One Of The Biggest Castles Ever Built In Britain! | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

sometimes on time team we find the biggest mysteries in the most surprising places and they don't come much bigger or more surprising than this because this is trigrig castle in south wales one of the largest medieval castles in the british isles and when you get inside even in this spooky mist you can see it's absolutely vast and completely empty nobody knows how many buildings were in here what they were or why it's so big but all that's about to change we've got a unique opportunity to launch a full-scale attack and paint in this vast blank canvas today the ruins of tragrig castle overlook the tranquil valleys of south wales but 700 years ago this area was one of the most turbulent places in britain the welsh marches this was a militarized zone ruled over by the marcher lords powerful english barons who built a network of impregnable castles to keep the welsh natives in check but not enough to keep an invading army of archaeologists at bay and anyway we've been given a warm if slightly misty welcome here by the castle's current owner david williams how long has this place been in your family since 1554 there was a gentleman called roger williams acquired the estate the lands and the castle but it hasn't always looked like this has it i can see a lot of these stumps are really quite fresh there was a complete keep full of trees of norway spruce here until about two years ago and they were cut down and the whole nature of the atmosphere of the place changed in the inner keep here overnight did you learn much once you've cleared away all the uh forestry i've always grown up with the feeling and knowledge that you wouldn't touch anything here yeah it's a scheduled monument as far as i'm concerned nothing has ever been disturbed so this is a very exciting time what would you like us to uncover for you during the three days we're here any old relics would be uh most interesting what was really going on here through our sort of ancestry side of things well if it's old relics he wants david's picked the right team we've got them in spade loads this really is an extraordinary place isn't it absolutely i've seen some castles in my time but this one presents a real mystery if you look at the plan here you've got all the things you find in a standard castle you've got a gatehouse you've got a tower you've got a really long curtain wall all the way around the side but you've got this big blank space in the middle it's in the same sort of ballpark as windsor castle it's a huge sight nick what do you think was going on inside this middle bit well there's lots of stuff we don't have we'd expect to have a big hall probably other halls kitchens we'd expect to have private accommodation bake houses breweries stables we don't know anything about that at all huge empty space three days what do we do well we'll do some geophysics but we have a real problem with that with the tree roots and all the wood lying about it's not going to be very easy for john and his team to work in it we can't sit around for three days waiting for geoff's to finish can we no no but we have other targets as well the first one is actually down here in the entrance gateway to the castle this is where people are coming in to get into that central area so we'd expect to find the port collis the drawbridge pit perhaps where the gates were possibly porters lodges that sort of thing fines yeah because people would have dropped things as they come through either you know personal items or bits off the horses or whatever this is a good place to look so we're going to start by stripping this area here so we're opening two trenches in the gateway to establish the layout of the entrance and hopefully discover personal fines and dating evidence to build up a picture of who was living here and when we got a matter and as the diggers launch a full frontal attack john and his geophys cohorts are beginning to tackle the vast interior to see what was going on inside the tree stumps are going to be more than a bit of an issue but yeah if we could have a baseline along the north wall can the gps see through low cloud of course it can john but i have to agree those tree stumps might pose a problem for you but however mystified the archaeologists are at the moment i'm sure of one thing if tregreg castle's seen a lot of action in its past it's gonna see a whole lot more over the next three days what's an oyster shell doing up here or somebody's living in some degree of style [Music] no this isn't a world war one battlefield hidden away among all this mist is the largest interior of a castle i've ever seen in my life we've already put the first trench in only another two thousand and we'll have covered the whole area because getting to grips with tregree castle is a huge challenge a whopping 13 000 square meter challenge to be precise so far we've begun to tackle the entrance through the gateway hoping to discover more about the castle layout and any fines which tell us when it was occupied and having only just launched our attack phil's already scratched the surface very very hard the question is how old is it exactly and it's the same at matt's end of the gateway i mean there's road stuff there ain't no road stones and that's right below the soil so it might worth me having a bit of a scratch around first i think things are really hotting up as far as our archaeologists are concerned we've got a trench in at either end of the gatehouse but about 100 meters away two of our archaeologists have sloped off into this rather bizarre little cave yeah but it's not a little cave tone it's much more interesting than that you look above us look oh is it um what do you call it a guardaro a toilet it's a toilet yeah it's a cracking example isn't it how does it work well presumably over the four holes you can see up there that would have been the wooden seats and the contents would have accumulated in the pit that we're standing in if we're in the pit where does all the stuff go well presumably it gathers in the pit and it's either goes out through an arch over there or people come in here and clear it out from time to time oliver are you as obsessed by this little room as mick obviously is but of course i'm it's a posh one and look here you've got really fine quality masonry some of the best stonework in the whole castle you've got arches above us i i've learned from you that over the centuries people dropped things down there absolutely and though no no they don't retrieve them so you want to dig it yeah it's nice to see a man who's so excited by his work mind you he's not the one who's going to have to shift through centuries of human waste but if mick's right we might get valuable dating evidence to tell us when the castle was occupied which will help helen uncover the secret of trigrig's history ray what was this area like when the castle was built perhaps the best description would be a potential powder keg in some respects we're in the welsh marches and i think that's really an important concept to get our heads around in fact the word march is old english for boundary isn't it indeed you can almost think of perhaps your martial lords as frontier barons so would one of these marcher lords have built the castle i think almost certainly for a considerable period of time this territory was in the hands of the declare family now i know that claire is in suffolk what was the suffolk family doing holding lands in wales well you're quite right they had substantial hand holdings in england but they also had substantial land holdings in ireland and bang in the middle there were lords of morgan as martial lords they enjoy certain rights and privileges maintaining armies was quite useful in founding towns so in a sense the king is allowing them this extra measure of independence all these unusual powers and in return he's getting them to keep this area peaceful to keep the welsh down essentially that's the idea that's the way it's supposed to work but they were often following their own agenda you'll even find instances of the welsh doing a deal with the marchers against the interest of the king it wasn't a recipe for peace and tranquility maybe it wasn't in the medieval period but back in the gateway trench the mists cleared the sun's out and phil certainly seems at peace with the world oh joy the gods have smiled look what i've got a piece of clay pipe stem excuse measure the app yeah phil i told you it was a lousy idea to put our first trenching right by our entrance i'm a happy archaeologist what's that i have found a piece of clay pipe stone dateable evidence and it also seems like you found the original floor of the gatehouse it cannot possibly be the original floor tony because this piece of dateable evidence is underneath this floor and of course tobacco didn't come to this country to what the 16th century absolutely and that presumably is why you're excavating further down in order to get the original floor normally tony that is actually true but in this case it's the reverse we think the original entrance is actually up there phil i thought the whole thing about archaeology was that the earlier things tended to be lower and the later things tended to be higher how can you have an earlier floor level right up there let me explain i think that what we're standing in is a massive hole we've got one edge of it running along there you see where that edge cuts away and i think the other edge of the hole is this solid wall of the castle so it's like a big pit absolutely i think when whatever spanda it might have been a drawbridge or a permanent bridge or what have you i think that when that went out of use to get inside they've had to knock a hole in the wall so that it can make a nice gradient into the inside of the cast but you don't know any of this too it's just theory at the moment the argument at the moment holds true that what we've got to do is literally get this later surface planned then we can take it off prove that that wall did once join up and that this there was a complete wall through there and then we'll throw it home to debate [Music] well we're now making good progress on the gateway so stuart's ventured outside because the whole castle is surrounded by banks and ditches which might help us understand what the castle was like how it was defended and explain why it's so big because trigrig's enormous size is one of the main mysteries facing us since it's completely empty inside do you think's in here well we just don't know at the moment we've got a big open space in front of us i know but what do you think first of all looking at our map we know that this is the lord's tower i think this is where the lodgings are the really really high status bit of the castle that's over there right there in the corner oh yeah yeah the other thing that would have to be in that area of the castle would be a hall a great hall maybe something a bit like that a great hall which is a the big focus of the castle where meals and feasts are taken the other thing you'd have to have if you've got a great hall there's a kitchen area kitchen range could be something like that and if you're looking at the posh part of the castle the high stages end the other thing you'd really expect to find would be a chapel maybe for argument's sake put it there a bit smaller actually but it still doesn't fill up much of this vast void not a not at all we've got big open spaces i mean those are the posh bits of the castle you probably have at the grubbier other end you must have stabling for horses maybe right there in the north yeah i see well olly's model would certainly fill in some gaps but at the moment is just pure conjecture and although john's been surveying the interior for nearly a day now i have to say it looks as if it's been a bit of a struggle john they've set you a bit of a task this time didn't they well they've cleared the vegetation but they left the tree stomps and the worst thing are these roots and you can see they just extend under the ground and trying to get the probes into that yeah it's like going into a solid wall and that's the problem i don't know if i'm going to be able to tell the difference between what is a tree root and what's a wall is it too much to expect to have some idea of what was going on in the castle before the end of day one [Music] but at least stewart's ready to report back on his recce outside the castle [Music] right stuart i've noticed you're wandering around have you sorted it out yet at first glance you look at it and saying yeah castle ditches ramp you know typical sort of castle type things but the more you look at it the more complicated it it gets it really isn't quite as simple as it seems i don't think i have to say that's a usual steward appraisal of a site that it's more complicated than we think what i'm actually starting to see as well as the castle earth works our earthworks i think relate to the civil war period as if this was defended during the civil war so is that is that known in the local history of the civil war it would seem that we have a member of the family young man called sir trevor williams who it is believed uh took a garrison of some 60 men from here to fight against raglan castle right so there could have been some sort of civil war fort or something like that here then indeed so stuart thinks these earthworks and nothing to do with the original castle but typical of arrow-shaped defenses built in the civil war period if he's right how much more of the castle was changed at that time phil already thinks that the gateway has been remodeled these have been covered over look you see they're that much fresher look at that crispness of that line there and they're beautiful he's now found a wall and he's trying to find out if it once spanned the whole entrance way to see if his theory is correct at the other end of the gateway the archaeologists have been investigating beneath the roadway which has been producing fines that may give some dates for the castle so what have we got steve well an interesting collection this is a ridge tile off the top of the roof that's fantastic because we've got accounts of tyler's working here in quite early on in the accounts um about 1305-ish this this is late 1200s early 1300s brilliant according to our dating we've got coin dating for that uh extraordinary isn't it and what do you think about australia it puts everything in perspective it brings it alive all the accounts that you read over this period of time and now there's dates uh particularly steve is able to put things too i'm glad that david's easily pleased because it's the end of day one and i'm afraid a single tile won't solve what's going on in that vast interior but at least we seem to be making progress and we're finally opening a trench inside it make another trench yeah yeah based on the geophysics well looking at that geophysics i can't see that much to put a trench in for look we've put the results on henry's model which is absolutely fantastic and the high resistance there is in red now the problem is could that be building could just be the tree roots could be the geology so in other words we're really putting this trench in to test the geophysics so we can see whether it would apply elsewhere on this side at least if we have any certainty at all it must be the perimeter of the castle yeah i'm not so sure about that either mainly because i'm not sure that's the main entrance but it is the main entrance it's always been the main entrance no it's an entrance probably but when you look at the course you'd have to get to it coming around that steep slope turning in coming through that very narrow passage to get into this enclosure i'm not sure that's how they would put all the supplies for the castle in imagine wagon loads of barrels and wagon loads of sacks it's a very odd way to come that is this is so time team this morning when we got here we had no idea what was going on in the middle of this castle but we were pretty confident about the outside now we're as unsure about the outside as we are about the middle and i bet you there'll be even more confusion tomorrow welcome back to tragrig castle in south wales one of the largest castles in the whole of the british isles and that in itself has created quite a puzzle for us because it's not only very very big it appears to be very very empty yesterday i was promised buildings here a chapel maybe a hall some kitchens well i'm not a professional archaeologist but looking down that trench i can't see any evidence of buildings is there anything there no there's nothing there to him in fact if you didn't know that this was in the middle of a castle you wouldn't think it was near any archaeological site at all but there must be some evidence mustn't there of buildings around here well from the accounts we know that there were certainly buildings here and they're buying amazing quantities of stuff for repairing them one point there's three thousand nails there's two thousand laps there's the lime kilns as the masons and also here it says new building of various houses in the castle they're not outside they're here what are we going to do well we've still got some targets to look at there could be buildings elsewhere but but hold on we've got a problem haven't we this is a scheduled site absolutely so there's a limit to the number of trenches we can also limit to the trenches we're going to look across the break of slope down that way see where the digger is yeah and remember yesterday we were suggesting about where there was a bigger gateway down there and the other thing of course is the one thing we do have is a socking great building over there and then another big building over there and a lot of this is accommodation so between the two in a way is the most logical place to put the hall in the other buildings so we've got john and the team starting to do some geophysics between those on the basis the hall might be there so we're not desperate yet but we can see desperation in the distance no we're not desperate yet go and have a cup of tea so hold off the desperation but this can't bode well open a trench in the evening close it in the morning however we are now opening another trench where the ground level changes start from here and let's go up over until we get to the top over the top of the slope break of the slope to see whether that slope is evidence of activity in the interior split apart and there's another piece here they're from different parts but that's more than we have from our bear isn't it we're on a winner and it's already paying dividends yesterday our trenches were concentrated in the gatehouse where we were beginning to find a road surface but phil didn't think it was the original medieval pathway into the castle and this morning things seemed to have got even more complicated when i looked at this i rather suspect you'd think the same as i did what the hell is that and so i bring you to a steam door pharisees and you haven't got the foggiest ideas it's one of those so how many phds does it take to identify a piece of stone obviously more than three but while they continue their pondering the rest of the archaeologists are in full swing at the guard robe trench it's taking rather longer than we first thought to clean out the medieval loo we're still hoping it will eventually produce fines to establish when the castle was occupied but at the moment we'll have to rely on scraps from the gateway trenches for evidence i know we haven't found all that much pottery but the stuff that we have found is virtually all 14th century how why are you pulling a face how does that tie in with what we've got dick no i mean i i i almost felt that you must have made that up to make me pleased because uh the accounts the detailed accounts start at 1301 and they go on to 1342. what was happening here in the early 14th century well there was a lot of building work going on and right down to the last well rope we've got the detail so who was instructing these people to buy all the well ropes and stuff amazingly they were mostly powerful women we start off with joan of aker who's a daughter of edward the first apparently the most spirited the most independent of all his daughters now her youngest daughter elizabeth she goes on to inherit to greek and she again is the most amazing woman by the time she's 27 she's had three children by three different husbands they're all dead and soon after that she takes a vow of chastity to ensure that she's not pushed into another marriage but do you think she would have really been in charge during those years or do you think there would have been another man in the background well i think that she'd have been calling the shots because in some of the accounts um this this last one here um it says that uh there's new new buildings at trigrig that it's it's all done um according to the ladies wishes and the lady at that point has got to be elizabeth what sort of lifestyle do you think she'd have led right well she certainly knew how to throw a party just look at this menu from a christmas feast 1326. just look at this it looks so eating half the bird population of south wales look at some of the things you've got swans herons bitters egrets capones geese hens chickens partridges something called clels woodcocks yeah it's a bit of a meat feast isn't it so it seems that life inside the castle was quite fun but that's a little odds with what i'd first been led to believe situated bang in the centre of the marches togreg was surrounded by hordes of war-like welsh who notoriously were the deadliest archers in britain as helen's about to find out if you hold that there okay and pull it back as hard as you like how far are you supposed to be able to pull this back about that far about that far so if you can imagine that's coming back to there you're a little bit taller than me yep so you've got your hand right back past your ear and that's where the power comes from i can't get it anywhere near i'm not going to do that am i go on there show me how it's done okay the muscles in the back of my neck actually are hurting now okay so we just draw it up god the force of that is just incredible isn't it they just disappeared they came down so far away we can find out can you test that yeah yeah right and i've got a bit of a walk now alright so you need the exercise all right it's gonna take little one yeah [Music] right henry to helen 223 yards that's just incredible isn't it we could get you no trouble from here i mean you're really conspicuous you've still got arrows up there haven't you can i come back now oh i suppose so if you can follow those along here and kind of define them a bit back in the safety of the castle matt's busy working on his trench over the slope and the change in ground levels now beginning to look as though it's been created on purpose it looks like it's been kind of stepped up doesn't it and phil's finally made headway in the gateway phil yesterday you had a theory that there was a big pit here and the entrance to the castle originally would have been up there somewhere does that theory still hold absolutely it really holds good but what we've done is the most important new discovery is this whack and great wall here because this wall helps us to get from inside the castle way up there to the outside this must be some major support for a drawbridge or a bridge that is going to get us from that level out there does this archaeology work for you i think phil's got it right it's either part of the abutment for a bridge maybe part of a drawbridge but geographically it seems so weird to me if you look at that level there imagine something there or higher coming out in this direction it's more like a diving board than an accent you just plummet off the edge of the hill doesn't make any sense at all the point of access is right up here above our heads it goes into nowhere so i think i kind of get this the walkway drawbridge and pit idea seems plausible enough but something's obviously missing because the entrance couldn't have led out into thin air so stewart's turned to landowner david to see if there's anything into grieg's landscape history which might explain a change in layout this large house that was here interests me is that it there this is the old mansion house that was probably built in the late 1400s and the first person to acquire it would be roger williams who he mentioned before there were additions and extensions put on the georgian frontage you would notice there a building as fancy as that that's almost been in continuous occupation through into the 17th 18th century it's a very classic period for doing massive landscape works at that period they were actually they wanted ruins in their garden and in some cases actually building ruins and in other cases they were taking buildings down to look like ruins they had them already up there i find it impossible to believe that they wouldn't actually use the castle in some way as a as a detached garden although david's family demolished the mansion in the 1950s stewart thinks his 18th century ancestors might have incorporated the castle into an ornate garden but as matt's discovering they might also have remodeled the castle a hundred years before that so could that date from around the time of the civil war then i would have thought it's um it's within that century anyway so could all this activity explain why the gateway seems so impractical this is what i don't understand you see those walls there well it feels right and that walkway is about halfway up that wall then in front of it we know there's a big pit then it plunges right away down that it comes right up the other side it's not a very convenient way of getting in and out of a castle is it well actually it does make a bit of sense if you can read the earthworks actually well something must have gone that's all i do well you've hit the nail on the head there because what we've actually got here it's actually a quarry going all along that slope through there but the interesting thing about it it's a quarry for a civil war battery which is what this big bank is here behind us during the civil war they've dug out this slope dug it all out raised the rampart along there you can see see on this 3d model this is in fact mostly quarrying down here carried into the slope and dug the material out to create this earthwork along here it's got two bastions one on that end one on that end rampart in between there but it's not under the civil war which has got rid of some of this and created this lovely civil war battery here in the in the 18th century you've got major landscaping phase going with a big house over there and they're bringing a carriageway all the way up this slope nice easy gradient for horse and carriage they've ramped all this off and leveled and done all sorts of things here to get be able to get into the castle up on top of the hill so that's when the big hole was punched in i would suggest so yeah yeah i'm still not convinced that i can see this being as the main entrance to this castle oh music neither can he no i mean that's what i've felt and all your explanations are the changes here just reinforce that the other entrance is somewhere else the main entrance is somewhere else now i get it before the land was remodeled in the 17th and 18th centuries the gateway would have led out onto raised land and with the drawbridge in port callis would have provided a heavily defended access into the castle but while the archaeologists agree it would have been a grand entrance they don't think it would have been the main day-to-day point of access since you'd have to have skirted around the whole castle past the loose to get to it so not content with sorting out one gateway ollie and stuart are heading to the other end of the castle in search of another can you see this this is good quality like a batter so you're saying that those are facing stones of the of the outer wall i think they are that's right they're nicely nicely put together in there we've got another standing wall just here and then you've got this arch bit of fabric surviving there's actually an arch but you can see behind it here we've got another big wall coming out of this wall you've got a gap haven't you a void between the two bear with me you can trace it coming out of that wall it comes all the way around here it's coming out in a circular route as it were then it's chopped and if you go over there there's another one it seems as if it's like two two towers we're now getting to grips with the ruins but i'm a little concerned by our lack of progress in the interior nothing's coming up on the gfiz which is strange because we know from the documents that there were buildings here so we're opening a trench between the gatehouse and the lord's tower because we think that's the most likely site for the hall but i have to say on first inspection it looks rather empty worryingly like the one we closed this morning it's this trench here that's really perplexing us because there doesn't seem to be anything in it at all but what we do know is that right behind it over here is this really large and impressive building could this give us some kind of clue as to what's going on back there as you can see it's got this evidence of a door here which would have swung out in that direction and then here there's a groove which maybe was for a port collis another door here which went out in that direction over here there's a great big tower it is a lovely bit of architecture isn't it it is i mean this is a very beautiful and elegant room and what i'm cleaning up is a window seat and i can imagine the ladies come in here in the morning the sun's shining full through this window come up here up the steps sit on what was a window seat here and look out across the interior of the castle but what would they be looking at there's nothing there well you found no structures but whether we have a garden elegantly laid out i see so the reason that there would appear to be nothing here is that all that was there was garden and we wouldn't see any evidence of that in the archaeology i think if this land's been cultivated extensively over hundreds of years since all those subtle features we may have gone completely so what are we dealing with a fighting fortress or the mother of all gardens when we got here two days ago it seemed like it was all going to be a doddle we've got these fantastic walls presumably in the middle here we'd get some really interesting castley things but after two days digging the sum total of our fines in here is that one roof tile which seems really odd because it must have cost a fortune to build all these walls and we know the declare family who lived here were really rich and really powerful so why did they build all this and why did they create this enormous space in the middle of it and the scary thing is we've only got one day left to find out beginning of day three here at trade castle in south wales where we're still puzzled by the fact that we've got these enormous castle walls and yet virtually nothing inside the castle itself but if there's one thing that we're sure about it's the quality of the workmanship of this tower that we've been calling the lord's tower look at that magnificent vaulting and the solidity of the stonework and this ancient white-haired professor because mick you're really excited about the idea of actually getting in amongst this tower aren't you yeah because if you look across the site we know we've lost a lot of the buildings but if you look from here see it's rising up you see that oh yeah it really it really kicks up it sort of banks right up yeah to this wall and i think the chances of some stratification with fines surviving is more likely against these towers in the war than is further over over the site do you think there's a chance that we might pick up some small fines that might give us some clue as to the lives that were being led by the people who lived here yeah right by the towel we might expect to find window glass for example or architectural features or even things like bits of wine glasses or bits of high quality pottery that was in use by the people in these buildings i'm a bit disappointed you're not peeling the ivy off the walls but i think that's holding the walls together i think you're probably right actually should we move slightly away from the arch so we've finally moved phil from the gateway to open a trench just outside the lord's tower in a last-ditch attempt to find something in the interior because we've already closed two interior trenches with no joy and matt's come to the end of his trench at the other end of the castle well there are two main features in this trench the bottom one right in front of us here is a it's like a terrace or a step you can see at the bottom they've reinforced it with a line of mortar but most of that has weathered and fallen off now there was some 17th century pottery underneath that so we know that was still there in the 17th century before it collapsed back up here the second feature we thought it was another terrace but on excavation you can see it looks like a robbed out wall foundation going across there uh they've taken it all the stone away and you can see it backfilled it with all the old mortar there was no medieval pottery or anything but i think it might have all been cut away i mean there's been a huge amount of remodeling here the massive step cut in there could well have been flattened across here and you know they've chopped away sides here and put the wall through so you might have always been completely chopped away yep so all this civil war and 18th century remodeling might explain why we've got medieval buildings mentioned in the documents but nothing in the ground however we still think that the area right next to the lord's tower might be less disturbed and putting a trench in seems to have paid off since phil's beginning to find a floor level and at the opposite end of the castle stewart thinks he's found the main entrance into tregree what we've got here got substantial wall there see this wall coming out here starting to curve round beyond that tree there there's a very similar thing so what we've got is the wall two towers starting to come out and curve back round to me that's highly suggestive of a gatehouse it's a much more likely position at the bottom area under the castle where it's easier to get down the slope yeah and presumably an entrance passage somewhere up the middle yeah up on this area here i mean the walls are standing to nearly three foot high what do you reckon we should do well what i'm thinking of we start up here mick yeah we'll be inside the tower on on this side of the gate come down through here if we're right there should be a passageway coming through here and then bring the trench over in this side and we'll have a look in in this tower as well so we go right the way across i think we should get on with that let's get it laid out and start sounds like stuart's actually going to get his hands dirty i just hope it's not too late in the day to start opening more trenches although we have finally got to the bottom of our medieval loo this is an amazing excavation i never dreamt there'd be so much of it no neither did we i mean we started off looking for this poo pit and to find lots of beautiful finds but we didn't find anything and it was really deep what's that there well that's a masonry mark that's someone probably who made it and put a mark on to say this is how much i should be paid or something and what about this slope one of the main things it's probably for us to get rid of all that horrible smelly stuff out from under the toilets it really would have been a fairly pleasant toilet as these things go only on time team could anyone be disappointed with the toilet being too clean but if it wasn't for the lack of fines i'm sure we'd appreciate it as much as they did in the medieval period it's now mid-morning day three and not before time things seem to be coming together in our latest trench stewart thinks he's located the main gatehouse it's looking like a fairly substantial piece of masonry wall at the moment isn't it yeah it looks like the core of the walls and phil's work on the lord's tower is also paying off what you got phil oh the most wonderful doorway tony this is the main doorway the main doorway into the lord's tower look what happens it comes along here and then it tapers back here and then we've got this beautiful look at this gorgeous decoration here beautiful you've got to remember that that all this that is represented here at the ground level was carried up in a magnificent arch that's going to meet up there and then follow down on the other side as well the door is in here and it goes that way ah because earlier we thought that the door opened that way yeah but that was before we saw this detail can actually see where the door would have been it's in there look and that is where the hinge would have been so you're gonna have a big pivot there and then as you come through the door swings back and you're in that's a bit nice absolutely stunning that was just unbelievable that is beautiful scarlett how are we doing on fines um apart from all this bedrock we've had a lovely piece of colonette well basically it's um part of a window or a door like frame framework i just think it's quite beautiful but that doesn't look very much like the stuff that phil's been finding well no the interesting thing is if you've looked at what phil was just doing it's very angular very square this is lovely and round it's beautiful yeah oh another one here hey so do you think that they're part of the same build as phil um well no because they're more circular they look like they're from an earlier phase basically how much further are you gonna dig back about another meter well we're going for lunch now i think it's imperative that you stay and get us those small fines great thanks come on phil i'm included in that that's good but scarlet's not the only one working through lunch helen's on a final hunt for fines so she can tie up the history of the castle we still don't have an awful lot of metal finds no but what we have got are pretty impressive what do you think of that that is absolutely gorgeous isn't it you know i think that's just about the best preserved medieval arrowhead i have ever seen and it must have presumably been shot from a longbow because of its its flatness yeah isn't that lovely david that is exciting yeah very appropriate for our site indeed look at this what do you think thing that oh gosh that is a very tiny little row from a spur it's one of the earliest ones and they're invented in the 13th century so 13th 14th century i might put on that oh yeah yes it's not the civil war period no i don't think so no but these ones look like they they must be and we've got three little musket balls um and and this which is just the star of the piece isn't it really amazing what do you think of that steve uh well it we think it's a grenade right um so while civil war a bit later well yeah i didn't know anything about glasses no i've never seen one i would never have recognized it but luckily somebody did they're about a cricket ball size uh with this hole in the top made of iron and you pour the gunpowder and set a fuse and then you fling this apparently that was the problem you couldn't throw them far enough and if they didn't actually score a direct hit they they hardly worked so they were virtually unheard of so that i think is going to be a really significant find i have to say i'm really intrigued by these fines on the one hand they fit perfectly with my picture of a castle with knights in shining armor fierce battles and bloody sieges but on the other they seem completely at odds with the overall picture we're building up of the castle fancy loose fancy towers extravagant feasts and possible gardens my image of a castle is you've got a pork callus in the middle of the front and then you've got walls that go like that all the way around that's it yeah and then you've got a stone floor in the middle for all the soldiers to march around and up at the top people are firing arrows and checking boiling oil but this is nothing like that no no that's because you have a very stereotypical view of a castle there no i can't believe that surely enough your image is he's absolutely right for some of the 13th century castle like kaphilli or conway or carnarvon one of those really big edwardian castles and they're built in just the way you describe because it's not very long afterwards i mean you only have to get to the 1400s before you've got gunpowder and cannon and these places are redundant anyway but the idea of towers and battlements representing power and status and so on stays on the other aspect you see is that even early on in say the 12th century the aristocracy the top levels of society are interested in gardens somewhere to retreat to somewhere where you could go and have a party with a small number you know romantic entanglements and all the rest of it the right word for this sort of place i think when you get into that is a presence in a way we should stop thinking as a castle and think of it as a pleasance it's not a castle well i never thought i'd say that at the end of three days if you'd like to learn more about pleasances or medieval romantic retreats log on to the time team website it's now nearly the end of day three and the team have finished working outside the lord's tower well it's a shame we didn't get more small fines but the architecture we revealed was really phenomenal just look at the quality of the architecture in front of us there you've got a door you've got a port callus the slot is just above us you've got another door as well and what would have been inside well you're looking at serious medieval high quality living you've got lots of rooms chambers fireplaces windows you've got that fantastic exquisite octagonal chamber over there the lord even had a little hand basin to wash his hands in and at the other end of the castle stewart thinks he's finally conquered the main gatehouse what you see in here the kind of where stones been taken out from they've been ripped out and been robbed off but this is the edge of a tower which came round here and what we've got over here are two road surfaces so this is where the roadway entrance ought to be absolutely you come up through here there's one tower coming round there yeah another coming round here and you'd have come up through here now what is interesting about this is absolutely no evidence that the main curtain wall came through so we know this is going to be you know there's a gap here yeah and that tower is much smaller than that tower so it's probably not built at the same time no it's quite a complex arrangement so it's sort of resolving i think we've got a twin tower gateway different size towers carriageways through it it's been demolished lots of it's been robbed away at two or three different periods probably so having finally completed our attack on the castle we're at last able to put together a picture of what tragrigu was like 700 years ago look at this tony it's a picture called the garden of pleasure it was made in about 1485 and i love it because it's got this fantastic frame around with a curved top that makes it look like a scene through a window just like the window we're sitting in here there's an awful lot of stuff in the garden isn't there yes it's very busy and we're lucky because the artist has put in an awful lot of things which you also find on these accounts from two of the garden the other gardens of elizabeth declare now you can see in the picture that we've got this lovely fountain here and a pool and here we've got mention of a pool in the garden and a fountain made and then we've got railings here and sandy paths and we've got mention of railings and sand and then lastly this amazing bright green turf she's obviously rather keen on her lawns because she's she's having turf taken from a nearby estate to repair her garden there's something really quite erotic about this picture isn't there well it's called the garden of pleasure and these these two people are holding hands but what else can you see well what's that is that a leg i think so golly i wonder what he's doing to her she looks very surprised just kind of i'm not surprised i've really enjoyed peeling off the georgian and then the civil war layers to reveal for grieg's medieval splendor and it's completely changed my view of castles since life at tragrig must have been very pleasant with massive walls and heavily defended gateways the declare lords and of course ladies were able to retreat from the dangerous welsh marches and relax in their luxurious tower overlooking beautiful gardens well we started out thinking we got a castle full of soldiers and we ended up with a pleasure dome how do you feel about that no i'm just extremely excited by your visit here and everything i've seen has brought the whole castle alive as far as i was concerned you don't feel cheated that it wasn't what you thought it was going to be no no we've found um examples from the civil wars and medieval times which is you know how i always wanted to date this place well given that it was a place of fun we've got one more treat in store for you phil off you go hey phil you hold that stand in front of the target and we'll start i know i'm as safe as houses [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 418,180

Rating: 4.9050727 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, Llangybi, Monmouthshire, Welsh History, Motte, Bailey, de Clare family, 1245, 14th Century, Bogo de Clare, Gilbert de Clare, Hugh Despenser the Younger, Llywelyn Bren, Williams family of Usk, Sir Trevor Williams, English Civil War, Tregruk

Id: faGxoJkvoBg

Length: 47min 50sec (2870 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020