Finds on the Fairway (Speke Keeill, Isle of Man) | S14E01 | Time Team

welcome to a very special place the isle of man may be a small and rather wet and windy island stuck in the middle of the irish sea but it's crammed full of influences from british irish even viking incomers in fact it's been a cultural crossroads for thousands of years including a time when celtic christianity vied with norse paganism to become the island's religion the legacy of this battle for dominance were the keels small simple chapels that once covered the landscape but today every single one of these keels has either been destroyed by agriculture or dug often badly by antiquarians apart from one which we hope will be nestling somewhere under the seventh fairway of the mount murray golf course time team have been offered the unique opportunity of excavating the last remaining untouched keel on the island we'll bring all our modern archaeological techniques and phil harding to bear on an investigation into the spiritual heart of the isle of man and we've got just three days to do it a thousand years ago there were keels everywhere on the isle of man up to 200 on this one small island now hardly any remain and those that do are just hollowed out testaments to victorian and edwardian amateur archaeologists but the one at mount murray is different miraculously it avoided the fate of the other chapels and after centuries of standing in an agricultural landscape it now takes pride of place on a golf course that was redesigned to protect its remains but before we get to grips with it we've got to adapt to an island ravaged by the tail end of a hurricane coming in from the atlantic nick over the years we must have had at least a hundred conversations around this four by four like this is the first one where you've actually been surreptitiously clutching the wheel arch so you don't blow away frightened have been blown into the hedge andy you're the local archaeologist come in here a minute is that actually part of the keel no it's not it seems to be a marker that's put up to ensure that ploughman in the past haven't actually clipped the site itself what period do they come from uh we think that the sites have been in use from perhaps the 8th century going out of use perhaps by the 12th century but i think that the sites have been occupied going back much earlier than that sometimes the burial grounds we think predate the chapels so there's a lot of things there up for grabs to try and actually answer your question is that most of them were dug by antiquarians in the early 20th century and they they didn't really dig them in the right way and they didn't find out the sort of information we want to know today most cases they dug down into the middle they didn't actually look at the outside they didn't relate them to any burial grounds there are with them uh and and you know the whole context of them we we don't know anything about really i mean that that would be a real first if we could actually date the structure in relation to burials and the site itself this is the last chance anyone will have to dig a keel but we won't just investigate the chapel we also want to understand the archaeology surrounding it i think this is in situ then this stone here really my initial view would be that it's perhaps being just lodged here for safe keeping it's by the by the pillar that's uh to put there to keep the plowman off but if it is in situ um then that's quite a rare in fact it's a real rarity we've got uh definitely one stone and perhaps perhaps one or two others that are still in the positions that they were placed in medieval times but considering we got 200 of these stone crosses from the whole of the island so many of them now are just not where they were found phil what on earth are you doing mate what do you mean what am i doing i'd have thought after 14 years it was blatantly obvious i'm opening up a trench and i'm digging it but mick we don't usually simply put a trench in because we've got a marker stone no no but we've got some geophysics from 14 years ago that show quite clearly or fear to show the sight of the keel there look well that's pretty crude unsophisticated stuff isn't it john you don't trust that i think it's pretty good myself was it done by amateurs no it's done by us oh really whoops but presumably you could do better than that now well have a look at what we've re-submitted wow look at that that just shows the difference doesn't it i mean it really has sharpened things up with the new instrument yeah what's exciting is we're digging here now where we think the keel is there appears to be an enclosure around it yeah you know there's so much more information in the latest results so where else do you want to dig well i think we've got to look at these ditches out here well i've already marked a line so there have been burials discovered here before so we could have an early christian cemetery surrounded by an enclosure ditch that could explain the presence of one of these ditches on the geophys but two concentric ditches are much more of a puzzle hopefully matt's new trench will help resolve that particular archaeological mystery but we're also interested in the graves john's identified in this trench because carbon dating burials will help us build a timeline and that's vital if we're to tell the story of the keel and its surroundings the weather may be doing its best to dampen our spirits but give mick a medieval chapel and he wouldn't care if we were in the middle of a blizzard what did the keel look like originally when they were built probably timber later on they seemed to have been rebuilt in stone victor's doing a drawing here look of a sort of timber building it probably was a bit more sophisticated than that but not much the irony is you to me are like the archetypal agnostic bordering on an atheist yes and yet you're passionate absolutely about early christian life absolutely fascinated by that i don't know what it is i mean i've i go around looking at churches i've got friends or monks in monasteries i really don't understand it there's something about the the amount of of energy and activity that goes into this and i am i absolutely gripped and fascinated by it so basically you've spent your whole life dedicated to something you don't understand yes in spite of mick's enthusiasm our initial finds don't seem that auspicious andy look at these voids here look this is absolutely ditto with them and yet somehow in among the golfing bits and bobs phil believes he may just have uncovered the first elements of the chapel just a meter away from the carved stone cross it's really hollow well it could be you've got a grave and we thought maybe this stone was a grave marker this might be the slabs over line that grave surely one of the crucial questions we wanted to answer was whether or not the graves were earlier or later than the stone built chapel now if this is a grave we should be able to establish then what its relationship is to this row of stones now to me a row of stones is a wall do you think this is a wall the way it's put together is not unlike walls that i've seen on on these sites could be could be we've got a lot of very white water-worn pebbles coming up there yeah the courts aren't they can you see that look oh that's a big one there really is there's there's a real variety of sizes of these i've been looking at some in in the incident room there seems to be spreads of them around keels and particularly around the eastern end of kiehl's so maybe they're being used to decorate altars or something like that as well it looks like we may have the eastern end of the keel now all we have to do is find the rest of it the weather though is improved from torrential rain to mere strong winds and persistent drizzle and that seems to me the perfect time to retire to the warmth and dryness of the country club's foyer to find out more about christianity's impact on the island from the 5th century we know that all of england pretty much with its brethonic population has probably been been christianized they're starting to be trafficked across the irish sea into ireland which are missionaries the isle of man itself probably becomes thoroughly christianized and then we have another phase of development much later on when the vikings start to move in across the north sea they occupy orkney they set up settlements in the hebrides they move into ireland particularly dublin and then probably the isle of man becomes part of the viking kingdoms it's at the crossroads of all of these things happening and that's why it becomes so interesting lots of cultural change so why might digging this keel be so significant well our keel could answer some of the really important questions that we've got which are to do with this whole crossroads thing as to at what point does the isle of man become thoroughly christianized and then later on when we have the arrival of the vikings probably as a pagan people at what point do they become christianized and this gives us the chance perhaps to answer those questions you've got the the pelvis there but the the buns actually right up against the stones one of the stones of the grave going off to this way back out in the rain matt just uncovered our first bona fide burial it's a kissed a stone-lined grave containing a skeleton in remarkably good condition and that's great news as it's the first thing we may be able to carbon date matt where's this burial on john's dear fears well we've started on this blue line here we've got over the first ditch yes that circle there now i think it's the first gray blob you come to there so it's in between these two ditches here what do we know about what's in there so far well you're actually stood directly above the kiss because there's kiss grace it's got stone lining one stone going off that way and this individual that's in there they're bums basically right up against that stone and their legs are going off in that direction the body seems to be going that way but for some people a chapel and a stone-lined burial just aren't enough in our shop in this john we had also these circles that look as if they might be well possibly prehistoric buildings or something like that i get the feeling if the archaeologists had it all their own way we'd be digging up the whole golf course that's the one i really want to go for though yeah that looks very interesting doesn't it yeah the problem is it's right in the middle of the fairway the really short grass so we can dig where the grass is a bit longer but not that really short stuff so everything over there is gone exactly we've got to look well what about something like that one you've already put the bloody trench in again haven't you yeah then the reason is this will take in four different elements this inner ditch right this curving ditch here yeah the ring there and then this rather enigmatic curving response that's good isn't it feed four things in one trench that's bullseye that is john let's go for that and within minutes of opening this third trench we've got features a mighty big one it's huge huh it looks like jon's just come up trumps again seems to be too big for a drain doesn't it yes i mean obviously viking drains were like that but a lot smaller but it is just like a lintel grave yes yeah it is a great tissue yeah let's see i can see um two femurs popping up oh yes no i can see them too you're right and yet some people still aren't satisfied stewart's already got his sights set on the field next door clearly we've got big earth works in this field this slope down here and i did a quick survey of these earthworks just to try and get a handle on them there's the road that's where the geophysical anomalies are on the other side and this pattern of earth works on here which may or may not have something to do yeah with the area we're looking at um and i think it's worth exploring what's going on in here that's that's a valid strategy we would have to otherwise the story is going to be incomplete the only problem is i don't know when we'll get the chance to investigate this field because the archaeologists are getting very excited about helen and raksha's stone-lined grave which appears to have completely protected the body inside it no earth no dirt just a fantastically preserved skeleton i've never ever seen a grave with no dirt in it i know it's really really spooky nothing collapsed in it exactly as it was when the lintels were put on it i've never seen anything like that never in all my life never on top of that matt has now found the full extent of his kissed burial at least we know where the top of it is now as well as locating another grave at the other end of his trench we are beginning to get what almost certainly is the northeast corner of the keel in fact the only place we don't seem to have a burial is in the keel trench but mick believes what was once phil's potential grave has turned into something even more interesting it looks like a little stone box with a lid on it i'm wondering whether it isn't some bone deposit it's like almost like a shrine or something like that i'm really intrigued with that i'll be interested to see what's inside it what you got down your end bridge i guess i smet back in the middle i think tony at the moment you know we've got phil's wall over that side here but can you see there's two lines of pixel strings coming towards us yeah we actually think this is the altar yeah to the chapel yeah and you'll like this but what we've got elegant oh look at that fantastic look at the quantity and the size yeah of these quartz pebbles coming out dates dates that's what they say they want yeah yeah this is this is still the problem what we have to do is we have to pull this thing together very very carefully very very systematically and and do things in terms of relative stratigraphy in other words one thing is earlier or later than another that's the way we've got to do it and in fact the bones are our best bet because we may get a radio carbon date from them that's that's going to be the the clinch but i mean it's absolutely fantastic what we've got you know i mean it's like all the stuff you see in ireland wales cornwall all bundled together in one little hole that's wonderful absolutely wonderful this has been a really wild day not just the crazy weather but the archaeology has been extraordinary too this is just the first of a whole number of graves that have been popping up all afternoon but that may just be the beginning because stewart's been for a wonder and he thinks that this keel and cemetery site extends not just to the edge of this field but way over there into the other field too if he's right you can't help wondering just quite how important this whole site is it's the beginning of day two on the isle of man and the storms of yesterday have given way to much more agreeable weather the seventh fairway of this golf course is now awash with archaeology we may have come here because of the keel a small stone chapel but we've ended up with so much more on our plates in one hour yesterday afternoon we found what was it five graves yeah i think so two down there certainly two here another one there and we think possibly from five or six so big deal mick we found graves in a cemetery surprise surprise yeah but it's useful for dating and building up a chronology not that we can tell the date of these graves from looking at them although they're very typical of that early christian period but the bones will be useful for radiocarbon dates what i'm intrigued about though is these graves here appear to be within this curving mark and that really is unusual whether it's an earlier feature that's been reused um we don't know but it's fascinating so many of these sites start out as prehistoric cemeteries with barrows and things and the barrels get put in so it may be that this is reflecting that it may be that the mound that they keel itself is on is reflecting an early barrow cemetery but we're not used to the job it looks like phil's keel will now keep him occupied for the rest of the dig he's established two wall lines as well as the altar and what mick thinks is a small stone-built relics box it's measuring something like only 40 centimeters across there yeah so i'm thinking if we can take this off and basically do a micro excavation but we still don't have a date for the keel and we haven't worked out how it was constructed in fact we don't even know where the door is and then there's the rest of the site dominated on the geophysics by these two massive concentric ditches all the graves we've discovered are inside this outer enclosure ditch which is normal for early christian burial grounds or see a skull or part of one everywhere oh well yeah look at these that's the pelvis that we could do when we look through the gap and he said that the pelvis is right up again i think these are very stable because they've got quite we're constantly searching for clues and there's a hope among the diggers that it's not just the burials that will give us a date one two three we've already had one carved cross and there's a chance that in among all this stonework there may be other more identifiable and dateable examples of writing or carving it doesn't look anything deliberate does there nothing man-made though the isle of man's littered with stonework demonstrating how different cultures came here and reinvented the island's language religion and art the best examples are across the island at maggold where a collection of stones show how christian art evolved over hundreds of years including the turbulent 10th century when vikings settled on the island bringing their pagan beliefs scandinavians didn't have a tradition of sculpting stone but amazingly they take it adopt it and adapt it and the vast majority of the examples on the island date to the period after the scandinavian settlement so what's this one well this one's broken but almost certainly would have had a cross at the top of the sculpture because we have a number on the island where we have crosses at the top and scandinavian imagery so is it pagan imagery well yes there's some interesting figures here there's a profile of an otter here it's holding a fish in its mouth and there's a little figure down here holding a stone in its hand that represents the god loki from norse mythology casting a stone and also eating a salmon which is from the sigurd mythological uh stories so you've got a norse myth on a cross which is christian that's absolutely uh the case and the sigued is particularly um significant because one of the most famous scenes in that story is that sigurd kills a dragon and races heart and to test whether it's cooked or not he sticks his thumb into the dragon's heart he's very hot so he sticks it in his mouth and at that moment after he consumes the dragon's blood he can miraculously then uh understand the words of the birds and it has been argued that there may be a parallel between that and the christian eucharist where we we have enlightenment through the consumption of the body and the blood of christ so is this a grace of the the vikings weaving their own myths into the bible myth yeah that's right i mean you can almost regard this sculpture as a teaching aid where someone is showing that there are parallels between the two different belief systems this fusion of viking and celtic culture also had an effect on the island's architecture and andy now believes that the construction techniques used in the keel suggest it's post-viking from the 11th century onwards at the moment we seem to have a very nice face on the inside but a very raggedy face on the outside this wall as it stands is simply not wide enough to stand more i look at it the more i feel that maybe these long walls might have an inner leaf that's stone and then you've got a turf bank effectively providing mass to make sure that the stone walls inside don't spread any rod it doesn't still give me great gauze for optimism that we've actually got a corner come on sweetheart it's almost halfway through day two and we've just started to lift the first of our skeletons from matt's trench quite delicious there's a little bit of newborn little bit of osteophytes in there that's just damaged while it's being in the ground there so is that aging that that yeah it's probably age related mix decided this is a prime candidate for carbon dating as it lies just inside the outer ditch suggesting it was already here when the grave was dug but more intriguing is the second burial in the trench containing the skull of a child or youth because this one has been cut through by the inner ditch meaning this ditch is later than the burial and this poses something of an archaeological conundrum are the ditches of two different dates or are the burials oh oh wow oh that is wonderfully preserved there's something there that looks like it could be here on the other side of the site the kissed burial in helena and raksha's trench is causing a stir for a very different reason that's the most incredible thing i've ever seen that must be here in london you have lead coffins that keep it as airtight as possible and there's lots of preservation of soft tissue and hair but this is quite unusual isn't it well it is but then again if you look at it you've got fairly similar circumstances in that you have just got air within here it's been kept at probably a fairly constant temperature it's not been getting hot and cold and hot and cold there's no soil lying over the top of it so you've almost created the similar kind of circumstances but over a much longer period of time in a stone coffin hare just doesn't normally survive in burials especially a thousand year old ones and this is a first for everyone on time team have you ever seen this before not in anything of this day no this has just come from the topsail just above this grave we found can you see along there oh my god but there's no time for a congratulatory group hug because an equally jaw-dropping find has just turned up in matt's trench get it there believe it or not these faint marks could belong to one of the earliest forms of writing in the british isles ogum basically it's an irish script which comes across the irish sea into the isle of man galloway wales cornwall gets used to record memorials or often just references to important people do you think it could be associated with the grave could it be a memorial stone or part of the grave slab well i think so yeah because i mean the straight edge along the side there is just like the grave slabs that we had on the other grave there and this grape has has been disturbed was trench were originally looking for two ditches i think i'm actually standing on one of them here and it seems to chop through that if it is from the grave then that's exciting as well because the the other stones that we have are um pillar stones which may have been near the site of a burial um but not actually in a burial like this i think we'll know more when we when we know what it said we're now going to have to track down a celtic writing specialist to see if we really have discovered some organ meanwhile the rest of the investigation continues stuart's still trying to work out how the keel and its increasingly impressive cemetery fit into the landscape he's discovered that this road beside the keel is only 200 years old and gives a false impression of our site we actually need to be looking at a much bigger area so gfiz fresh from finding those fantastic graves keep going and now surveying the road and the new field to see what exactly is going on helen have you ever seen anything like that before well i've seen them in books and i've seen the odd one in a museum but i never thought i'd see one actually newly discovered i mean i don't think one of these has been found for donkeys years somebody said oh we've got an organ stone i thought oh great big boulder with cuts down the side when i saw that that's more like a sort of practice piece it's more like somebody learning to do it you know like this morning we're going to you're going to write your name and address inaugural rights and this is the result yeah it looks more like that like a trial piece than than a message really i see what you mean yes it does i don't feel 100 convinced about it to be honest i'm not going to allow you to diminish my excitement any longer i thought essentially i thought this was a brand new fabulous artifact yes extremely important francis scribble it that's equally important if it's somebody actually learning to produce the language for the career and going off making gravestones that'd be fantastic teaches us more about it than any actual formal finished thing ever could you'd rather find a novice monk scribblings than leaves right this is i think this is the find of matt's life hopefully an email of victor's transcription will land in an ogum expert in box very shortly and will get a definitive analysis look this is working we got the wall coming along here and at last we've had a breakthrough on the keel well that's where we predicted because if you remember from that corner to the middle of the altar was two meters and another two meters from the middle of the altar oh you've got a stick i've got a stick bingo yeah and that that is it that is it running long keels tend to have a standard ratio of width to length and this means we can now target our efforts onto the missing wall one two three four five we should be about there yeah i tell you what if it is a boundary it will indicate that they knew exactly where the middle of the building was when they put that stone up but he slapped back in the middle good point very good point yeah all we have to do now is prove the wall is there let's get on with it oh and find the chapel door that so far eluded us over in matt's trench mick's become intrigued by the ditch that's cut through one of the burials this kissed was there with a barrel in it and then it was dug into when this ditch was put through and that's why we've only got half of it and they bung the balance back in the corner yeah guys i've got some news for you we have now got uh an email from dr ross trench jellicle yes yes who's one of the preeminent specialists absolutely in ogham writing and he says that it is definitely ogham right it is 11th to 12th century 12th century tradition and it's part of the norse tradition wow wow what does it say he doesn't know yet all right okay have you ever found any album writing before no well you wouldn't most of us haven't done we and it's first for you too oh crikey yes i mean that's it's a sort of find of a decade at least isn't we're now more determined than ever to get a translation by the end of the dig i reckon looking at that she looks like she might be somewhere between 25 and 35 from her tooth wear patterns as for our other outstanding find well it's now too late in the day to lift the body in helen's trench so we're preparing to cover it and protect it until tomorrow morning it's that kind of stuff that if you breathe on it it's gonna it's gonna go isn't it it's so delicate oh there's another stone there but phil's now confirmed the size of the keel and with the last scrapings of an already fantastic day he's made one final discovery are you getting on there phil typical of you to come in here just at the right minute and it hey you didn't sniff it did you you hadn't got the door of you well i might have really well look we've got a gap in here very narrow true but on this side look we've got this big stone in there and surely that's going to be far too narrow to put a doorway in it's always structurally not very good idea to have a door or a window right in the corner is it i know that man but i didn't build it no no no clearly not no and you don't think that gap there's wide enough next to that stone too you'd have to go in sideways you wouldn't you really yeah what a day it's been under here is the rarest of archaeological finds a piece of plaited human hair that's probably at least a thousand years old and also today we've come up with another of the rarest of archaeological finds a piece of slate with some viking writing on it but still at the center of our site is this our keel chapel and our prime job tomorrow is to lift all this stone and see if we can find a way of dating it and we've got just one day left beginning of day three here in the isle of man where we're trying to unpick the early history of the mount murray golf club and look at this amazing find it's plaited human hair probably at least a thousand years old so rare a find that none of our archaeologists have ever experienced it in the ground before but that's only one element of the extraordinary archaeology we've come across over the last two days the centerpiece of which is this keel building although quite frankly after two days it still looks to me just like a mound of stones phil do you actually know what you're doing here yes tony have every reason to know exactly what i'm doing then what are you doing the fact is that what we did yesterday was we've managed to define the extent of the keel what we've got to do now is answer specific questions and the specific questions we've got to address is the detail of the construction of the altar and the significance of the altar so we'll be looking at the east end and we also still want to resolve where the doorway is so we will be going down at the west end as well the other problem we've got is that we don't really still have any useful dating evidence and around this kill there's a little enclosure and we think that the ditch around that is a good place to look for that and the air inside it so we're going to take a trench from the edge of the present excavation down over that ditch around it hopefully to get some material right close to the keel and in the in the ditch so it will take in the ditch and the anomaly outside and so one final trench goes in over one final feature on this already breathtaking site where the quality and significance of the archaeology has created an incredible buzz among the archaeologists including some who should know better so it's almost no surprise that just under the top soil in raksha's new trench we uncover another stone-lined grave or kissed yep you do get your geophysics right sometimes don't you you just dig it we now have a series of clear targets where we can use all the archaeological and scientific techniques at our disposal are you sort of feeling for the vibes and then there's the trench that seems to work on another more emotional level isn't it funny that we've all been so galvanized by this hair it's no older than the bones no younger than the bones but somehow the bones are a dead body but hair's a person isn't it well it's something that's really recognizable to an individual it's something you notice about people when you're looking at them you look at their face you look at their eyes you look at their hair and that's it's because it's plaited as well you can still see what it would have looked like it's not a skeleton it's not a grave it's a person i'm actually terrified here it's all going to fall apart right in front of you all the problem is that although it looks quite robust what happens when here decays is it sort of gets like a almost like a cortex a hard outer shell around it and it looks fine but inside it's absolutely porous all structures gone so it can easily just compress and fall apart just crumble as you lift it yeah do you think it was specifically laid out like this for the burial normally a platter it's a single plaque would lie behind your head and that really does look like it's been pulled around and laid over her right shoulder while she when she was placed in the grave yeah to hold this one bit in place there we go it's wedging on just need to work it a little bit jackie there's also something about the way it's so coiled and curled that makes it so human doesn't it coming up should i take it you up again there but it was the radiocarbon date of the skeleton that made the survival of this hair even more incredible the body was much older than we initially thought this young woman was buried here fourteen hundred years ago making this sixth century burial the earliest christian grave ever found on the island any progress on this doorway andy well i don't know phil i think i think possibly things are starting to resolve themselves we've got a door reveal here and i think this big slab here is our other door reveal but it's fallen at some point the other interesting thing is that we've actually we've actually found a little rivet good lord now whether that's out of the door i'm really not sure it's a bit on the small side but it is effectively our first proper find at it well it is by establishing the position of the door we now have the footprint of the keel and that means ray sand can start to build his 3d reconstruction of the chapel i suppose if we had the buttressing of this earth on his side we'd only need it on both sides anyway we can keep the gable ends clear yeah it relies on a mass of turf and earth on the outside to hold everything up and just provide mass and and stability where i've seen that before has been in viking age farmsteads and if that's the case then it's a slight inkling to this being a viking age keel rather than say you know an earlier thing that predates viking invasion we now believe this chapel was built around the early 11th century when the viking income has converted to christianity that ties in perfectly with the date of the ogum script we're hoping to translate and now thanks to raksha's trench we've got an idea how the viking keel fitted into this landscape mick one ditch around this field yeah one drive crikey yeah that's good and once we got that we're extended oh all right second one so does that mean each of these blobs on your geophysics is like to be a grave then looking that way well that's very useful isn't it just absolutely fantastic so these are all out these are outside that big ditch so we've almost got a zone of symmetry or something that's brilliant not bad so the chapel stood in its own defined enclosure with burials beyond but it turns out the archaeology on this site isn't all from a single period all the burials we carbon dated had results centered around 590 a.d 400 years before the viking keel was built and as there are no burials in the center of the cemetery this would suggest that there'd been a sacred focus to this site long before the vikings arrived perhaps a wooden chapel they eventually rebuilt in stone and now work carried out by stuart and henry suggests that the site was once much bigger from your earlier geophysics john it was clear we had a d-shaped enclosure defined by these two ditches on on this side of the road but from the looking at the the land it's quite clear there's a hill that goes like that and we're sort of expecting to see these go all the way around weren't we i've surveyed that the air and i've created this 3d model of it so exactly what you're saying there's if you follow that the edge of that ditch down you trace that round on this edge of slope all the way around here and even joining right back up to those those ditches all the way around here right around the back and following up so you expect that to be a large oval enclosure it's got a clear and distinct identity that hill hasn't it later agriculture may have destroyed any trace of a ditch in the next field but gfiz have found enough evidence to indicate the spiritual roots of this site lie much further back in time and then look that ring at that point there that's very distinctive isn't it it's very similar to these others on the other side of the road if it's part of a group yeah look at the position i'll actually create this on top of the 3d as well just look at where that is right on the top of the hill that's a very distinct position though i mean that that's a classic place for a a bronze age burial mound isn't it yeah well if you if you're living down below you'd see that as a lump on the horizon it's perfect so what we might have then is a hill with prehistoric burials on that at a later date has the church keel on the one side quite possible and it's a theory that's now backed up by archaeological evidence just discovered by matt we've got the outer ditch going around here right we found the cup for that it misses that grave completely so there's no relationship between the grave and the cupboard i did get out the top of it this huge quite well preserved chunk of prehistoric pottery oh strew so that ditch could be could be bronzer yep absolutely that's a bronze age bit of pottery have you been able to show that these two parallel ditches are the same date now oh no in fact completely the opposite completely honest the inner ditch yeah cuts through one of the lintel graves up there so the inner ditch appears to be later than these these graves which would put a good couple of thousand years between each ditch the outer ditch seems to follow the boundary of the bronze age burial ground that was then later reused as a christian cemetery but we now believe this in a ditch was dug around the same time as the 18th century road to protect the remains of the keel and yet they're parallel well the only way that will work is if the people who are surveying that ditch in could either see this ditch or a bank going with it and related it to it yeah that's the only way they could do isn't it yeah absolutely i've certainly got to the bottom of the side by the altar and i'm pretty much getting towards the base of the front of it it's a surface but it's characterized by masses and masses of quartz pebbles so do you think they're a surface as opposed to offerings inside the out or beside the altar that might be some sort of a floor so that's much more architectural which is i think what's actually happening in here as well they seem to be using again these angular bits of quartz and they're putting them around the inside of the kiss and they're formed like a little box and inside it was a lot of of the soil you can see here it's charcoal flat brown but it comes also down onto this very yellow clay that's where i'm stopping it's almost like instead of using like a wooden box and putting it in there they've used these to construct the box to contain something like relics now one thing that's been nagging me since day one is that do you think that that stone's got anything to do with your box what what i can say is that the dimensions fit what it would actually slide in here literally just slide right here and if this keel became less important over time those relics may have been taken somewhere else that would explain why this is being disturbed and then sort of put into the wall area that we can see now in this collapse well logically i suppose if they were going to amp that out i gotta take that out first it would be the first thing to go yeah yeah what venerated objects were in this quartz-lined box we can now only guess at but they lay at the east end of a chapel where priests once worshipped on a quartz floor and prayed at a carefully constructed stone altar and all this inside the stone and turf-walled keel the vikings built on a 500 year old christian cemetery which itself occupied a burial ground that had already dominated the bank's landscape for over a millennium after three days hard work we've now got only one mystery outstanding and it just happens to concern one of the most important discoveries we've ever made all day the team have been on tenterhooks to see if we might get a translation of the ogum script and uh helen and dawn have been on the phone to scotland yeah kate forsyth at university of glasgow she's the national ogame expert um and she can actually read it it's gaelic and it dates to the 11th century and gaelic is of course the language of the scottish isles and of ireland and eventually of the isle of man what it seems to be is this word apparently means corner i'll just leave you with that corner and then i'll go into the more exciting stuff yeah this is back for corner now this says okoy cat which apparently means 50. and this says which means apparently group gang throng maybe group of warriors this stays to the 11th century which is a really interesting period in the history of the isle of man and in 1079 a man called godrid kraven um captured the island and established the kingdom of man and the isles and he had been a mercenary at the battle of stamford bridge in 1066 fighting for the norwegian king and you know he establishes that the kingdom of this island um and and the idea that this record 50 warriors potentially that came here in the 11th century into a small community i mean that would have had a serious impact look at his face i'm still stunned there's so much to take in there's so many possibilities about what it might mean and and there's the whole issue of who is it who's speaking this or writing it yeah it's the first time that we get that language here on the isle of man so early as far as i'm aware of so this could be the first writing in gaelic yeah it's been found on the island yeah and this is almost a casual personal bit of of stuff and for me that makes it that much more important that it that it's it's a it's somebody speaking to us almost directly that's incredible who carved this message and what they truly meant by these words will keep archaeologists debating for years gang but we've discovered so much about a site that only three short days ago was just a landmark on a golf course it's amazing to think that in the past you might have seen early christians here and viking warriors and medieval priests all of whom left rare pieces of evidence and maybe we've shed some light on a history that began to be written in these words a thousand years ago you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 492,877

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, Christian buildings, Finds on the Fairway, Isle of Man, keeills

Id: kW3UQEDQ0zQ

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020