Hermit Harbour (Looe Island, Cornwall) | Series 16 Episode 9 | Time Team

over there's lou island off the dramatic coast of cornwall and to say it's got a romantic history it's an understatement [Music] you can't move the stories of shipwrecks and pirates and monks and ghosts and treasure maps pilgrims frequently lost their lives in these waters on the trip to a chapel on the island which has now vanished and legend has it that jesus christ himself played on this very beach when he was a little boy it would have been a great draw for early believers but true or not could this island have witnessed the very first rumblings of christianity in britain this is going to be a somewhat challenging time team because the tides only give us five working hours a day on the island and marshalling the team is no easy task look at this he's just half a boat look what's he doing flynn oh no so do you reckon we're gonna fight oh yeah a story of two chapels in the medieval period they belong to glastonbury abbey the important somerset monastery famous for cultivating the legends of king arthur and joseph of arimathea and according to local legend it was joseph of arimathea who brought jesus christ to liu island and left him to play in the safety of these beaches while he went off to do business with cornish tin merchants if people really did believe that jesus played here when he was a lad that would have got people flocking here wouldn't it oh yeah that would have driven a whole pilgrimage industry of people coming out here to seed you know and the support structure for it it's just that sort of thing that people travel around to to visit so you're already championing the bit now aren't you well of course i am i mean the point is that the time and tide are the two things that wait for no man we have got to get off of this island by early afternoon and we've only got half our diggers because the others are i don't know if you can see just around the headland there up on that hillside what are they doing there mick there's another chapel over there halfway up the hill and they're said to be the same size one said to be a copy of the other one but the mainland chapel has been excavated already hasn't it well that's right i mean partially dug at least i mean in the 1930s some local cornish archaeologists went in there there were slightly eccentric ideas they were desperate that it should be pre-norman and they kind of labeled it celtic what do we mean by celtic it's a shorthand term in the west country for something that's after the romans but before the normans but of course we don't have anglo-saxons in this area so it's a short-term term for that dark age period and it is a period that you are specifically interested in the point is on that chapel over there there were deposits there that were not actually dug so we could actually get some dating evidence there as far as we know this chapel site here has never been dug and we should get some date in here if we could date either or both of them that would be incredibly important [Music] before we can date our chapel on the island we need to find it and there are some pretty good indications where it stood a bit of a clue here and there are the clues looks like this is the east wall here right north wall going going up there and then stewart thinks he can see its footprint in the earth works and there are maps dating back to the 16th century showing a chapel right on top of the hill well that should be our excavated area in between these strings so if you want to start stripping the turf off of that that'll be fine thank you so with time in short supply phil's confident enough to get going without geophys results i don't know there might be a wall here watch this hard yep hard hard yeah soft again let's see if you've got something about there isn't it there's so many of these stones sticking through the soil here a bit of a clue aren't they you're an observant sort of chaplain the chapel we're looking for on the island was dedicated to saint michael as was the one on the mainland in fact medieval pilgrims are known to have flocked to sites dedicated to st michael all the way down the cornish coast so michael seems pretty popular who was he well he's uh an angel he is the commander-in-chief of god's armies and so you have to imagine him and them up in the skies keeping us all safe from the devil and his guerrillas and he's also very important to us personally when we die he is the security guard who frisks our souls as we go through from check-in to the departure lounge and make sure that we're suitable to go on the heavenly flight why is he important here in lou well it's a hilly island it's the sort of place you'd want to have a chapel of some michael so i think that the monks of glastonbury were trying to develop this as a rival place to michael's mountains and michael's mount was doing very well with pilgrims and they were bringing in a lot of offerings to the monks who ran that island and grastonbury was great into what you might call religious staging i i sometimes think of glastonbury as the first english theme park they they would know how to get a cult of michael off the ground down here documents suggest that the first thing glastonbury did when they acquired the site was to build a brand new chapel on the mainland so that pilgrims could celebrate michael's day without losing their lives on the crossing to the island but here's the puzzle because when the site was excavated in the 1930s by croft andrew he thought that glastonbury just added a chancel to an already existing chapel but the second world war cut short his excavations so we're gonna pick up where he left off back on the island we've already found some possible chapel walls just sketching roughly where that shaped trench is going and stewart's nose for earthworks has sniffed out what he thinks is a knave for the pilgrims and a chancel for the altar you see phil's getting a bit of a wall coming out through there which rather suggests that that's probably the first block with perhaps that added on to it right mick's theory about the island chapel is a bit like croft andrews theory that the monks at glastonbury added a chancel to a pre-existing nave in the mainland chapel and andrew thought the original mainland native was celtic so oliver crichton's been looking for clues as to why he did just looking closely at this plan here from the croft andrews excavations in the 30s look at these two post holes i'm sure those are worth looking at and they're right next to what are marked on the plan as a set of steps running up here up the slope so why don't we put a little trench to take in those post holes and let's see if there's another one and if you're really lucky be an early feature that would be a very nice thing to find it's safe to say we can expect some rather complicated archaeology relating to different phases of chapels on both our sides so what do you think the timeline might be the very early what they call celtic chapel would be wood and we just find post homes then what if we're lucky we find post holes and then we get a stone building on top of that which is pretty small and pretty featureless and then somebody comes along and revamps that with some nice architectural pieces perhaps doorways chancellor arch windows in the 12th century that would be my guess as to what we'd see on the site the structures themselves could be the best clue we have when it comes to dating because chapels don't have the domestic rubbish that we usually rely on to date buildings hey phil that trench is coming along yeah i mean it looks like we got the beginnings of a wall tony i mean we always knew that there were those big stones just immediately underneath the turf but now we've got it stripped off you can see there's a nice edge there but we really need to be able to get down to confirm that that is a war we certainly can't date it but we can begin to suggest that it is a chapel jackie was showing me some boner earlier on what you got jackie the bits that are really of interest are these pieces here now these are bits of human femur and it's quite a large individual you can see these ridges running down here this is where the big thigh muscles attach and they really are quite rugged so this is quite a large individual with quite chunky thighs so i've got a mystery of a big thighed person that's somewhere on this island at some time and he might not be the only burial here because human bones are said to have been revealed as the cliff faces have eroded glastonbury acquired this land sometime in the 12th century and legal documents suggest that there was already a chapel on the island at this time they also tell us who glastonbury sent to set up their new pilgrim site we find that one of the witnesses of the charter was elias then prior of the same place and his fellow monk john and this is wonderful because we there have the staff of the little priory of glastonbury abbey at just two monks because you have to have two monks as a quorum to form a monastery of a feeling the prior elias and brother john would have found themselves with quite a challenge on their hands setting up a money-making pilgrim industry on this somewhat inhospitable island even today if the wind swings to the east the island can find itself cut off from the mainland for days on end so with storms forecast some of our team have volunteered to rough it here after the rest of us have left for the day so the work can continue whatever the weather this is where the archaeologists who are staying on the island are going to sleep lovely bunk beds made out of driftwood from a malty ship that founded off the island somewhere it's lovely here isn't it the toilet facilities you don't want to know about what a shame that i'm going to have to stay in a warm hotel on the mainland but there is something really magical about this place which was recently left to the cornwall wildlife trust who are doing their best to restore it to its former glory or at least john is because you're the warden here aren't you yes yes do you stay here all year round mainly in the summer but i've been here a few winters yes becomes harsh where you live now do you reckon that's the best place to live on the island without doubt it's sheltered from the prevailing winds you can have a southwesterly gale and it's you don't feel it there's deep soil here for growing crops yes it would be lovely to think that our archaeologists are going to be staying where the monks once lived [Music] at the chapel on the top of the island it looks like we've found a potential north wall and ian's put in a new trench looking for the west end but the tides are going out then we've got to leave it's a really frustrating moment it's 2 20. normally we'd be only halfway through day one but we've got to get the boat back in 10 minutes and just leaving tracy and matt and a few of the others to keep digging phil jackie we've got to go now i'm afraid already already come on roy come on cheers [Music] while we're gone our island team will be trying to discover more about the chapel that enticed pilgrims across these treacherous waters do you think pilgrims really did drown on the way out here or do you reckon it was just a photo i think there's a good chance it really happened there was a court case in 1290 where they got a jury of 12 local men and they said that in days of old when people wanted to visit the island on st michael's day they were at risk of losing their lives in the stormy sea when was some michael's day well there were three of them there was there's one on the 5th of may then there's the famous one we all know about 29th of september and then there's one even later in the year in october three of them they could have been carnage couldn't it tim you're the local ferryman you know this place more than anybody else do you think people actually could have drowned on that little journey just out from the mainland to here well i think it's quite possible yeah we're going to be all right today i hope so so do i on the other side of the water we found steps coming down the hillside into the chapel on the mainland chunky stone walls and a floor surface carved out of the rock face it seems to be deliberately terraced into the hillside at exactly the same height as the island chapel isn't it weird looking back at our chapel from this chapel it is and yet this is strangely familiar i mean when you look at the size of this chapel and you think about the earthworks over there they are very very similar on both sides we're trying to find out whether the chancels were put in as part of the glastonbury revamp so where are you well our trench is actually running all the way across here so have you found the skeleton unfortunately we haven't found any skeletons and we haven't even found it at the grave cuts either what about this wall well yes and no can you see this what looks like a wall running here there's almost like face stones coming through well they're actually floating on top of this dirt we need to get to grips with this wall to find out whether there was a knave here before glastonbury added a chancel and bridge and oliver have now found some post holes that might prove croft andrews theory that this nave was celtic it would have been a hell of a job cutting through that rock wouldn't it absolutely and i haven't excavated them yet but having stuck my trowel down they're at least the steep so do we think we've got our earlier chapel our early timber chapel if you're very very lucky on the other hand of course they could be late they could be poster solution for all we know yeah but we've also got this other new feature that just come up which may support an earlier structure um can you see down here we've got this wee gully and it's been actually cut into the stone it's at a right angle and that could well be a timber slot for an earlier building and that's in line with those post holes as well isn't it absolutely it's funny you know it's all rocking here with things cut into it on the other side of the trench it's all soil and build up a chapel of two halves by the end of day one we've established that whoever built the mainland chapel went to a lot of trouble to put it halfway up a hillside instead of on the top and it seems to be pointed very deliberately at the island but was it built as a mirror image of the island chapel we'll find out tomorrow day two in lieu in cornwall where we're trying to work out what was here before glastonbury abbey attempted to create two major pilgrimage sites one on the island and one on the mainland yesterday on the mainland we thought we might have found evidence of a wooden chapel in the form of a beam slot and two impressive post holes hacked into are kind the rock marks you can see very clearly there and there and there the alternative is that they're part of the later stone chapel it's a working great thing it is i just try to think what is there that sits in the west corner of a church um the western gallery is something that was suggested but i only know of post medieval post medieval in danger what we desperately need is some dating evidence it's just really mattering signs well keep doing [Music] nowadays lou harbour's the starting point for a trip to the island but it seems too far away from the mainland complex to have been used by medieval monks and pilgrims and now stewart has identified a more direct route between the mainland and the island even today twice a year people family still can physically walk across that gap at very low tide it's sort of a pilgrimage but there is the ingredients here for a medieval harbour a harbor literally here now if you look out over there and see how jagged those rocks are they would really sort of rip the bottom off any boat that tried to land even at high tide and it's the same over here but in this gap in between in this bay you've got these nice smooth rocks here they wear this big sandy patches that's right so you could you literally could bring a boat in here at high tide this is the place where monks and pilgrims embarked you might expect to find lodgings nearby and only a short distance away is a wall which croft andrew called the monk's house when he excavated the site in the 30s so based on the geo fizz we're putting a new trench in to find out if this was where our two monks lived or even a place where pilgrims could have sought accommodation if you if you look at that wall there yeah that's the kind of thing that we're looking for and it's not pretty dissimilar to what we're finding down here is it on our way to the island the wind turns on us and we're getting a taste of just how difficult this crossing could have been it's 10 past 10 and last the tides high enough for us to get back out to the island again but hopefully matt and the rest of the team have been digging for the last few hours tony to matt can you hear me turn it to matt what have you been doing since we left well we also put in a couple of hours working no we got down to the beach we found a kayak we went out for kayaking and i had a different sea as well it was absolutely beautiful i'm so pleased for you mate see you in a bit despite appearances our island team has made a lot of progress since we left tracy's exposed more of the north wall of the chapel and matt's been trying to find the east wall we've got through the rubble oh wow yeah oh god that looks like fuel in the west end ian's cleared a lot of rubble and found something a bit odd is that what it's a big lump of iron but god knows how old it is and all that before hitting the beach proper freezing tough life our boats made it safely today but the story goes the pilgrims boats were wrecked on a regular basis on the perilous rocks around the island and even today these rocks can cause problems if there are going to be wrecked here we've got the perfect team to help us find them we've got mark and johnny here from the royal navy how are you going to approach this task mark well first of all we'll go for a dive out in the bay behind us and then the two guys that live down in the boat will do the second dive but one of them's got a bit of a hangover so he wants to go second round second yes good luck thank you thank you so equipped with our underwater camera the navy dive team sets off to look for medieval wrecks [Music] pilgrims who made it safely to the island chapel believed that saint michael would reward their bravery with time off purgatory and were just beginning to uncover the nave where they would have stood phil i think i might have piece of in situ flooring here good lord yeah and it that is exactly the same sort of surface that we had on the mailing chapel yesterday that was was a mortared surface just like this and it's patches directly on the natural bedrock and this wall too or like this wall here so what what angle are we on there where's where's the north oh hang on here we go i'll tell exactly what angle we are hanging on east west it doesn't get much better than that doesn't it yeah much better than that this wall's convincing because chapels generally face the east often orientated to the sunrise of their saints day now we can really get our teeth into working out what it might have looked like 1590s all these lovely ships that's amazing because this is is showing the disposition of the english and and spanish fleets at the armada it's a story map to some extent but you can see along here we've got what's called st michael's island at that stage but it still shows a chapel it depicts it with a tower but i think you have to take that kind of a pinch of salt and we've got a a map of 1539 this is is the earliest depiction of the chapel on the island there's quite a lot of detail isn't there you can see what looks like a large window there and then something like a weather or a bell at this end what's worrying me is that in 1539 we know that our chapel on the mainland was still standing and being used but it's not there that's one of the problems with maps used for navigation and if that chapel wasn't especially visible from the roots they were using along the coastline they didn't bother to map it this image of the island chapel suggests that it could have been a single cell building a much simpler design than we were expecting we've got the wall now it is bang on east west right now the interesting thing now is what is happening in here because we've got all this these stones are mortared in so this is actually masonry right now what i don't know and i'm trying to resolve is whether or not that wall comes along and turns in other words we're actually in the northeast corner of the chapel or whether it's actually a big sort of swelling to take a buttress or a big column that might support a chancel arch like the big stones we've got over here in fact exactly and now you see down there might had another wall yeah now we did wonder at one stage whether or not that might be the south wall of the chapel but now we've actually cleaned it up and looked at it you actually see that it's on a slightly different alignment it's south west to northeast right so i'm rather hopeful if it worked out all right for me we'll have a wall coming here be the northeast corner of the chapel yeah this is the chapel that would be a separate building outside it if phil's right the island chapel could be much smaller than the mainland chapel so the theory that they were mirror images is looking a bit shaky but it's early days ian hasn't found the west end of the chapel yet although he has found plenty of other things well i'm plunging down into this deep dark hole and it seems to be full of victorian rubbish but at this end we've got this huge wall this revetment down on this side that doesn't look victorian to me i mean that looks like a prehistoric burial chamber or barrow or something like that the whole thing does look a bit like a sort of big barrow on the top here doesn't it well that wasn't in the script but if it is prehistoric people could have been living and dying on the island for thousands of years and there is evidence that somebody was trading here before our medieval monks arrived these are actually anchor stones they use for anchoring boats stones like these have been used certainly since the iron age right through to the post-roman period not for the big ships but for the little ones like the lighters and that they're used to bring stuff ashore do you really think that these anchors imply that there was trade going on here a couple of thousand years ago well we know that there was a roman amphora found between the island and the site on the mainland digging and we know that there was a post room a fifth and sixth entry piece of amphora found on the island itself so those are foreign pieces of pottery which has had to be brought by ship onto the island here if mediterranean people were trading here in the post-roman period this could be the basis for the joseph of arimathea story and this post-roman period was the time when christianity was really taking hold in cornwall vividly dramatized by the legends of the cornish saints they tended to imagine them coming to cornwall from elsewhere usually wales or ireland sometimes miraculously and saint ia who is the patron saint of some dives came over on a leaf believe it or not uh they also thought that they had helped create the landscape that they'd they'd opened holy wells and they'd killed local giants so they're very local to the landscape who were they these saints we don't know really who they were because they lived before the age that documentation starts but the likelihood is that they were people who founded churches or were clergy of churches or people who were buried at churches so if there was a saint associated with the site he'd be likely to be buried within one of our chapels and on the mainland bridge has found something suspiciously burial-like in front of the altar we've got these pitch stones here there's a hole isn't that just that that's exactly it to me that looks very much like a burial it's east west right in the middle of the building the chancel arch would have been above us so it could potentially be a really really good find great stuff a burial in this position is likely to be somebody important to the chapel one of our monks or even a cornish saint meanwhile we've put a new trench in on the island to see if there's any evidence that this is where the monks lived but that's not quite the whole story for the very first time on time team we've got a treasure map and this you're rather embarrassed by this aren't you this is the trench that we've put in in order to find the treasure john explain well there was actually an american time team fan that called us to come and do a survey here somehow he got hold of this map with this cross and this is supposed to be the site of some treasure and actually jimmy got fantastic results with the radar and this is what we found what do you think it might be is it natural well i don't think it's natural you've got the two edges you've got the end there it's about as thick as that spade i mean it could be the top of a a kiss burial or something medieval or or even a standing stone which has fallen over all being buried i mean that's the other possibility that's what we thought is that a sack of doubloons you've got down there oh don't stop it stop it the tides have suddenly gone out and we're gonna have to leave early but just before we go ian's got the earliest piece of pottery we've had in either chapel it's quite crude and handmade so what's all the data system probably the late 1100s into the early 1200s no crikey starts considerably early isn't it this is when glastonbury was trying to get their cult of michael going but admiring it nearly gets us stranded thankfully it's not long before we're on our way to the mainland but it's not so hard to imagine monks and pilgrims falling foul of the jagged rocks where our team of divers from the navy have been filming their search for wrecks how'd you get on lots of wildlife um some seals fish crabs but unfortunately no wreckage you swam with the seals we did swim with seals um it was beautiful never done that before never first time so it's all worthwhile but no wreckage nothing at all why do you think that is do you think that little passage of water actually is much less dangerous than people have said and there haven't been the wrecks down there that we thought no not at all um there's a lot of rocks down there and it does get very shallow at low tide so i'm sure there have been uh wreckage there before but um just the amount of wildlife and uh seaweed that's grown you we wouldn't see anything at least just went with us yeah that's well worthwhile yeah definitely that could be that could be the end up at the mainland chapel jack is casting an expert eye on what looks like a very important kissed burial let's feel a bit different actually to the other side of that so let's clean that up and see what he looks like kiss are stone-lined graves used from prehistoric times right through to the medieval period so they're difficult to date unless there are bones inside have you found the end of this burial yet well no we haven't really yet we've extended the trench in the hope that we would but it's just sort of eluding us at the moment jackie we're blindly going on about this burial but we haven't seen any bones is it definitely a burial um it looks quite convincing at this end you can see we've got uprights on this side and this side and then there's one at the end here now that's very narrow so that would make that the foot end i mean it's quite these look like quite large capping stones they look fairly convincing but it's just finding the other end of it if it is a burial a radiocarbon date on a bone sample could help us work out if he was one of glastonbury's monks or possibly even a cornish saint so day three is looking very exciting beginning of day three here at lou in cornwall we've got a chapel on the island over there we've got another one at the top of the hill and this morning we're gonna open the stone-lined burial we found yesterday [Music] one day left and frustratingly the tides won't let us out to the island for a couple of hours yet jack is already hard at work on the possible grave in the mainland chapel because whoever lies inside it should be an important figure in our story it's all a little bit strange strange in what way it's very narrow but i think actually it's it's now it looks narrow because of the pressure of material pushing down on here you can see this stone here is angled i suspect it was originally further over there but i think we might find that there's something underneath these i'm probably gonna have to take those out where do you think the end might be then jeffy well you can see how the soil changes completely there so i think it actually could be right over here a bit smaller isn't it it is i mean that's the one thing that i'm a little concerned about is how short it appears to be i think we need a bit more off down here what else might it be then given its position within the church it could be a storage area reliquies although women it's usually some kind of box or other kind of container in which you would store things like the bones of saints in your church for people especially for the pilgrims to come to um but i might expect that to be slightly more rectangular and shorter than this one is this is what i think it's most likely to be a grave but we can never be 100 sure until we get to the bottom and see if we can find some bones further down the hill raksha has found the missing wall of the monk's house that we were looking for yesterday and it's a pretty substantial building we've got lovely coursing down this side and we've got another one here you can actually see this line going across here so that's the inside of the building the standing remains show a two-story building croft andrew found two small bedrooms for our monks and we found the back wall of a refactory which would have been used by pilgrims waiting to get to the island on feast days when they really did make a day of it what would they have done with their day well the religious element would have centered on a mass set at about nine or ten in the morning either on the island chapel if you could get to it or else at the mainland chapel and then after mass was over around about 11 o'clock the rest of the day would be free for a jollification so you have to imagine it as being something like a little fair here with all the lou tradesmen selling food souvenirs games and that kind of thing so it wasn't just a serious occasion and in fact people criticized pilgrimages for the things that people got up to that they didn't alter like young men and young women going off together and the young women getting pregnant as a result and having an illegitimate baby was known as going on pilgrimage or going to jerusalem that really does put a different face on it doesn't it it does indeed pilgrimages were not what you think they were aside from getting up to no good if they couldn't get to the island pilgrims would have attended services at the mainland chapel and maybe laid offerings at the altar where jack is beginning to have doubts about the kissed burial so it looks a bit more like a box now than a coffin isn't it yes it seems to stop about that it's about a meter long but i'm gonna see if we've got anything surviving under these slipped side stones now if it was a box but there's nothing in it does that make any sense well it would fit in with the idea of being a storage area for a reliqui or perhaps even loose bones that were held in a cloth bag that have been subsequently removed these bones do you think they would have been saints bones were carted around the countryside from you know one end of the country to the other or it could have been one of the well-respected monks or abbots of the monastery so i mean it could have been at the dissolution for instance these these bones were removed and taken somewhere else perhaps in secret when henry viii closed all the monasteries yeah i mean they wanted to destroy a lot of these things so there may be no record of where they went well i don't think we've got anything in there this is an extraordinary find relics beneath the altar would have been displayed on feast days drawing pilgrims to this chapel to make offerings frustratingly the bones have long since been removed so we can't date it jackie i've got bone here but in a different part of the chapel bridge thinks she's found another burial and it's human part of the human foot bone you've got look to have more down there yeah there is a lot down here you can see it's ranging from here to about here yeah so that looks like it's in situ it's not moved anywhere so where's the grave card well i think that these two large stones here which end about here mark one side of it and what i've been thinking of was a wall here is actually marking the foot end of it which is interesting given that we've got that over there yeah it does look like that might be a head marker then yeah the next one along next one over croft andrew found a skeleton here didn't he he found two here but they're a much higher level can you see in the section here you can actually see where he took out this grave and then it also seems that he he took one from on top of this small wall here this gets better and better the small wall was glastonbury's chancel and this means that bridges burial could well be related to an earlier chapel and now oliver's convinced he's found it well the evidence we've got these two whacking great post holes in front of us but the killer piece of evidence is the fact that they align really nicely with the rock cut feature stretching off into the distance there and the fact that together they're on a different alignment the walls that we can see only by a couple of degrees but i think it's significant if oliver's right it means a wooden chapel was here before the glastonbury monks arrived and the exciting news is that if bridges burial is related to it a bone sample could actually date it and another thing we can kiss goodbye to the theory that glastonbury built the chapel from scratch to prevent pilgrims from losing their lives getting out to the island it's all getting pretty exciting over there apparently so we're going to leave a skeleton crew on the headland which is fairly appropriate i suppose and the rest of us are going over to see what's happening [Music] after we left it seems our archaeological hermits made the most of their island experience they've even been barbecuing limpets in a bid for authenticity but this morning they've been hard at it the big news is the mats found a burial carved into the bedrock ian thinks he's finally found the west wall of the chapel and tracy's cleaned up the possible standing stone so ah you've got a grave cut yeah this is it here look you can see cut into the shale going all the way along there this is the wider head end coming back down here do my eyes deceive me or is that a very big bone that is a very big shin bone there's his foot there um unfortunately no knee bone and no sign of a thigh yet do you think it might belong to the same person we found on the first day well in a way i hope not because that would mean the barrel's been really disturbed disturbed or not if he's buried inside the building he could be a significant figure in the chapel's history that's a really curious looking wall you've got there well yes but i did tell you yesterday that this was a crucial part of the site now we've got it cleaned up i think we can say that it's probably the buttress for the chancel arch because you see that the wall carries on and you see it's very very nicely plastered but i think what is interesting is that it's quite a complicated story because here you've got this plaster here and you can see the line of the wall continuing through here so i think that this stone is actually added on which implies to me that this is not just one chapel that was built and then that was it periodically it was refurbished it was strengthened it was modified it's a very very long story and part of that story the addition of the chancel is exactly the same as we found on the mainland but this isn't the only similarity it looks like matt's burial is in the same position as the reliqui in front of the altar if only our big boned man could tell us when he was buried because we're running out of time to work out just how long this story is but with a few hours left we're putting another trench in because stewart spotted a ditch running all around the top of the hill which might give us an idea of how long a chapel has stood here we're only just below the surface and already we've got some fines it's certainly medieval at the latest and probably earlier it is handmade just do a thorough spanner in the works that may influence my decision about the pop-ups this could actually be a ramana british shirt then so perhaps the origins of the island chapel go all the way back to roman times if not further this is such a typical time team trench on day one when ian started digging he came down on this mysterious stone structure can you see how it's kind of slanted here and they all thought um this could be a bronze age beehive can maybe with a burial inside it very exciting very very old but then as they came further down they realized that this was something that had been cut away that this was actually part of the chapel and who knows what was here maybe it was a supporting column maybe it was a little tower and it wasn't until today when ian finally discovered this mysterious semi-circle of stones with this strange staining on it that he realized what it was it's actually a victorian flagpole and he's got a find to prove it it makes you wonder what else ian can turn up before the end of the day meanwhile there are some exciting developments over the water we've removed the chancel wall to reveal the grave bridge found this morning and discovered it's potentially the earliest thing we found on the mainland the edge of the grave appears to be running along here and as you can see it's in a completely different alignment to this wall so it's obviously going to be much earlier than this but how how much earlier it's difficult to tell but what is interesting is that you see i saw these slates here now tracking them back to establish whether it is actually a floor and it looks like in this section starting to get masonry perhaps with a wall and that's more on the right alignment to be associated with the alignment of these burials but the other nice thing about that bit of flooring is it's at the same level that that reliquary boxes it looks like we're heading further back into the time of the cornish saints because the latest theory is that our burial and reliqui are from an even earlier chapel than the one oliver found which glastonbury probably revamped by adding a chancel and if so pilgrims could have been coming to pay their respects to relics in this box long before glastonbury's time meanwhile the island has turned into a hive of activity kerry is trying to lift the possible standing stone without much success and it's all going on in the oval enclosure where we've been pulling out a coin every eight minutes so far there are six jonathan that means one more coin and you've got another horde to your name you've got one beautiful coin here that you can clearly see the figurine of the goddess on the back back on the lawns the huge stone doesn't want to stand up so kerry is now burrowing under it it's smooth underneath so i don't think there's anything under there i think we can go for the standing stone exciting as this is it's undateable but it's better news in the oval enclosure where we've got our seventh coin this is now legally and officially a horde pretty good trench mick it is i think it's very interesting that the top layer's got this roman stuff in it because it suggests perhaps that that's the end of the life of the ditch and it's actually a lot earlier than that what prehistoric well it could be i mean it's an oval of course which is the sort of shape you'd get in prehistory and i wonder if it's not a prehistoric ditch around a prehistoric settlement somewhere on this hilltop with our little chapel plonked in the middle later on that's the intriguing thing they've then used the enclosure they're probably a slight ditch and bank and they've used that as the enclosure around the church that's fantastic all this is more evidence that the chapel had early origins and phil's beginning to get an idea of just what an enormous undertaking it was to construct a chapel on top of the island so i can't get over digging down any areas just how much they've used an actual geology to really make the chapel stand out look you've got solid bedrock over there and look i'm down over a meter down here no bedrock i think the ground must plummet away this war is right on the edge of the natural so they've been right on the top of the hill they could have seen the whole coastline and be seen as well i guess that's right but of course because they've they've sighted it here they've had to make massive foundations and they even splay out here to take the main thrust of the chancel it's fascinating it's a hell of a piece of engineering i'll tell you it must have been an awe-inspiring sight for pilgrims making the trip out to the chapel across the water the last three days have demonstrated just how unpredictable the seas can be because the tides are turning again but just before we go matt's found something very unusual some dating evidence from within the grave these are medieval shirts of pulp one's actually got a little spot of glazing so that helps me a little bit i think these are mid to late 13th century so how does that fit into the history of the island and this chapel nicholas well the late 13th century is when glastonbury is giving up this site and bringing the monks back but it's possible that this is one of the last monks or priors of the place and if it's not that it's the lord or lady of the manor it's clearly a very important grave it's being excavated out of the rockets at a pole position in the church and matt burial isn't alone just as we're packing up outside the west end of the chapel ian's found what looks like a kissed burial but you're going to be staying here anyway aren't you so will you let us know at some time what it was sure yes matt we've got to go like now okay let's go even as we're loading onto the boat another kissed burial emerges from under the south wall [Music] cheers it's beginning to look like this enclosure could have been a burial ground for thousands of years maybe even into prehistory over the last few days we've discovered that the story of our two chapels began long before glastonbury's monks arrived when lou island could well have been one of the earliest outposts of christianity and a chapel on the top would have been a beacon of hope for traders from the mediterranean crossing formidable seas sometime later another chapel was built on the mainland at the same height looking to the island with our reliquay box at the altar for pilgrims to visit and eventually in the 12th century glastonbury's monks rebuilt both the chapels as a sort of michael theme park over the last three days we've just scratched the surface of this magical island which has been a very special place going way back long before christianity [Music] to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and 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Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 266,541

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 16, time team season 16 episode 9, time team cornwall, time team looe island, looe island, cornwall, british history, british dig sites

Id: 6zYeKiKo3o8

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021