on there mick that bit there look it's not curved for the wall do you want to see what it looked like in the 60s don't get it wet here we are yeah but it's exactly exactly we can marry this appreciative i mean there's this stone here which is the long one in the middle and there's these two here with this crack running between them which are the two of the handshaw boys we can actually say with some degree of certainty that that photograph was taken exactly where you're standing right what we've got is exactly what they got so what do you want to do now we want to dig a trench over that side of the path because the the from what we know in the 60s they stopped here right that over there is brand spanking new virgin ground never been dug before and that will answer the question of all this rubble it will give us a continuation of the war it will also give us the inside of the building and also it will give us a brand spanking new set of fines so we'll have the old wheelbarrows going up and down there and then you'll put in another trench here somewhere that's right yeah parallel this way would you say at the moment that this looks like an apps no i don't think we've got enough of it to say that but we might know more with this new training yeah yeah i mean we don't know it have to be butted onto something to be an absolutely we've no evidence for a very simple trench it will solve a lot of our problems this is the wall phil's found in the 60s another wall was found in this corner phil's new trench will provide the missing link between the two if this lines up we'll either have a circular building or one with an axe a semi-circular projection on one side [Music] any fines associated with it will give us a date for this wall at the moment we've no way of even knowing whether it's roman or not so okay the roman army might have been here but why here there are a number of possibilities first of all freeze is actually on the line of the main roman road which runs from the legionary fortress of chester over there down through the centre and up through this valley on into central wales and eventually the west coast so given the location and it's also close to two small rivers there's a possibility there was a roadside official lodging house or mancio where people would stay overnight and get changes of horses and vehicles the other possibility is that there are extensive lead deposits in the area so basically the romans have come here to plunder the raw materials if you like to put it that way yes lead of course was important for all the pipes they would have needed for the water mains inside the legionary fortress lining and baths and so forth out in the playing field helen's opened a very large trench but has very little to show for it we were thinking were we coming down onto something structural or not heavy looks horribly natural when i saw it first i thought well i wonder if this is not river gravel oil or even glacial gravel it's very loose and kind of churned up isn't it yeah is that something you might quarry out to build a road well exactly but we did have a bit of luck with some roman finds from here yeah yeah from the top layers that's a star one that's your star piece but this was from very much higher up this is from the more like the ridge and furrow see i'd have thought that was probably flower pot well yeah i it crossed my mind but guy um guy identified it as good roman stuff right and then we've got a few bits of modern brick and tile and here we are nice piece of signal quite a big bit really right you see all the flex in it yeah yeah yeah but i mean one piece of oprah signing doesn't make a roman cycle no it's not in context at all so it could have been brought in from somewhere else in the village and we already know that there's a signing and floors and there's heating systems and things so i don't know that we're very much further on these fines are the first evidence found by us of roman occupation here but the shortage of fines is very worrying we'd expected more by this stage time to hit the pub nightmare weather it was terrible bridge and i thought we wouldn't be able to get um to see anything at all but uh because it was so kind of smeary and muddy but once we got underneath the ridge and furrow you know we were kind of going for this thing that could have been a building or could have been geological it was this really clear kind of loose hardcore stuff which might have been natural so not really pushing our knowledge forward much so what are you going to do about it no we're going to try and dig a sondage at one end of the trench like a little inspection tree to see if there's anything underneath that could actually be real archaeology and what about you at least we've got our round roman building well i'm not really sure that we have i mean i'm not really sure that it's round you mean it's straight well i'm not sure about that either i mean what is it wiggly that's a very that's a that's a yeah that's a very fair assumption look but at the moment i simply don't know it it's going on that's the prime thing it is actually going on trust me how much have you had a drink not enough so we came here because we've got this uh magnificent round building uh now we discover it's possibly not round possibly not straight could be wiggly but at least it's going on yes so what is it we'll find out tomorrow what was all that about then yesterday evening mick and i had this bizarre conversation in the pub with phil where we both assumed he'd been drinking too much crazy juice because we were trying to press him about the wall in this garden about whether it's curved about whether it's straight he said it might be wavy but now this is the extension isn't it yeah this one here yeah yeah we've dug this new extension to try and find the logic of the wall fill your wall straight curved or what i told you in the public last night tony i mean i really didn't you don't believe me it really is a bit of both i mean look you see on this printout look it's it's straight through there and then it does actually go into a bit of a curve and you can actually see that on the ground this beer is straight yeah and then when it gets beyond that bucket yeah it does actually begin to curve the chapter douglas before had a piece of wall in the corner of the garden over here didn't it exactly we were he was saying the whole thing was circular and there was just like a little bit of the circle in that corner but if we've now got this wall across here that can't connect with that obviously can it no it clearly can't do that yeah yeah funny old thing isn't that yeah yes very peculiar i mean it doesn't look very much like a roman bath house to me there's no demolition rubble you'd expect roofing that's right plaster you'd expect loads of stuff i mean that wall there the way it's built at the moment looks as if it might be the base of a field wall between a couple of fields and it could be medieval or later couldn't it that's great we came here because we thought we had a site of possible national significance a roman bath house and now you're saying it could be a wall around a field that's what that looks like to me well we got in the next matt's just next door to phil but we've no idea if anything in his trench is related in any way to anything in phil's that's looking like proper archaeology now yeah i think we've got undisturbed roman wall there and undisturbed roman floors at the bottom there yeah undisturbed roman but it's undisturbed roman only since the mid-1960s when they dug it up last time yeah i guess have you nothing new at all well over on that side of our little fence line there we are we're not getting all this modern stuff so i think the 60s trench probably ended about where that fence is right and on that side we've got proper kosher untouched roman build buildings not only roman but jewish so is this finished no no no we've got a lot more to do we're going to take out the bulk and the fence join the two up and then keep cleaning it right come on this is weird isn't it why did we make the mistake of assuming that this was a roman bath house mick and i were just about to film getting into the car as we do and he walked round the back of it and he looked down and he went blimey and burst out laugh and he's rushed off to get phil come on show him what's this don't you think this line of stones here is very similar to what you've got in there it's probably the same line in other words whatever that wall is it's not going anywhere else but it's coming down here it does line up does it well we need to get henry in don't wait to ask him to look at it look if you stand here look it can see the shed hey if you're standing over here you can see the corner of the shed look so he must be going under this garage was it to come out under the fence if he's right it's not a bath house it's a wall at least 15 meters long and it looks more [Laughter] on i'll see you later the wall that mick tripped over is here it looks like it lines up with phil's here now the whole thing looks even less like a bathhouse wall so mick no bath house no it doesn't look like it is it i mean there's there's no none of the characteristic features the plasterwork hypercoarse tiles anything like that that you expect to get what do we do with this extension to the wall if it is one i think we pop a little trench in anywhere and see if it's related to any roman structures you know um we don't need to dig a lot to demonstrate that but wouldn't it be on an old map if it was medieval well yes i wondered about that we see there isn't a tithe map for the area the thai maps usually drawn about 1840 yeah and normally they show the situation before all the villages come in before roads are laid out but there isn't one for this area so we don't have an early map that might show it it's just you know unfortunate stuart major time team crisis the bath house isn't a bath house why shouldn't that surprise us after all these years is there anything about this place that we actually do know well there is i've been looking at some excavations which were done just where you've driven in on offers dyke there was some done in the 20s and some done fairly recently right which were properly recorded that's an important bit and what they showed you can see in the photograph here that's where the the trench was cut the office dyke which was built in the late 8th century it was built almost entirely of redeposited roman material pottery fines broaches all this sort of thing this is the original ground surface office dyke this has got all this repository material in it yeah where did it come from we know elsewhere that office diet's got a ditch on that side is this where the road is now yeah the road would be take up about that much there so i think what's happening is they're digging all this material out of here popping it up there so do we have roman activity over here so you think they've dug through a roman settlement or something here when they actually dig in the ditch for the dice whether it's a settlement is another issue it could be rubbish pits could be waste but it's definitely roman whatever it is how does it help us what we need to be doing is looking on this side of the road over here and we've got a piece of ground in there which is big enough to get into it's got chickens in it that's big enough to have a look at let's have a pop in there so far we've been digging up here to the north this is the chicken run stuart's talking about at the southern end of the village it's just opposite the spot where roman material was found in the 1920s so we pop a trench into the middle of that area [Music] we open up the wall that mick tripped over it does seem to line up with phil's and is on the same height in the extension to phil's trench he's found the wall but he's also found this ditch inside the ditch we're coming across a range of good finds and they're all roman a piece of glass could be roman oh i'm sure it is actually look at that you see the little projection on the side yes and then the thinness of the glass and also i think you can make out some little air bubbles in it very characteristic of roman glass what else and the star exhibit a robin brooch oh yes that's p-shaped a p-shaped brooch there should be another one of these on this side so there's a gap down the middle they join at the bottom for the tail here but it is an unusual type of brooch and i think it probably belongs to the late second century and on into the third okay these fines give us some relief but they date the ditch in phil's trench the wall is still a mystery this gives phil a bit of a problem i'm absolutely happy in my own mind that that's roman i don't know quite the ditch is roman but how can he get a date for the wall clean up the section yeah i've just had a thought i thought you got pensive it's usually a bad sign with you it's just struck me go on i wonder if we went through there yeah whether we'd find the wall running over that ditch because the angle's different isn't it so somewhere over there the alignment of that ditch like that that's right he's going to meet the alignment of that wall like that about where the space is in fact that'd be better wouldn't it than trying to perhaps clean it all up and not quite get the relationship that would be better still he's shifting a lot more muck yeah but isn't it better to invest the time in that and get the answer rather than invest the same time in cleaning it up and not possibly not getting it it's the right way to do it it is it is so digging here might give us a point where this wall and this ditch cross that way we'll be able to tell if the wall's roman or if it comes after the roman period it's funny 35 years ago a group of archaeologists came here they dug a load of trenches got some fines and then joined the dots together and conjectured that there was a roman bath house here and all these years later we're doing exactly the same thing digging trenches finding stuff creating pictures the only difference is that the picture that we're creating is likely to be very different from the one that the earlier archaeologists did we can confirm some of their findings like this wall but this one tears their theory of a bathhouse apart and our investigation of the wider village is getting us nowhere in the playing field the sondage produced nothing we're down to the natural down in the chicken run helen's got a few finds but nothing much yeah that's a piece of roma mortarium the round mixing bowl with grits in the bottom yeah excellent that's the rim yeah that's the room you see the grits beginning to show through the dirt there oh yes those are white flecks but there's no evidence of any structures down here this is all very worrying in the north of the village we're also having problems the wall mick tripped over isn't roman it's sitting on top of victorian bricks in matt's trench he's very unsure about what he's got it looks like mortar or something that looks much more like a very degraded wall plaster or something of packing right into perhaps a timber building or something with all the timber's gone or they've destroyed it in the 1967 excavation but it doesn't have anything to do with that massive great stone wall does it i don't believe that's roma for one minute it's much too badly built and i can't see a relationship between the two apart from the flooring if you've got any signs of anything structural though it looks like i've got this dark patch here coming like that it's clearly even cut into this it's small though isn't it it is quite small yeah maybe it could i mean it could be the end of a beam or something like that small beam and now phil's having some second thoughts well what do you think of that thing it's turning again in it we thought it was gonna come through yeah somewhere like that and what's it doing coming back like that so you wouldn't build a wall that close to the edge of the ditch would you that collapsed into the ditch wouldn't it that's right but if the ditch was already filled up then you could build the wall you wouldn't even know the ditch was there that's right in other words the wall would have to be later might not be his wall isn't roman either because the ditch in phil's trench is full of roman material and the wall is right beside it the wall must have been built sometime after the ditch filled up so it's much later than roman so we found this wall of fills this of mats and this where mick tripped over none of them are roman and we're running out of places we can actually dig there's only one wall left from the 60s dig and it's here just outside harry's garden after this we're on our own hello chris i think you've got some plans for me have you yeah we've been trying to marry up these plans from the 60s excavation with the modern ordnance survey map here [Music] there's a quiet sense of desperation settling in [Music] our only hope of finding a roman building may now lie beneath these victorian bricks well with one possible exception there's only one part of the village we haven't touched yet [Music] in front of the pub desperate times call for desperate measures [Music] what we've got is this sort of rectilinear arrangement right yeah yeah there's reported roman finds just over the road there yeah i mean that's such a positive result i think we ought to hold another look which is what we do and pretty soon there's quite a crowd around having a look over in his new trench phil seems to be getting somewhere [Music] well that's solid enough isn't it that isn't it i'd say you've got a good one there looks like a mortar floor it does it's nice and thick isn't it look i was going to say that when i dug down in that hole there it's still carrying on down and this is the wall and that's a mortared exactly look there's lovely bits of mortar in there mortar there all the way along and it's still running it's just going on under my feet here does that relate to this plan then we were looking at before where we've got this little stub of wall coming in here do you think that's what it is well i think it'll have to be won't it gotta be at last something decent for us to pursue tomorrow time to try out the second pub in the village [Laughter] tracy if anybody deserves a drink it's you too after what we've done to your garden have you seen this this is our star find so far it's a dice like a snakes and ladders dice that's not been thrown for 1800 years mind you we've been chucking it given our luck over the last couple of days what would we have got ones and twos oh come on tony at least twos and three though and what about day three when we get [Laughter] day three and mick and phil are attempting to reach new heights we don't usually see the world from up here no one i know that it's a special treat for you because it's your birthday it's not my birthday well it's still a special treat for it it is it is last night phil hit one of these walls he now needs to extend his trench but doesn't know which direction he should take has he hit this wall or this one oh yeah i would no no joe just just look in just looking yeah that isn't a return on that wall is it on the right no going back on the left um who we got down there matt hello can you just come in with your trowel and point a bit for us now then come forward towards the wall no no no no outside edge of the wall that's it follow backwards back back back stop does that return away from you there through here yes it's going on by your right hand matt matt where your right hand is in your trouble does it actually go on towards the garage then uh yep there it is there you see the white there all right what i should know that's my theory she got four we've learned not to trust this haven't we i mean it might it might go straight on which is what he seems to be implying yeah but you know i mean it does look as though at the minute the best money is at that right hand right hand wall is the one that we found so phil thinks he's got this wall he now needs to dig on this side of it to see if there's a floor here there might be given the shape of the adjoining walls if there is a floor we might just be able to get a date for the wall so this actually runs up to those sandstone blocks we don't know whether it goes beyond it but all right you got it oh yeah probably do that again that's the first time i've actually showed you that i've never seen you moved before henry i don't know about my trowel is that right i suppose one must actually demonstrate to you how it's done but you'll get there eventually the pub trench has delivered nothing the geophysics we saw may well have been buildings from the 19th century all we're left with is a pipe and harry's garden's beginning to look like it might not have much in it either but stewart as always still holds out hope i suppose you're wondering why i'm hijacking you yes yes great surprise pleasant surprise i mean i must confess since we've been here i can't really see where we are geographically i mean we're not that far from chester and yet chester's in the middle of a great flat plain yeah it actually seems miles away because you're in wales as well yeah i climbed up these hills yesterday unfortunately just about wiped me out oh yeah yeah whatever type of settlement or activity we've got down in this village here yeah part of the key to it is where it sits in these two valleys that come together where do those valleys go to well this valley up here heads north eventually heads up towards flint and we know that it's a big roman industrial site that paint a farm in flint this valley up here to the west yeah eventually that's the one with the railway fired up to the bottom that's the one there yeah the valley heads due west yeah and we know quite a few about a day's march also in military roman terms there is a roman fort in that direction all right and 15 miles in that direction is the big legionary base for chesapeake i think chester is the key to what's going on down here but it'd be useful to have some sort of supply base wouldn't it send stuff off in development yeah so you've got to cross it and you've got access through these steep valleys and across the terrain but what else have you got here i mean why are they here and i think in a way they beat up in the helicopter helps us because when you're down in the gardens it's quite hard for you to see yeah but up on the far side can you see all those quarry things oh yeah yeah yeah that's all limestone that's been quarried away in the 19th century all right huge break what's this carboniferous that's a huge great blob of limestone there there's a source for making lime here and which you'd need in building work in place you're like check exactly yeah you're building this massive great fortress in chester yeah huge great place all the stone buildings is watering everything yeah people forget nothing stands up if you don't put water in there this hill yeah it's the nearest source of limestone to chester it's a day's cart from here to chester that's why this roman settlement down here is here it's not a settlement it's a mining community if stewart's right the settlement here might not necessarily have been made of stone it may well have been more transient more like a series of temporary buildings by accident rather than design we seem to have turned the archaeology of this place on its head yes we do rather don't we um parts of the site that were previously interpreted as a bath house now no longer seem to be a bath house and may not even be roman i don't have a problem with that being a bath house here and that's exactly what you might expect on an official building there's all the records from the 1966 conversions of tiles associated with the bath house we just happen not to be on it but aren't you just making the same kind of assumption that the archaeologists made in the 1960s just because there's another course that doesn't necessarily mean we've got a bath house since it has to be a bath well it sounded pretty much like it's a me i think it's a possibility there's a bath house here and i think that's quite likely given the description of the hypercoarse tiles which you might well expect what does the antiquarian actually say near hope while i was writing this a gardener digging somewhat deeper than ordinary discovered a very ancient work guy he doesn't say this place he says near home look there was no freeth at that point he didn't have the word to use we are very close to hope yeah there must be a hundred places that are very close to home well up on that hill well yeah right down here this is where you have buildings so this is one of the most likely candidates and roman buildings have been found oh hello suddenly it's one of the most likely candidates [Laughter] what's the difference you're doing exactly the same no i'm not no i'm not i'm not i'm not because you are of all of us you are the person who says you can't make the kind of assumptions that archaeologists always make just because people have said something in the past you don't just kind of dig and perpetuate this myth and yet you seem to be doing exactly no i'm not doing that we we've got the evidence here that they found a roman site which they thought was bars we've got hypercoarse tiles found on the site what we have shown is that the people in the 1960s who took this material then found a couple of big hefty stone walls assume that was a bath house which when we took one look at it we realized that was a totally implausible association of the artifactual evidence the documentary evidence and the structure which are completely separate outside phil is at last making real progress with his stone wall ah mick yeah come and have a look at this i've been taking out all this brick rubble which must be what they must have shifted in the 60s yeah and in the side of their trench look what i've got look at this beautiful mortar floor oh yeah yeah so it must be under this lump in the corner here then well yeah i mean it probably goes all the way that way a room with a proper plaster flooring exactly i mean that unquestionably is in the building yeah now the big question of course is whether or not this wall is the outside of the building or whether it's an internal partition yeah what'd you make of it chris yes i think we're certainly inside a fairly substantial roman building yeah i told tony we were going to throw a six today yeah right i wonder if we shouldn't have this block out here phil with the machine to give you a bit more room to work there i reckon if we're going to move that tour one good bloke would do the job is just as well right you don't mean me he doesn't no or indeed me i can teach you i know you expect you to use a shovel bigger than this three days in and this is all we've got left matt and phil we open another trench close to phil's [Music] this is a view we don't often show you on time team but it's probably the thing we see more than anything else during the three days when we came here three days ago we thought that we were gonna get a roman bath house and we've got somewhere underneath phil is that rather manky old wall yeah you must be very frustrated yeah i think i am because you know we've sort of worked our way through you know where to dig and what to look for and what evidence we've got and so on and we still don't have a lot to show for it really but we're now in the area where you know most of the structures that have been recorded in the past have turned up i mean under this building here for example there was a hyper course system found probably under this building somewhere in this area and then over the back where that house is number one on the end there is where they found a lot of hypercoarse tiles and a lot of fines including glass and stuff like that plus of course you know what we originally came to look at which is back where phillies so somewhere in the middle of those three bits seem to be the logic of this this trench here okay so after three days we're focusing down on an area about seven meters from where we started what happens if we don't find anything here well we may not do we may not do i mean don't build your hopes up because you see where phil is there it's it's sort of dropping away from him it's quite likely when they built all these buildings that they planned it all off maybe that the material we've got in the fines that people have hung on to and the museum's got is all that's left because the rest of it's been removed that's why we've put this trench in here through this gravel because there's not much on the geophysics in there part the reason is that we may have the bottoms of features that shows that it has been planed off so it's fingers crossed time yeah but you know it's it's it's the process of sort of you know trying to find out what's there three days ago this was our starting point a map of stone walls joined together by archaeologists and historians in a way that suggested a very big bath complex in this area we now know that they were wrong most of these walls weren't even roman except for this one but then just when we thought that was it [Music] bridge things starting to come together in your trench yeah it's absolutely brilliant look we've got a roman ditch coming up here yeah just to uncover what looks like a roman post hole and the piece de resistance is this piece of dorbz dorb as in wattland yeah so where would the wattle have gone two pieces would have fitted it just in there it is extraordinary how things always start to come together towards the end of day three and it being day three we've got as usual three quarters of the local population but what's so strange is that in addition to all the things that we've got in bridget's trench in matt's trench we've got something similar what have you got for us we're down on the bottom clay floor here and if you look really carefully you can see these circular evenly spaced stains and that's where wooden stakes would have been and they'd have held up a small wall a partisan mall or something like that so there is roman here it's just much more ephemeral than we thought it would be it's wattle and dorb and mud and post holes it's not made of stone the post holes in this trench are roman and they explain why we haven't found much it's all gone what we're left with is one wall and some floor so i've seen loads of walls on this dig but that is the only one i'd label as roman oh it's a cracker that's terrific absolutely cracker and i mean we got the inside and the outside but it's a really nice thing what do you think of that i reckon that's a tessera you know what i think you're right you've got the flat surface on the top here you've got the mortar around these sides here but i do think it's been broken off on that side so it should really be square like that but i don't think i can recreate a brilliant mythological scene on a mosaic pavement out of that if that is a tessera it means absolutely cast iron we got a mosaic floor in this building no it doesn't it means we've got a tessellated pavement probably of one color like down a corridor okay that to me is a mosaic well well you don't get brightly colored mosaics usually in a military context but i would expect this kind of thing in a slightly higher status building with somebody who wants to be comfortable and i think that fits with a lot of the stuff we've got here those stories about the bars or heated rooms here i think that does fit with it oh yeah yeah helen three days in sunny north wales what have you come up with for me i've been in charge of finding nothing i've i've had the most important places in the village the scheduled ancient monuments i found nothing in one and i found nothing in the other so i've been sent to the chicken run and there i did finally managed to find something so i became an expert on local roman mortaria as well as the natural phil oh wow i mean i'm over the moon i mean we came looking for a bath house and it's always nice to be able to put the record straight we now know that there is no bath house and then to cap it all we've been able to confirm some of their results which was this wonderful stone-built wing of a roman building tessellated floor lovely floors it's been yes stonker it really is what a great optimist you are what is it that we've got what we've got is a whole complex of buildings here quite what it is is more difficult to interpret because he's clearly not a roman villa and neither is he something like a roman fort well stuart came up with the idea that this is actually the nearest supply of limestone to chester and why that's important is you need vast amounts of limestone to make lime for the mortar and the plaster and everything when you're building the permanent fort there and you'd need a ganga labras basically to do that so you probably ought to think of this as some sort of industrial military compound of people who are producing all that material to send back over to chester and i quite like that idea it's wonderful having a quiet little conversation at the end of the day with just the five of us and 350 local people go away [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 364,164

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, village of Ffrith, North Wales, route of Offa's Dyke, Roman bath house

Id: olva4aMXLpg

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021