Picts And Hermits (Fife) | S12E08 | Time Team

[Music] [Music] deep in the gloom of these scottish caves are messages from one of the most enigmatic peoples ever to live in britain this is just one of many symbols carved by the picts of people who so worried the romans that they built hadrian's wall just to keep them out but that's just part of these caves colorful history over the centuries jacobite aristocracy world war ii refugees even hermits have all sought shelter here [Music] but now they're under threat rising sea levels mean it's only a matter of time before they succumb to the dark cold firth of forth and that's why we're here to glean as much evidence as we can from these caves rich past before it's too late and we've got just three days to do it [Music] [Music] so [Music] the term picts describes the people who lived in northern scotland from the 4th to 9th century a.d [Music] their name comes from the latin pikti meaning painted people and they've fascinated historians and artists for centuries despite leaving virtually no written history the pics real legacy is their art intriguing designs that have never been deciphered and there's an unusually high number of them here in the weems caves on the very edge of the pictus nation [Music] we've got stan here is that a picture not as far as i know no no that's not a picture but we do have some classic picture symbols here this double disc symbol here is a classic one what's this one well that's a salmon again that's probably original it's probably pit dish and it's probably dates from perhaps about the seventh or eighth century d but this fish over here but this one down here that one there it's quite different nature and character and that's probably 19th century indeed we've got 1500 years or more of carving straight in front of us here this wall is a chronicle of centuries of human activity here but we're going to concentrate on these mysterious symbols and the people who made them the carvings represent years of pictish presence at weems and we want to discover if this cave was a communal art gallery or if the picts who left these marks actually lived here if they did we should find some evidence of occupation charcoal animal bones cereal grains and the like but first we need to find the 1500 year old surface on which they would have stood to carve these designs we'll get this modern disturbance off let's let's call it the party layer and then we'll get down onto some serious archaeology but we're going to have our work cut out the 1500 years of human activity here have featured periods of later occupation industry and unfortunately vandalism including one case when a car was driven into this cave and set a light how far down do you think the pigs might be well anywhere within possibly several meters to the bottom of the the cave floor it could be a long way down we would expect a great sandwich of occupation of different periods you know people come in there's been stuff washed in probably stuff dumped and then more people living on top of we've got sandwich underneath us so it could be some dig yeah and we might find a four decisions the trench phil's digging is in jonathan's cave named after a 19th century man who made it his home and is just one of several caves at weems that not only contain pictish carvings but seem to encapsulate centuries even millennia of scottish history but all the archaeology along this coastline is now seriously at risk from rising sea levels and unstoppable coastal erosion [Applause] and that's why we've decided that this dig has to be a multi-period excavation this is probably the last chance to record the heritage of the weems caves and every one has its own story to tell our next target is the well cave which lies underneath the remains of the medieval macduff's castle as well as a rumor of a secret tunnel connecting the cave to the castle it's also believed that from the 10th to the 15th century this was home to christian hermits this is a big open area yes about 12 meters in diameter it's high too yeah yeah hello you've got the descriptions on that side well the date from about 18 60 1861 these carvings may be more recent but they do have a special significance for the archaeologists on the dig they're from the mid-19th century when weems became a popular victorian attraction as antiquarians the forerunners of today's archaeologists began to uncover the cave's rich history unfortunately some of the methods used in the investigations were far from ideal archaeology this this period wasn't really a science it wasn't a subject that really come into existence these were learned gentlemen who were inquiring about scotland's past and their qualifications was essentially to be a gentleman and to have the money to indulge their passion and interest do we have any idea if they found any fines in those digs well yes and no the records from those early explorations show that a number of finds were made ceramics and a few other iron objects but the descriptions and so on they gave them they were relatively poor and these artifacts weren't actually collected the technology and methods being used today are a bit more sophisticated as part of an ongoing project implemented by fife council the caves are now being digitally a scan mapped about five millimeter resolution here a point every five millimeters yeah the laser scanning will create a high definition 3d model of the caves recording them for posterity and once the well cave has been scanned we're going to put in a couple of trenches for our own investigation oh what's that over in jonathan's cave phil and raksha are finally through the layer of 20th century rubbish and appear to have found well some earlier rubbish that ain't the short thing you have for a party is it no not really a lawyer so i mean that could be where somebody's been living in here it looks like phil has hit an occupation layer but unfortunately these fines are much too late to be pictish so far the only evidence we have of these elusive people are the carvings who were these people who were doing the carving they were simply the descendants of the celtic tribes whom the romans encountered when they marched into scotland in a.d 79 and it's sometimes argued that it was the threat of the roman presence that made the small celtic tribes come together into a single kingdom of the picts in order to be stronger so although a lot of these drawings would have been post-roman actually there are echoes of really old times here yes they are and what's interesting about the caves is that it is the early forms of the symbols that you get as time goes on into the eighth ninth centuries you get really elaborate versions but these are dead simple the most beautiful examples of pictish art come from standing stones found elsewhere in scotland but they do have something in common with these roughly hewn symbols at weems they've confounded academics for centuries do we know what they mean no no we don't uh clearly they're a means of communication um a passing pick would know what they meant but we don't because there are no documents and there's no equivalent of of something like the rosetta stone where you have two languages saying the same thing one which we know one which we didn't so we can work out what the other one means yes oh oh yeah oh that's oh yeah yeah it could be a long time before we reach any sort of pictish archaeology that's a big old nail on it yeah phil and co are still trawling through an inordinate amount of iron work it's a cut nail i would imagine it's 19th century perhaps even earlier what do you think that was used for then holding two big bits of wood together well that is big bits of wood oh everyone watch yourselves it's really dark in here you guys all right following through yeah cool oh but over at the well cave the laser scanning has finished and bridge and matt can now start work on the medieval period of weems history [Music] wow look at that it's awesome that is incredible our first trench in here will investigate the well that gave the cave its name and in particular bridge will be looking for any evidence of medieval occupation the period when hermits are believed to have lived here this this is the well then over here yeah this is the well over here so the first trench is going to be around this it's going to come straight out here i guess about a meter extending from see the set stones here yep all the way around the edge the other intriguing aspect of the well cave is this tunnel which according to folklore leads to the 15th century mcduff's castle over 20 meters above our diggers but in its current state it doesn't look a particularly welcoming proposition it's now down to matt to try and find archaeological evidence of a medieval man-made passageway we're going to put a trench sort of against that wall there halfway into it and let's see if we get can let's see we get some evidence that people made that hole the historical period where investigating may be vast some 1500 years or more but in geological terms the weems caves are young whippersnappers cut from sandstone in the last 10 000 years i always think of caves as being almost as old as the earth itself the idea that people were around when they were being created and moved in practically straightaways quite bizarre 10 000 years ago this was at the water's edge the sea was bashing against this as totally inhospitable as it were but about six and a half thousand years ago there was a change the ice sheet started to melt and as they melted the weight was reduced and the land started to to rise out of the water lifting these up onto dry land you can see here the the layers of rock these sandstone layers they're very soft and as the the sea pounds against it it breaks little bits off along these joints here and every bit it breaks off it then bashes further against the rock and knocks another bit off so you get this like it's like a huge tumble dryer of pebbles and rocks going round and round and round and scouring into the rock if you look you see just up there on that shelf can you see there's a whole lot of pebbles just there yeah yeah that's almost just a remnant of that last process the sea coming in here those pebbles are jammed into that rock give them a few more years those pebbles would have brought down that ledge as they were swirled around the cave would have got bigger in jonathan's cave mick has decided to open up another trench in the search for pictish evidence it would be nice if one of them gave us a result if only in phil's trench the expected two meters of archaeology with a nice pictish floor at the bottom has spectacularly failed to materialize [Music] doesn't actually sound to me like evidence of pinkish habitation it sounds to me like bedrock tony and that's exactly what it is we've basically got two layers we've got a layer up to this dark line here can you see that dark yeah across there now we've actually got a piece of pot from around there which we think might actually be 17th century in other words that could be part of our jackaboy aristocracy that we know lived in here but above it we've got gosh what's happening here well actually this was cave was once used as a nail making i mean there is very very little stratigraphy here so does that mean the picts who carved these things were extremely small or laying down i mean the the only way the only way in which you could actually carve that is either to be extremely small or simply to get down here and work like that yeah the second trench in jonathan's cave has fared little better it would seem that the picts who created these designs came carved and left again there's no evidence that they lived here it's a disappointing end for a cave that promised so much but at least we still have the well cave [Music] this is extraordinary yeah mind your head tone yeah well it's like a mini cathedral fantastic isn't it like a proper cave shouldn't be how you been getting there all right we've got a couple of things going on here bridget's over there look bridge what have you got well looks like we're inside the well here um tom's following round the curving edge inside it looks to be redeposited rubble really and we're finding chris packets and paintings but he has just said that he's come down to a new layer which does have some archaeological promise how about you matt well when he finds us yet but just below the surface the edge of the cave is dead straight and drops down completely vertically so it looks like it could be man-made we're going to follow that round and see if it joins up with the tunnel there mick it does seem as though we've been working all day and we're still just scratching away at cave floors yeah i mean it's been an awful lot of rubble and soil and stuff to shift but i think we're in a position to get down into the archaeology we won't do much in jonathan's cave i think we're almost finished there but here there's everything to go for so we hit this hard i think so yeah and in addition we've been looking in a third cave where there seems to be many more layers below the floor surface and most importantly one of our archaeologists has discovered some ancient kind of engraving which no one's ever seen before so we're going to get the specialists in first thing tomorrow morning to see if we've got our first ever time team pictish carving yesterday morning we came here to the 5th coast to look at some caves which have been inhabited on and off for thousands of years the first one we looked at was jonathan's cave which is way back there and there's some great pictish carvings on the walls but we put a couple of trenches in and we haven't found anything particularly exciting but one of our archaeologists was fooling around down this cave and came up with something which everyone thinks could be really exciting and obviously it had to be in another cave that's a bit of a squeeze to get into but tackling the appropriately named sloping cave is well worth the effort we think it's a serpent you can see kind of this head hole here and then the body curving around like this and we we thought you know it's probably a pictish carving how do we know it's picked up well we've had an expert looking at it anna ritchie herself has actually seen it and said yeah there's no doubt about it it is pictish the beauty of it is look how low down in the cave it is so in fact there's no way that you could actually make that carving with a ground level at this at this point there must be quite a lot of build up of actual deposits with possible pictish material in it well we said that yesterday but maybe this time phil will find an identifiable pictish layer but the pictish heritage of these caves is just part of a much bigger survey of this coastline which is now under serious threat from rising sea levels [Music] in the well cave underneath the castle bridge and matt are in the midst of a medieval excavation uncovering the eponymous well that may have been used by christian hermits and investigating a mysterious passage that runs into the cave wall hey getting on pretty well actually we've got this medieval jug handle probably about 13th 14th century it's great and that came from the lucid deposits up here right next to the uh the tunnel opening so that's pretty good for explaining a link between the castle up there and uh and this cave they may be chucking rubbish down here or there's something joining up the two there but i still want to get a camera down there if possible yeah but every single tunnel in the world people say it goes to the nearby castle or a priory or a church maybe this one really does you can't tell come over and have a look at what bridge is doing oh you're certainly on a different layer than you were last night yeah not very far down still yet what we seem to be finding here is um interleaving layers of cobble and soil trample that people would have bought into the cave on the bottom of their shoes and left it and then you've also got evidence of people not being in the cave you've got sort of decayed sandstone that's been washed down by water in between the episodes of people coming in here can you date the well not yet we're going to have to keep digging and keep going down because we are on a nice organic layer that looks pretty undisturbed there's clearly a lot more work to be done in here but that hasn't stopped searching for new targets outside the caves have such power this plateau of land has been savagely eroded and a trench at the very edge of it has provided county archaeologist douglas spears with a stratigraphy of centuries of human activity including lots of rubbish from the castle just a few years ago this land surface went way out beyond us i mean this whole section of coast is so unstable it's currently eroding at several meters a year what would you expect to find in layers like this on the beach like this well i said what i think we're dealing here is with a medieval midden when i see a media dumb food reminds me it's the rubbish from the kitchen it's the old bones from the dinner table we could actually find just about anything in the smoothie so we've got to come back when they've done a bit more clean and see what they've got them very much so we now want to find out what was happening out here and relate it to what was going on in the caves and that's all the more important because phil has just uncovered even more evidence of the pict's habit of leaving messages in the sandstone this one is the original serpent yeah coming in there but we've actually got a brand spanking new one but it's coming down there and almost mirrors the curve on that one there i mean it's just such amazing to me because i mean what you're looking at is well not only branch bank and new caravans but look at the condition of the rock face it's totally unweathered that i'm sure is the way that the pics would have seen it when they actually actually carved it it's brilliant and there's no sign that you're anywhere near them not on my way no no what's really interesting about these is that these carvings haven't been tampered with in recent times like most of the other carvings in the other caves but also when you look at that one it's smooth you know it's been packed first and then it's been ground down nice and smooth so that's finished carving whereas that double disc over the other side what this one over here yes this one what's that they never finished that one there well you can still see the pecking on that they never got around to smoothing it out purely in terms of pictish archaeology this is a great find but in another sense it's a deeply frustrating discovery no one knows what it or any of the other pictish symbols mean and the picts themselves are just as mysterious this is a picture of the pictish man recreated by victor and this is a picture of a pictish woman from the early 16th century i thought what they demonstrate for me is this wide variety in images of who these people might be why don't we know more about them the problem is uh to date in the past we've only had a few sources of information to to examine them or certainly that only a few have been exploited for example a very colorful but one-sided picture is given from the early historical records we have from the roman writers about the pics and this is likely to be a biased source of information we do have quite a a good visual impression of them we know what sort of things they at we know the names of their kings but it is it is that whole process of of putting together you know an earlier people which archaeologists have had to do time and time again isn't it yeah you start with the standard remains the ruins you dig on the sites you find as you're saying evidence of diet and that sort of stuff and then there's us another stage you're thinking well yes but what were they actually like were they warlike were they builders were they farmers i think it's likely that excavation or more excavation of picture sites is what's required because for example here in fife the exception of the work we're doing now there's only really been one sizeable excavation of a picture site actually in five so it seems utterly almost bizarre that we have this group of people inhabiting scotland or a large chunk of scotland for so long and all we really know about them is they had a particularly distinctive artistic style but at the moment the symbols are the only thing we have to go on and they don't just appear on rocks because the pics are also famous for their jewelry there was a remarkable find in fife about 12 kilometers away from the weems caves at a place called nori's law so what happened to it oh oh it's a tragic tale because about 400 ounces of silver were found um unfortunately the people didn't want them to fall into the hands of the crown treasure trove and they actually sold them to a peddler who then sold them to a jeweler in cooper and he melted them down and made them into spoons well no such blasphemy from us but we are going to try and recreate one of these pendants using methods from the time and one of the original designs the objects themselves have left some clues so what they must have done is to start off by making an ingot of silver and then they would hammer that ingot flat and they would shape it into the leaf shape and you can tell that because these are hammer marks on the back they would have flipped it over given it a light polish and then engraved the decoration then they would have enameled it and then give it a final polish so there's actually quite a complicated number of stages in it absolutely requiring a great deal of skill as well in the sloping cave phil's search for pictish occupation is starting to uncover a lot of bone although it's too early to say what period it belongs to and something else has been discovered in this cave but this time it's not pictish and for once we can translate it so what what is that sort of y-shaped fork-shaped thing that we're looking at it's a very distinctive norse or viking rune how crikey but i mean is it what you'd expect to find in a cave like this you expect to find anything and we know that there was norse activity in this area which letter is it it's the letter k it's the sixth letter in the alphabet and what's interesting is that um the first six letters spell futhack a sort of magical formula it's almost as if i were to say uh god bless you or praise be to allah something like that this is a timely reminder that these caves contain centuries of history and in the well cave matt's trying to discover if he's got a tunnel leading to the medieval castle or if he's just busting a gut to debunk a local myth and he's now employed the very latest in technology cave cam which is basically a camcorder in a plastic tray strapped to a couple of fence posts i think i think i think maybe yeah we should get another bit of wood and make it a little bit longer yeah i wasn't born to be a gaffer tape woman there we go that's beautiful lovely talk about amateurs the initial results from this cutting-edge technology aren't promising it would seem the tunnel story is literally coming to a dead end outside the well cave john's now finished his survey and he's established a couple of targets that might help tie together the different strands of our archaeological investigation what we have gotten the results is an area of increased noise and that may be something or it may not so we're going to put a trench in over that it's just going to be a very very small trench basically probably only about a couple of bucket widths just to see what john's anomaly is whether it is actually anything or a load of pebbles the strategy is start there first and then hopefully move closer to the cave entrance stop where first well actually down here we've marked out the trench this is where the noise is on the geophysics yeah but we're quite a long way from the cave so really what we want to do is if rod's happy is cut back some of the nettles get a bit closer to the entrance and maybe put something in there as rachel said he's not shaking his head i'm thinking now i think it's okay if we don't not take all the the cover away from the cave mouth so you can get in quite a long way in and i hopefully type the strategy between the cave area and out to the outside will that do for you yeah it's an opportunity to work in the sun so far this site has given us three distinct periods to investigate but this trench here on the plateau could present us with evidence dating right back to the formation of these caves thousands of years ago that's an awful lot of archaeology from a rather small trench with just a few hours of day two left this multi-period multi-site dig has taken on a life of its own with each trench supplying different but vital information for the history of weems caves and our attempt to recreate a pictish pendant is also doing pretty well starting to look more like an object you'd recognize alison that's right yes yeah i mean when they're found they would be um corroded but certainly shape-wise and smoothness-wise yes it's more like the ingots that we know on the plateau the digger has gone through over two meters of earth including a rather impressive midden layer of dumped organic material and it's now hitting sand just coming out to the beach all right see a sandcastle we'll stop there then it's now down to environmental archaeologist dr erica goodman to make sense of it so do you think that definitely is beach yeah we've hit the beach department well immediately above that was where most of the midden type material was coming from do you think that's um actually just washed in or do you think it's actual human activity oh there's definitely human activity i've just found a bit of bone and there's some charcoal in there but above that midden type layer we've got this two and a half meters of soil i mean where's that come from well that's not natural that's got to have been built up artificially somehow um we'd need to find out when that started and when it finished and we need some dating evidence that's all been done that's all been dumped and i think it may well have been dumped from the castle just up there [Applause] back inside the well cave matt's camera on a stick and some further excavation have exploded the myth of a secret tunnel follow the tunnel along this way the trajectory actually bends down it hasn't actually been cut by humans at all so nobody has cleaned out this at any point so it doesn't look like anyone's ever used it and looking at the rock in there as well there's no real evidence for have people having chopped away at it at all so you're saying that that tunnel is entirely natural it looks it yeah and looking at the castle up outside above us it's a good 20 meters vertically i'd say from down there and this rock as you can see splits horizontally and so i really don't think there's going to be any evidence at all for joining the castle so that's one piece of folklore laid to rest but even as one trench shuts down a theory another one opens up a whole new set of possibilities an animal bone has been discovered at the bottom of the trench on the plateau and it bears all the marks of early human activity i can actually see some fine knife cuts that probably been made with a metal knife so your bone has actually been butchered by a human being with a knife oh excellent that's fantastic got it and that's not the only bone that's causing a stir phil's doggie determination in the sloping cave has revealed a layer that could be very significant we're getting so much bone and it's all from this level here yeah the chances of that just being washed in i reckon that it's got to be two coins yeah i think we could argue we've got occupation here good good one of the most frustrating things about this site is how much of the archaeology has been interfered with by the sea by rusty old nails by barbecue fires by graffiti by a blazing car in a cave but at last we're beginning to get down onto untouched early archaeology like this piece of butchered bone both here and in phil's cave are we beginning to get to the levels where some of the earliest inhabitants of these caves actually stood and if so what else might we find it's a cold steely start to day three and fife and the trenches across this coastline are now producing evidence of centuries of human activity i've got a bit of bone in here it looks burnt excellent but it's the sloping cave where we discovered unrecorded pictish carvings that's attracting the most attention look at the quantity of bone and we're getting it from right down here right on the base of the trench and that bone is not the evidence of of somebody having a party here that is somebody living here there's just too much bone and at the moment the only people that we can know use these caves are the pigs so are you saying that these bones could have been dropped by the actual people who did those carvings it's a strong consideration we've got to work to that idea to start with but what we've got to do is prove it but sloping cave isn't the only place where we found bone on our site our first trench over on the plateau found similar looking evidence of occupation although that was at least two meters below the modern surface so to try and find out what was going on here we're now digging a new trench close to the entrance of the well cave hang on this is really loose so it's probably fall yeah this is more than just rockfall these clean angular pieces of stone are debris from the construction of mcduff's castle in the 15th century and that means anything directly below it will date to the same medieval period as the fines being uncovered inside the well cave fridge yeah you get your pottery over there the bit that i'm in we've got no pod we've got the orbit of bone but um alistair's got a little bit of pottery out there still from the 14th century so it's outside the well whether or not this is evidence of the hermits who are meant to have lived here remains to be seen but what's more surprising is the bridge can't find any evidence of a water source for the well that gave this cave its name must be the natural back on the plateau the archaeological evidence is now suggesting we're looking at a human presence here that stretches back well before even the earliest days of the pics if we begin at the beginning and we begin with the wave cut platform here that's this smooth rock in front of us that's right that was cut by wave action and we know from the geologists that that was cut about from about six and a half thousand years ago so that's mesolithic so that's hunter-gatherer period when people are you know not farming or anything like that that's right that's before farming we've then got these midden deposits and they've been churned about by the sea we've got a lot of shell and and sea sand in there but we've also got a lot of animal bone and some of this is domesticated animals so that's telling us that it's neolithic so that's after hunt together it's after hunter-gatherers so somewhere in this there's a change from hunter-gatherer period to when people are actually farming well yes and that's right over the wave cut platform so if there was any mesolithic it's all been mixed up and we can say that that lowest deposit there is neolithic or later it would seem that almost as soon as this land and these caves were carved by the receding waters of the forth people were using them for shelter and farming and stewart is pretty sure where these people came from i've been having a look at all the aerial photographs and and where things occur there's there's big iron age hill faults sort of over that area there's evidence of a picture settlement over here and beneath where we're standing on this hill here there looks to be evidence of a possible bronze age burial mound so all in all you've got a very active farmed intensively occupied landscape in fact it's no different then to what it is today this photograph shows it well you've got settlement of east weem here around this valley and the coastline and people living here and coming up and carving the names on the caves is no different to what was happening in the bronze age the iron age and in the pictage period it's just i like that continuity people are doing now what they did thousands and thousands of years ago okay the majority of people lived above the cliffs but that doesn't mean that some including picts weren't living down in the caves we just need archaeological evidence to prove it oh look at that and there's another bit there look yeah but that's that's a cracking piece look at that and in the sloping cave phil's now wading through a mass of human detritus i don't think there's any don't know that it's human occupation did you ever doubt it was it did you ever doubt it that could be charcoal parts you can see the charcoal from here even or small small mammals or fish bones whatever i mean this is the real the real answers are in here whether or not its occupation related to the cave's pictish carvings remains to be seen but at the minute these are the only proof that the picts visited here our own attempt to recreate one of these enigmatic symbols originally found as part of a pictish horde has been going well until now i've forged it out as far as i can from the ingot i cast yesterday but i've come to stop now because cracks are forming round the edge uh and i can't get a bigger piece out of it it looks like sort of the way pastry cracks when you roll it out but of course this you can't ball it back up against that no so has the experiment convince you that the pictish silver could have been made using this ingot and hammering technique oh yes no problem i just needed to cast a bigger ingot luckily we brought along a spare for just such an emergency but the last couple of stages are the fiddliest with some of the inscription barely more than a hair's breath victor that looks incredibly difficult give him a pencil and paper anytime and there's still no guarantee that the enamel inlay will properly fire on our makeshift forge [Music] we've now only a few hours left of day three and on the plateau the diggers are almost through the thick layer of 15th century rock debris but in the sloping cave phil has stopped digging come on 41 centimeters from the section right and then slightly there's just too much archaeology in the trench and some of it has to be recorded before it's removed it's still got to be done precisely of course it has i mean the fact is you see what we've done is we've got down onto this floor this is where these stones are there no no this black stuff right at the bottom that's the floor now see those big boulders and what have you that's just a beach deposit which is actually coming in that's actually protecting the floor oh it's been marvelous but if you look at that level there that floor and you look at those carvings on the wall yeah cast your mind back to jonathan's cave and and how low those carbons were to the floor so they could have been done by somebody sitting on that floor in fact exactly that could well be the picture's floor if phil's right this would be the first evidence of pics living in and not just visiting these caves are you nearly finished just buy it i think we've just got it yeah that's it but the history of the sloping cave is just part of a much larger complex timeline down on the eroded beach douglas believes he's uncovered a relic from a different era of weems history this is a stone it's standing upright a very unnatural position for it to be in and it's actually contained within a large cut and the obvious question is who did it and why did they do it well we don't have the exact answers to that now but one thing we do know that within the last few years we've had two skeletons come out from this area behind us there's no soil there now because the seas eroded it all the way and we've had carbon dates for these so we know they're about 10th 11th century 80 and date so it's possible that this is a stone which marks a christian cemetery and there may very well be further christian burials behind this stone but that's actually quite significant well it's very significant over in the well cave we've now managed to unpick medieval fact from fiction do we know how deep the well is well i'm not sure if i'd want to call it a well anymore i like the word pool a little bit yesterday we dismissed the myth of a tunnel running up to the medieval castle and now bridge has discovered that the well that gave the well cave its name isn't well a well a well suggests that you're actually tapping down into the ground to get water but this seems to be an area where there's a natural accumulation of water and somebody has come along at some point and cut a bigger area to catch that water if you can see here on the sides quite sharp edges and if you had a naturally formed pool you'd have pebbles scouring round and round and round and round and you'd have quite vertical edges and they'd be quite flat we don't have that here and it definitely looks like someone has been manipulating changing the sides have we any idea who made it not the moment but outside the well over there we do have a proliferation of 14th century pottery suggesting that the main time of activity here is 14th century and that is when the hermit seemed to be in this area so we've got a hermits pool would be very nice we've even got a stone just down here that sort of the morphology of it makes it look as if someone's been stepping in and created a footprint wear on it there's just one drawback to your theory there is absolutely no water in there well if you look down here there's a wee bit here and look at the glistening of this rock here this is where the water is seeping out and into it but it's not enough to wash a dirty hermit no it's not but it's going to seep through seep through and of course you've had a change in the water table levels the amount of wear on the step and the effort that's gone into making this pool suggests this was a facility that was in use for a long time it's very possible that hermits were the first people to take advantage of the rock face seeping water but the trench outside the well caves entrance points to other more practical people also living in this cave and you can actually see in the bottom of this this deposit those lines got these very distinct marks these linear dark features these are plow marks which are going right i didn't dare to hope that's what they were this neat bit of stratigraphy shows how much the plateaus changed in the last 600 years at the top is a thick layer of victorian landscaping below which of the rocks that were dumped here when the 15th century castle was built above the caves then there's this layer of soil which we now know is full of dumped organic material bits of bone charcoal shellfish and so on and the plow marks at the bottom of the trench show that the people who lived here were putting that waste to good use it shows us that this area of land is being cultivated with plows or arts in this area so the the great dump of domestic debris and i suppose food remains everything is fertile enough they're actually ploughing it to grow sort of crops in the top that's exactly what they're doing what sort of date do we think that is then it's very difficult to describe an exact date what we can do in relation to other layers we can see that this material here is 15th century and so everything below this red layer has got to be pre-15th century right so this is probably medieval it probably relates to the occupation of the caves and perhaps anywhere before the 10th to 15th centuries and it looks like the sort of level it might be in the cave so that it's sort of related perhaps to that strata very much so that's another really helpful thing about this layer because it's being plowed we can tell it was formally a ground surface and if we relate to that to the levels of the cave we can see it was actually formally quite a a level um plateau almost coming out from this grassed area into the caves they did well to spot that didn't know the bottom of that hole that's a very good piece of excavation indeed it would have been very easy to travel through that and this means that this whole part of the coastline would have once looked very different 600 years ago the entrance to the well cave would have been a much more welcoming prospect and as well as providing refuge to hermits it may also have once been home to the people who farmed the plateau throughout the middle ages it would also suggest that the sloping cave where phil's been working probably wouldn't have required a degree in potholing to enter it what we were looking at that brown stuff with all the black charcoal yeah it was actually trample lying on the top of this floor and you can see that quite clearly in the section here yeah i mean it's probably about that thick and the stone floor itself well you can see it's a bit egg woody piggledy it starts here which is part of the natural boulders right and that's part of it there that natural boulder there but the interesting thing is when you get to here you actually get stones that are laid in there deliberately you see it is a nice level surface they've sort of leveled it up to go with the bedrock then do we think it's pictish i'd love to say it was i really would i mean it is still a good height for our caravan yeah yeah but realistically i can't actually tell you i think the truth is we're gonna have to fall back on science and get a radio carbon day and phil now has his proof subsequent radio carbon analysis of barley grains lifted from the occupation layer dated it to between 240 and 400 a.d which covers the late scottish iron age and the beginning of the pictish period so really we've got to leave what's underneath for somebody else haven't we that's too good to disturb really we're beginning to get an idea of just by looking in the cracks of what's underneath and it looks like it is good clean deposit so i mean there may be other occupation levels underneath but this is as far as we're going that's nice i like that the discovery of this floor is a first for these caves proof that people lived here during the era of the picts the most mysterious people in british history are people who left no written records of their nation just enigmatic and stunning artistry there we are is that it finished yes it's finished it is absolutely beautiful well done you please yes thank you it's come out very well i'm very pleased about that the thing that really comes across me is the contrast when the really high professional craftsmanship that's gone into making this is so different to the sort of graffiti level of the same designs carved on the caves here but even these crude carvings are personal declarations of the pictish identity and our new evidence shows they not only visited these caves but some actually lived here it's now only a matter of time before the weems caves disappear but at least we've helped to protect their legacy cutting edge technology has digitally preserved the carved interiors while the archaeology we've uncovered has told the story of a coastline that's had a brief but very eventful history living by the sea in a beautiful spot with a good roof over your head has always had its appeal and we found evidence of people using these caves since the earliest times when they first rose out of the water and that evidence seems all the more important because now seems to be the time when they're about to return to the sea [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 213,840

Rating: 4.9416566 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, time team, time team full episode, time team season 12 episode 8, time team fife, time team picts and hermits, wemyss caves, time team wemyss caves, british history

Id: jUydo57HKh4

Length: 48min 37sec (2917 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021