Hitler's Island Fortress | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

Montag i jersey's oldest castle sits high over gory harbour protected on three sides by the Sea built on a steep granite Bluff it dominates not only the beaches of western Jersey but also the approach to the Channel Islands from France entering the castle you passed through a formidable corridor of gates and courtyards overlooked all the way by eros lits gun platforms and battlements it was never supposed to be easy to get in but it's the natural defense of the terrain that's really going to cause the team a few headaches I mean that's a serious flow yeah that's slightly more vertical than I was expecting there's the first time you guys have run this machine over this kind of undulating grounds undulating take the slack EE 25000 quids worth a kit there's anybody done this before not on the slope this steep I don't think anybody's booking so to defeat her it's not til you get right up here at the top of the castle that you begin to appreciate why it was quite so important strategically look you can see not only the beaches and the coastline but way over there on the horizon that is France Helen location Location Location that's what it's all about absolutely because this is the closest English castle to France we may be a hundred miles from the coastline of the UK but we're only 14 miles from France so that puts this place at the heart of politics it's of the most important times in our history but why are we here worried well there are a number of mysteries about this castle that we want to solve although we've got this great stone structure all around us and we know quite a lot about it there are bits of the missing just a minute you've been working on this site for 30 years surely you must have cracked all the mysteries by now well that's short in archaeological time and there's a lot to do so there are still areas where we just need to know that about the bits of the castle that have been demolished and lost over the course of time what would you like us to be untied I'd like you to and come over here and look over the wall and look down to the green there below us that area Castle green has got earthworks and lumps and bumps in it and clearly there are structures down there now that area is unexplored we know nothing about it archaeologically and almost nothing about is historically and if we look at this plan which shows the outline of the castle as we understand it in the 13th century we are very unclear about the north side this uncertainty at the north end of the castle is due to the later edition of the grand battery and of Somerset Tower monstrous fortifications built in the 16th century though would have obliterated any earlier structures we'll have to closely examine these gargantuan walls looking for clues in their makeup in order to find evidence of the 13th century walls and towers that complete Warwick's early castle plan Helen why should we be so interested in this period of the castles history it's because when this castle was built in the 13th century that's just at the point where England has lost its lands to France so this place is now on the front line of one of the major power struggles of mental Europe so this is what King John it is that's right yes King John who was famous for getting everything wrong and and losing all his land in France right in order to find out more about that our guys are gonna have to do some pretty tricky work are they our efforts will be concentrated on the bumpy lawn of Castle green and on the steep slopes under the formidable north and west walls it's a relatively simple task but with one enormous problem the extreme terrain leading the hunt for the 13th century walls is the intrepid geophys team but it's slow-going climb with geophys struggling to get results Phil's been looking for another way to start the investigation he's found a small visible section of wall what I want to do right sighs we've put the trench in here we've got what looks like a wall and it's the wall that runs right the way along now at the back of it we've actually got the main wall of the Tudor Castle the question is does the Tudor wall sit on this wall if that Tudor wall is sitting on the top of that wall there the Tudor one is later this one has to be earlier what we're hoping is it might be the 13th century wall but doesn't have to be all we can say is it will be earlier than the Tudors the crucial thing about the dating is if we can identify any of the original mortar and so that's why we've we've put it in here it's the place where these two walls come together John you know how much we love to wind you out I think we've really surpassed ourselves getting up getting you to GF is that slow you I mean I think this guy's thing for me is seeing Jimmy in that harness there's lots of health and safety issues we need to do it properly yeah and so it's taking time it's gonna be a while before we're getting the results in that area so you've moved down here now yeah I mean this is more my sort of territory nice flat lawn and this is likely to be associated with the castle anywhere either in its earlier phases or perhaps ancillary buildings associated with it yeah but Mick you're not a costly sort of bloke I can't imagine that the reason that you want to come down here is simply because this is part of a castle now I think there's a lot of possibilities that was something earlier down here as well isn't he I mean if you strip if you mentally stripped out all that stone castle off the top there you've got a a promontory sticking out into the sea which is likely to be the sort of thing that we've been iron-age promontory a prehistoric promontory in which case through here you might have ditches and banks cutting off that promontory so we might get something that's even earlier than the castle sir I think it's highly likely yeah GF is is now well underway on the very promising Castle green but meanwhile up on the slope phil is just putting in our first trench I've got a little find I can't wait to get up there myself maybe after lunch welcome back to the fantastic Montag I Castle here in Jersey this isn't a bad job on a day like this is it our archaeologists are already under way up on that slope excavating behind those trees but down here on the castle Green John you've got some geophys for us yeah we were saying early it's a fantastic area to survive yeah and the problem is the results aren't that clear why is that well we've got problems with the bedrock it's really close to the surface the electric currents aren't going into the ground having said that we've got some results he's got some big black blobs there yeah I mean that's on this high a bit of ground here yeah then you can see this green grass I'm just wondering whether there's a ditch coming through here before we get on to this higher ground here so I think an initial evaluation trench from where I'm stood over this potential ditch and onto this sort of possible building here a possible building you don't sound that convinced well I'm just worried it's all geology to be honest but then you always are running so trench two goes in on Castle green to look for a ditch that could add to the known defences of the site being cut into granite it should be easy to find if we're really lucky it may even take back to the original castle built in the reign of King John when do we first hear about there being a castle well we first hear something in 1209 hints we don't have mention of castle but we've got this description from the pipe rolls and it mentions the Isle of Jersey and deliveries to knights and 12 Force sergeants and ten-foot sergeants and also the horses of these Knights so clearly this fighting men here there's a garrison so he might assume it as a castle we don't know definitely until twelve twelve now this is a letter from King John where he mentions the Isle of Jersey ensalada Jersey there come Castro with its castle so that's when we definitely know there's something here why Chris why put a castle here in the first place at the beginning of his reign King John of England owned most of the west side of fauns and Jersey there was happiest comps in the middle of the edge of an empire in 1202 he was summoned to Paris by the King of France to answer for his futile holdings and he refused to go so they were confiscated by the French and the whole of Normandy the coastal town and Brittany was taken back and Jersey became an remaining outpost the island was fought over a couple of times certainly in 1205 1206 and again a few years later but the ruling elite who were in charge of the island decided they were staying with King John you could really see it on this map Colin knew that when all this part of France was English property then Jersey was slap-bang in the middle of it and really well protected but as soon as this part of France goes back to the French King then suddenly Jersey is on the front line yes and our little promontory here on the east side becomes a perfect place to put a castle because it's in the right place to put two fingers up to the French King kind of thing to say look we're English so what was the position of Jersey by the end of King John's reign it was still held by the English king it was never part of the kingdom of England it was just a hangout from the the old duchy of normandy and there began over 800 years of Union siding with England though was to cause trouble with France making a stronghold on the island vital the fighting evidence of that original stone castle under the massive 16th century walls is proving difficult undeterred Stuart's hunting high and low and may have found something out on the northeast corner this this join here looks old doesn't it this Junction here these are part of the the Tudor battery on the corner isn't with yes we know the date for that but that built over that wall there we've got a wonderful junction here where the the Tudor bastion comes up against a curving wall that must be of earlier date that itself is built against the rock face curving wall suggest tower to me is that tower 13th or 14th century part of the arrangement of the curtain wall with round towers on it as we had before the Tudors it's the first time you've seen it this one at first time this morning yes when the ivory was stripped away we found something that has never been drawn on any plan or described before Wow so we've now located an original 13th century corner tower underneath the 16th century defences but round the corner feels struggling to take trench one anywhere near as far back in time Oh quite challenges getting up here Phil what's the purpose of this train to see whether we could establish the date of this war and have you done it not yet what we have found is that we've got the outside edge of it plummeting away there and then across here we've got the main core of the war what we'd like is for this war to go underneath and be earlier than the main Tudor Bastion wall so at the moment you've got absolutely no dating evidence not really not for the war but what we do have is rather unexpected dating it's this water pipe or this pipe that's running through here which we think is probably a relic of the German occupation why do you think it's German well a bit parently everybody that digs around the castle says the one thing always find his relics left over from the German occupation it seems that's the best bet for so you've got some pretty robust dating for the 1940s now you've just got to get back to the 1,300 yeah and I mean there are two ways we're actually gonna try and approach that firstly if you see if we can establish whether this wall goes underneath the buttress and the second way is actually to look at the mortars what would be significant about the mortar well according to Warwick the 13th century mortars tend to have quite a lot of shelling and whereas the Tudor mortars up there are a lot more gritty but he also tells me that there are miscellaneous mortars and we just got a hope that we haven't got one of them no sign of the 13th century down in trench to either the rock-cut ditch is deeper and wider than anyone expected but it's producing little to help us date it although this might not be the only ditch down here Stuart thinks he stumbled upon another one near the castle gate and after clearing the Brandy's he causing Jimmy with his radar for confirmation if he's right this is yet another unknown defensive circuit around the castle if you if you follow the contour around but you can see this actually a ditch comes round here and it heads down towards where the drawbridge for the original medieval castle gate was so really this ditch ought to be part of that original 13th century castle defences so it should be just outside the 13th century stone walls there it is yeah it's clearly it's on this side the castle this is the weakest side down here you could easily come up here and get to the base of the towers to undermine them and so I think it needs some form of Defence round here and to be able to prove this is part those original defences will be great I mean the radar that we've done across it shows it's about a metre deep so it should get some dateable material from that channel well hope so I mean given given where it is at the base list like this should be all sorts of material in that dick should like let's get on with it then we'll get on with the tea there was rumors of cake you know before we started filming this we've been lucky so trench three goes in to see if there is a second ditch cut below the western wall if Stuart's right it should run tightly but it up against the lower slopes of the castle parallel to John's dish but the question remains where's the wall that should go with it Stewart has a hunch and is about to boldly go where no landscape investigator has gone before with a beady eye he's plot something 30 feet up yeah mostly it's different to the battery yeah above it encouraged by the daredevil antics and the rest of the team good luck Stewie he heads off up the rock face confused by such an up-and-down archaeological site I catch up with Mick to get my head around what's going on so Phil's looking for a 13th century wall up there down there we've been digging for some ditch but suddenly I find that you've opened another trench here yeah well it's another ditch you see coming through here by the earthwork so we won't know the data that one as well but you know given the magnificence of these castle walls there's a bit of me that feels a bit disappointed that you're just thinking for ditches but the castle walls are just half of the defensive system as well as each line of stone wall they would have been ditches at the front as part of their the other depart of the defensive circuit so we need to look at those as well and do you think all those ditches will be the same day I'd be very surprised if they were because the walls are all of different dates and so you'd expect correspondingly different dishes to be done after all this is the weak side of the castle the rest of its defended by the sea and rocks this is a side you can come over land to each so you're gonna have to revise your defense strategy from time to time dig another load of ditches it's hard for me to concentrate solely on Mick because while he's digging down into the ditches Stewart perversely he's swinging in the air about 30 feet above our head Stewart hello what you doing up there having a look at this masonry here you see see this this block here can you this a band of masonry going that way yeah this is very different to the stuff that's on top of it and it goes in a curve this is earlier than that that's Tudor so this has got to be earlier and it looks like it's the corner of around Tower could that be the 13th century wall that we're looking for it looks very probable well the council is beginning to give up its secrets although very slowly and it's hard work isn't it yeah who knows what we're going to find tomorrow normally on time team I try and finish a part with a cliffhanger but just can't think of one beginning of day two here on the island of Jersey where we're looking at the awesome model guy Castle and trying to unpick some of its secrets yesterday afternoon John suggested we put in a long thin trench here because we'd started looking at the defenses in front of the castle and he thought there might be a defensive ditch running along there and maybe some sort of building over here so Matt what are we found what we do have this ditch it's huge one cut into the rocks nearly five meters across it's been backfilled and then recut again at that end so they keep using it but down at this end of the trench is nothing any dating evidence at all well we've got a few bits of pottery coming up from the fields of the ditch but nothing firm yet John bit frustrating slightly inconclusive well no the ditch is good I mean I wasn't sure about the building but we've done some more resistance and radar you can actually see we've got another massive ditch showing in both datasets and they're both showing another huge ditch where's the ditch well you can actually see it in the grass the dark green lush grass this is this is just over here you get that depression there yeah and the ditch is running through there now is that related to the castle or is it part of this contry fault that we talked about that might be here so do you want to dig it we've got it it looks quite promising but I must admit this part of me the things we've got a bit ditch crazy on this dig so trench 4 goes in on Castle green to investigate John's GF is a third ditch would mean the approach to the castle was very heavily fortified but will it relate to the third century older laughs if this turns out to be a pro star exercise I'm about sucking right medieval castle behind us we're now unearthing diagnostic and dateable artifacts across the site but they're just not doing much to take our story back in time Second World War German barbed wire I would think yes frankly so far the fines have been a bit disappointing you can see this is obviously very late 19th century ink bottle dazzle trees the word that springs to mind except that Phil you've just turned up with stuff from your trench absolutely Tony I mean most of what we've been getting is that the debris that's been thrown over the walls but we do happen to have some bits of pottery which we're pretty sure are a lot earlier what do we think about that one auger right well this definitely is our first piece of prehistoric pottery and I imagine it dates to the Iron Age but you see if you want early Tony really early look at a piece of Flint this stuff is actually gonna throw our story back probably to 4000 BC something like that well we don't really want to throw story right back to the beginning I know you want the early stuff Fred Flinstone but we're actually trying to date the earliest castle up here have either of you seen in the pottery anything that could be say 13th century but we haven't got down to the critical layers yet sure Stuart's no confident he's located a bit of 13th century Castle high up wedged under the door the 16th century walls so he's back up his rope recording the archeology with a little eagle-eyed help yeah I can hear a fancy new wall up here Henry which is really really nice it's a curving bit of wall going round this crag with the crush burn limpets in it that war it was saying were likely to me in its 13th century if I give you a couple of positions can you put them for me first one now where I am Braga Latvia where my life glove is now Henry encouraged by this medieval discovery Stuart follows the base of the vast 16th century wall in the quest for more walking on a wall of ivy along the way yeah so follow behind me and we have to go on our bombs to scale across the no problem okay now there's a few stingers just down the yard okay bingo concealed out of the ivy as a second tower this is really good so in addition to the northwest corner tower we can add a second 13th century tower just along the western wall everything we're finding on this site is geared to war and defense suggesting that this castle has seen some serious action looking up at it you really do get the most amazing sense of how difficult it would have been to storm a castle like this how many layers of defense there are it's all absolutely bristling with defenses isn't it but the the stone castle once it's built in the early 13th century it doesn't stay static does if it's constantly being added to and remodeled it's constantly another two because the castle in the island are constantly under attack yeah I wrote down some of the attacks like we're trying to make a list of what's been going on and I have got a second attack after attack as is this big one in 1294 isn't there yes there's about 1,500 people agreed to being killed at the time which is probably about 10% to the island population that's terrible as much it wouldn't make a difference yeah and who so who's attacking at that point at the fetch ah no wonder there's a I'm called a Finch and then moving on into the 14th or 15th centuries there's the several sieges at that point so I suppose what are they doing building up a great big towers and and and hurling missiles trying to break through the walls did you remember yes that standard siege warfare in those days so where the walls ever actually breached in 1373 the French broke through the outer wall but they couldn't take the Keith they said at the time that they letters weren't long enough in the foundations were too strong you think I could send time for a few more letters in II gotta go back to Vaughn for that Henry I wonder if you do a bit of modeling for me right Stuart thinks he's located a defensive an earthwork down below the corner of the 16th century and virtually this a large pointed platform seems to sit on top of the rock cut ditch jutting out into Castle green and you've got this big flat to earth work that comes and lies on the sperm well to me that looks like it's an out work on it a bastion some form of Defence covering this this sort of weak area here this saw that sense of a triangle isn't there which is yeah yeah that we right well what would be what be really good if you could model that and see how it fits in with all Lion defenses and the topography see whether it is a defense work under orders Henry gets cracking but he's not the only one surveying the council we've got a very flashy piece of kit on site this week then all our tech people are really excited about what you're doing what exactly is it this is a 3d laser scanner and we're actually using it to digitally document the the castle at the moment how does it work what does it rise a laser beam and any surface that it hits it calculates a three-dimensional point in space and there's this thousands of times a second creating a rich point cloud of data which is a an exactly sort of replica of the castle why do we need a 3d model of the cursor look I've got eyes here I can see the castle I got a camera here that can see the castle as well what do we need you we can use it to create very accurate measurements at any point within the castle so if we scan the exterior walls and then we go inside and scan the internal rooms we can create measurements throughout the building so you can actually take slices as it were out of the castle we can yeah once you scan the whole thing we can retreat slice you at any point horizontally or vertical and create sections through throughout 23 has now bottomed out and it's throwing up some useful pottery 15th century oh the bottom yet right the base right just expecting it to me so 13th well we thought medieval so it's later medieval but unless it's being washed down it's cleared out that from the evidence she looks like it's 15th century but we have got a lots of rubble and other bits coming no that's a cracking section here up there with all those tip lines isn't it we've got more to about stone there and it looks like something with building was here or up there somewhere initially so if that's that's the bedrock yeah presumably something sat on the top of that platform there didn't it it must have done so to confirm whether there was structure sitting on this planet in Phil's dragged over to take a look and trench pipe slowly exposes a small but solid wall on the granite spur Henry's contour is also defensive structure confirming mysterious suspicionless that's where we put the trench over the big ditches is there isn't it's right on the platforms over in this area here isn't it yeah that's right you can see see I think as an earthwork part that ditch coming through that's just showing it in colors representing height near difference in height whereas you see more if you model it by slope so the blue area is the steep bits of slope and the red areas are flat this and then that way you can just see how dramatic that platform is as a flat area and it's how dramatic that slope is come down here I mean that is classically what you'd expect from an out work round round a castle so at some stage an arrowhead Bastion was built over the earlier rock cut ditch these gun platforms gave great angles for defensive fire of a popular through the 16th and 17th centuries this is all positive stuff but none of it has anything to do with the 13th century time to join the Buffon's for a cup of tea to find out what's going on gentlemen I'm really struggling with the archaeology of this castle mainly I think because it's got the big coup de Castille dumped right all over it and it's hard to see anything else but our first goal was to find the early castle the 13th century one have we done there we have found a tower on the rock behind us we have got a very nice 13th century tower based sitting on the rock there we found a fragment of another one partway down the west side and we've got them the known one at the southwest corner so we've got the whole of the west side and all the 13th century plan there is complete but where we're sitting now the ditch in that trench and yeah this wall behind us that isn't 13th century is it it doesn't seem to be on me it's just possible that ditch the cherry is part of that it's undateable the only thing we can say is it's overlaying by this earth work which we sat on which appears to be a gun platform of what sixteenth century and date something most likely yes so that that ditch there he's he's earlier than that but it could be as early as the 13th century but if chances are it's somewhere between what I'd like to do is put another section across it over there testicles how that varies will information in II just see if we get any dating from that one so Mick orders a second section across Stewart ditch his hope being trench six will provide an early date for this ring defense back over in trench five warrants dating techniques render film shell shops Warrick yeah you know you chain of eight that Shelley mortar and if you add shells in it it was thirteenth century look and look and look again they are whole shells in the more yes they're shells that's not Shelley mortar but that's mortar with shells in it therefore that must be Shelley mortar that must be thirteenth century this is mortar with occasional shells in complete shells right now this is a piece of real Shelley mortar which Stewart found up there on on the battery a little while ago where the mortar is full of broken and crushed shell that's been in a lime kiln and is burnt and that's what you see all those dark bits are fragments of limpet shells that have been crushed and then burnt in a line kill that mortar doesn't have it so this mortar was Xiao Xin is 13th century yes and this mortar with shells in is not 13th century but Shelley mortar is definitely 13 so sorry I'm losing the will to live all day long as far as the archeology of mont or guys concerned confusion has reigned but thankfully at last the mist seemed to be clearing and hopefully by the time we go tomorrow we'll be able to tell the full story of this car for now mind you this being time team there's bound to be a few surprises along the way beginning of date 3 here at Mont old guy castle in Jersey and actually became here to do a pretty straightforward job which was to find a couple of 13th century walls so we could identify the original castle on this site but as the days have gone on the archeology has got more and more complicated we've not only got our 13th century stuff we've got 15th century we've got Jude we've even got three historic quite frankly by the time we leave I think they'll probably have to rewrite the guidebook because what we're finding it's really awesome [Music] where's lot of activity going on around here yeah it's we're trying to sort out these these defense is still yeah I mean fell up there look he's on the top of of this which which appears to be a sort of early gun platform and would have gone straight and up but he's also picking up material that's coming from the 13th century terror at the top so he's got the you know the early mortar cascading down and this down here this is where this ditch that is interrupted by this gun platform this lower one he's carrying on around you and lower Dean this to see if we can get more dating material hang on this is all highly confusing at the top is 3840 station yeah here that you're calling the gun platform presumably this is Tudor yeah and then underneath it we've got this ditch which is best guess 15 chains we probably we're getting dating material out of it now over there so we shall learn that I don't want to make it even more complicated but I will whatever hot down there where we on the Castle green were we thought we had prehistoric where matys has gotten PT material in the bottom we've bits of timber I think it might be prehistoric it would be nice if it was Iron Age or you know something to do with defenses but any dating early on to be useful do you think we can sort all this out by the end of the day I think so yeah but I think we've got a particular job to do because normally all our all the things we find are spread out over a fairly flat site and here we're spread out up the side of the hill and to know that this bit here is one date but a bit slightly higher than it might be earlier he's all a bit odd really so we're gonna need Henry to go around and plot everything I think to make sure that we understand the relationships between detour and early finds from the ditch attention support our military story so where these come from well these are just literally come out of the stuff being scraped off the top from this trench here so they come off the spoil heat right okay well this one is the bottom of a sword scabbard you can imagine that they're gonna let us covers and from its construction I put it in the 17th or maybe even the 18th century so you can imagine that the leather of the sword scabbards coming up there now this one though this is very interesting it's a French Jess on I think a 15th century I have to clean this up to be sure it's hard to see if you can just about see on this side some fleur-de-lis a cross of fleur-de-lis these jet ins or counting tokens were minted in there thousands across Europe often featuring ornate design they were used for complicated arithmetic on a lined board rather like a two-dimensional abacus back in three dimensions our survey of the castle is nearing completion and should help us make sense of this topsy-turvy site and trench two has now hit rock bottom although the pottery is definitely medieval and not prehistoric the building films sent to investigate one of the big mysteries forests since we got here has been this wall here doesn't seem to be the same build as the big tudor castle up there nor will we convinced that it was necessarily part of the original 13th century castle and in a way it sort of seemed to be a bit isolated on its own here but whatever was it Phil have you managed to solve the problem for us we have solved the problem Tony and we've always known that this wall went round and actually butted onto the bedrock on that side well we've dug into here and we can show that this wall buts directly up against the natural so this is a totally freestanding tower and we reckon that it's exactly like one of those over there I've talked to Warwick about it we know it's not 13th century we've seen the mortars it's not the Shelley mortars its mortar with shells in it it's probably 15th century and it's almost certainly part of that defence over there what was it for what this tower is doing is covering this lower ground in here you've got people up in here defenders with guns and bows and arrows it's literally like a big pillbox that is designed to keep people off those lower slopes and this is new stuff no one knew about this this is crucially new stuff to the whole development of the castle Helen big structure up here looks like it's defensive 15th century how does that tie in with the history pretty well really particularly if it's connected with that tower which was built by Richard Hollister who arrives at the castle at a really peculiar moment during the Wars of the Roses somehow the French have got hold of the castle and Holliston is sent to relieve it for the English hang on so that's the Brits seizing their own castle yeah absolutely I know it's kind of backwards isn't it but anyway the French get driven out and Holliston sets about updating the castle now this tower here you can see it's got the arrow sets but just peeking through the trees is what looks like a window now that is a gun port for the modern artillery now this tower also looks like it was built for artillery so they're part of the same defensive system that does make sense isn't it you have a tower there guarding the front entrance and one here checking out the rear absolute it all ties together these new defenses along with those of the 16th century reported occasion showed that the castle was under constant threat and Stuart believes mortal toys offensive evolution mirrored developments in weapons technology so he's mapping no medieval firepower against the cultures walls their effective range from the arrows is about a hundred jobs I can just so you have hundred yards just working out this distance of death is chilly I'd never think I could be killed by an arrow or a crossbow from that that distance by the time you get to the 15th century and starting to use muskets you've got a different order of beasts to deal with and you've got these musket balls which are coming at you and they're penetrating power is such that if you're at this distance the ball wouldn't just kill you it goes straight through you out the other side and take two or three people out the other side a bit big chunks of meat flying everywhere people killed by splinters a bone behind the person that's been hit first by the Tudor period when you get in the cannon coming in suddenly they're gonna they're going to do you a lot of damage at two-and-a-half thousand yards and this fireman could be aided by geography looking at the levels the top of that's lower than the top of the hill here so I think the natural hill is pretty better a defensive position than the castle and far away so the crest that Hill here is about 300 yards if you're on top of that hill you've got counted you can pound the castle quite easily this would be a horrible place to be womanly so moved [Music] we've now established there's no ditch in trench 4 but as it turns out Castle green still did its bit for the war effort although we haven't found the big ditch that we were looking for in here what we have got is an OG s or old ground surface with early medieval pottery but then this end we've got this great big feature here we've only got one side of it now we think it's a quarry pit and they're removing all the loose Louis they'll do natural windblown sand and things in here and they're mixing it up with stone to make it kind of mushy paste almost with big bits of stone in and they're using that for the wall core and in the time of about the 1470 rebuilds the castle and the word prehistoric mentioned once no normally there is stood in that change over there where we've got 14th century at the bottom 15th century half way up there's nothing prayer start down here at all but you've got this all excited about the possibility of prehistory camping oh that's right yes and there's no evidence I mean the there is prehistoric stuff on the top of the base of the castle that's where the prehistoric site must be back in time had we pushed this site the answer lies in trench one was it Ian you got a visitor I said where are you they said I think he's still in that trench out by the castle wall we haven't seen you for two days yeah well I've been up here digging down all the Mon so what you got well we've got to the bottom of this this medieval wall and I've just got underneath the wall down into these rocks and this old ground surface I'm back into prehistory how do you know it's prehistory because all the soils absolutely full of Iron Age pot and pressed or it flipped were you tried to insult me a couple of days ago by calling me Fred Flintstone but I'm totally unrepentant I still love Flint's look at how sharp my edge of is across there it actually goes in a narrow shaft like that but that Arrowhead is probably about 3000 BC it's really satisfying actually that we've managed to nail the prehistoric part of the story to here isn't it absolutely but I know you're not remotely interested in it all you're interested in is the medieval stuff and when I talked to you a couple of days ago and we talked about why we put this trench in here I say we wanted to find out which of these two walls was the earlier and which was the later and I said there was two ways that we could do that one was by the stratigraphy one might be Bo the mortar and the stratigraphy we can show with this one is that this low wall here is the earlier one and it is earlier than the big Tudor wall back there and it's nothing ah now I can't tell you the date of it because the mortar was going to be the crucial date in thing we do not have the Shelley mortar in here so I cannot say without doubt that this is 13th century but it could be it is definitely earlier than that wall that's tantalizing is there so you satisfied now yeah yeah I'm going back down again I'll leave you to chat to Barney Rubble back to the future our photo realistic 3d model of Montel guy is nearly complete and Stuart's keen to use it as a tool to accurately measure the dimensions of the massive tudor gun battery added late in the castles life I'm really interested in the thickness of the grand battery for remember reasons to do with the defense of this castle what's the measurement from the face of that north wall of the grand battery to the inside wall of it there we're looking at twelve point four or five meters mi a-- crikey that's thick I mean when you think that the average stone wall is probably only about maximum two meters thick and how deep is that from the corner to the inside of that curve of the battery I'm looking at twenty three point two seven one meters and reading that's put there simply to absorb cannon fire from cannon upon the hill here course if is simply a warfare 2 meter thick wall it would just shatter with the impacts of cannonballs so they leave that depth of earth to absorb with the impact and while this huge kuda gun platform buried much of the original carson the archaeology is not entirely lost to us so when do you start getting the good reflections just in front of where you're standing at the eleventh hour Jimmy has made a remarkable discovery his radar has picked up a complete 13th century tower inside the later Bastion that ends our investigation and it's time to draw together what and about the earliest stone castle and its subsequent development what can we add to this now that we didn't know when we started we can confirm that there is a half round we've also found a completely unknown round tower a round tower there 15th century battery down here solid are fresh abouts down on the seventh round a d-shaped 15 say fourteen thirteen century I think I'd better pull this together Montag boy has been in use since prehistory a steep sided granite hill has been recognized as a perfect defensive position for at least five thousand years the site was set in stone in the 13th century when a fortified keept was built on the highest point protective curtain walls and towers surrounded it high up on the crest of the hill and partway down the slope in the 15th century the castle had a military makeover two formidable ditches were cut in the rock below the hill and a pair of gun towers were added to protect the Gateway and cover the approach to Castle green the late 16th century heralded the most substantial changes towers and walls from the earliest castle were knocked down or buried under a monstrous gun battery and a lofty t-shaped Tower designed to protect the heart of the castle the Arrowhead Bastion at ground level was the cherry on the cake leaving Montag I groaning under the weight of guns but all this reef fortification was to prove futile as the castle became a prisoner of its own geography Henry have you got those measurements yet bori up now is just over two hundred yards away from you I'm actually over four meters higher than you I'm not even at the top of a hill yet so I've got the advantage so you're definitely higher than me yeah absolutely well we've been trying to work out why these defenses are so complex particularly on this side the castle while the castle seams are getting higher and higher and higher of the variance and it's really quite interesting because if we were standing on the 13th century battlements on the cast we've got the height we've got the advantage she's got bows and arrows bows and arrows exactly so if anybody was attacking down there the effective range of a bow is about 100 yards which is where about phase just down there on the lower law and view fighter bow and arrow it should I get her she'd be dead but then later on when they got muskets their effective range is not that dissimilar about the same distance so where Matt is over there now's a terrible but the big difference comes a little bit later in the Tudor period yeah cannon of course cannon makes the biggest difference and you've got a hill up there that's where Henry is where exactly if you had a cannon on that Ridge at 200 yards that's a distance the velocity of the ball would completely smash any walls here so the Tudor period yet to build this great big thick work here to stop the impact of the ball completely destroying the wall destroying this castle suddenly he's got the height he's got the advantage so is he going to fire his cannon at house he hasn't got a cannon we have [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 258,907

Rating: 4.8247142 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode

Id: dPh8JxRpBY0

Length: 46min 35sec (2795 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020