The Abandoned Castle In Sunderland | Time Estate | Absolute History

stuck in the middle of a sandal and housing estate is this like some graffiti covered medieval version of the tardis but is this tower all there was to it when it was first built or is this just the tip of some archaeological iceberg [Music] [Music] it's covered in concrete well the windows are anyway and uh it's all sort of black and grubby why have you invited this you sound disappointed well it's not very romantic is it i thought time team was about you know extracting these beautiful bits of architecture out of the ground this is stuck up on the surface already and it looks pretty grim you don't mind me saying that isn't it well what we're showing you now is what we've got at the moment and what we're hoping to do is actually invite you back just in a few years time and show you what we're going to develop this into but before we can start to develop it we need to know something if it's past the whole of the story is if we don't develop it we'll just end up with a pile of rubble yeah so before we can develop it we need an archaeological survey on the site right so you want us to look at what's here so that when you come to develop it you don't put a car parking over something or yeah that'll be somewhere or whatever i mean it is to us it's very special it might not look much to tony but this is our castle it's the people's castle and we want to preserve it as best we can yeah we've already started doing some work then he wants some geophysical work all around the building and beyond as much as we can get done which will give us a lot of information about what's under the grass uh we're also going to do an earthworks survey because all these bumps and lumps that are everywhere we hope will make some sort of sense yeah and then fairly quickly we think we might put some trial trenches in so that we can see what state the archaeology is underground [Music] so the local community want to restore hilton castle to a working building and design a new park around it our brief in just three days is to provide the archaeological information which will help them do that in keeping with its past quite a lot's already known about the castle itself english heritage have done some restoration work to the building they took over the castle when it fell into disuse in the 1950s we've lots of pictures which show us how the building has been radically altered over the centuries the billings of 1846 yep still the west front it's been all shapes and sizes from a massive georgian mansion to a tarted-up victorian villa which is the frontage we're left with today but we don't have any pictures of how it was when it was first built around 1400 a.d this weekend we want to fill that gap and produce a picture of what it was like originally was this gatehouse all there was to it or is there more of the castle waiting to be found the geophysics survey of the area close to the castle is the first step to finding out how long you've you been suspended for one year these lads here unavoidably can't go to school today so they've volunteered to help you now john's in charge of the geophysics can you explain to them what it is yeah basically what they've asked us to do is try and find the early remains that are buried below the ground so we've got this instrument we're just sending electric currents and where you've got the buried walls the currents find it difficult to pass through the walls that's it so we get high readings on the instruments and it's all stored inside we feed it into a computer and it comes out in a plot and hopefully it gives us the walls that are buried below the ground simple as that so when it works what can they do for you 29. so you're probably going onto a wall now if you do another reading see if it goes into the 30s oh it's dropped down so it could be that we've got a wall at that point that gave us the 29 when you were here you'd got 22 high over the wall because the current couldn't go through the wall now you're back down to 24. so you've passed over the wall and continue the people who live around here obviously don't want to be sticking tennis courts on top of ancient buildings and the geophysics work this weekend will help avoid doing just that bernard and stewart's job over the next three days is to produce an earthworks survey of the entire site and by recording the lumps and bumps in the landscape they may be able to trace gardens and other features important to the history of the castle the hilton dean area is about four miles from the center of sunderland and within a stone's throw of the river weir it's more or less in the middle of nine communities will hopefully all benefit from the improvements made here as part of the government's city challenge scheme it's easy to see why it's so important to them it's the only green area for miles around the geophysics team have got our first results they've done a quick survey of an area to the east of the castle and already they've discovered a kind of horseshoe shaped building possibly a courtyard with crosses at one end that could be buttresses so that's suggested in fact that there are ranges of buildings coming along the slope perhaps along the top of that bank that we can see out there or at the other side of a courtyard well once we get those tied in accurately with survey we'll know exactly where to put the trench yeah i mean this is a big area 40 by 40 meters and and obviously in the time we've got we can only do a small sample across that where is this in relation to where we're standing now it's beyond the fence here inside this this earthwork we somewhat over here aren't you it's basically the area up to the suzuki and where nadia is walking across now she's actually just walked across that main building uh and louis who's probing is actually in this area so we're talking about a big building where are these buttressy things that's where nadia is working at the moment yeah and the one on this side and louis where he's probing is at this far end of the building so it could be a building almost the same size as this one yes i think it's certainly as large always assuming that is a building i mean that's what the trench will find out we're being cautious again so in terms of the date of all this we've got uh a castle call it what you will of the late 14th century according to the heraldry on it but we've also got an ancient site with which the hiltons were associated from 1157 or even earlier and so we may be picking up earlier structures as well from whatever timber or even a stone hall that they had before they built this castle will you can read a few books about it we want to get on and dig it impatient so the plan for the day is to dig two trenches it's up to phil and local archaeologist steve speak to test if the walls we've located under the ground belong to the original 15th century castle are a part of something much more recent victor's gone off to some peter's church in monkwearmouth to produce a drawing of the effigy of the man who built the castle baron william hilton here he is without his legs which were chopped off in the last century by the church warden now time for a chat with robin in our mock medieval incident tent what else do we know about baron william we've got quite a lot of information about him as a chap and he seems to be something of a of a professional soldier um we've got a reference to him accompanying the bishop of norwich on his crusade to flanders in 1383 agreeing to serve the king in 1386 for 50 marks a year with 20 minute arms and 20 archers but he also had a nastier side to him i got an account for instance that he was with others responsible for for pirating two scottish ships in 1381 um he was also declared an outlaw in london in 1403 so there was a nasty side also to hilton i'm pleasant bloke well he was a man of his time and over mighty lord would probably be the best way to sum him up um what evidence have we got of what this place would have been like at that time well fortunately when when he when he finally kicked the bucket in 1435 we have what's called an inquisition post mortem which describes the place uh it says there are in the same manner that's hilton a hall four chambers a chapel two barns a kitchen and a house constructed of stone called the gatehouse so you're talking about a succession of outbuildings possibly a separate hall which is conceivably where we've been digging today so both the documentary evidence and the geophysics plan seem to suggest that there should be remains of medieval buildings here but how much of the building that we can still see above the ground can be traced back to medieval times beric morley is an expert on buildings of this period and can help us to identify the surviving bits of the original castle we're fortunate in that when the victorian house and indeed the georgian houses that were here that this was converted into before yeah were laid out they left their floor level where my hands are up here right about two feet above the press they ripped out all the innards down to that level right and took away all the medieval walls inside the shell down to that level we've subsequently dug them out and what you're looking at here these low walls are the base of the medieval partition walls within the castle so you wouldn't have seen this in victorian times you wouldn't now you can again and you can build it up instantly recognize what is it you've seen it i mean you've got you've got the gate presumably a hinge hinges two leaves opening inwards and this is the main doorway into the gate passage which is straight through there and out the other side through that blocked wall so you you could this is actually the beginnings of the gateway well it's the beginnings of the gateway it's the doorway itself but it's not quite the beginnings because if you step back a bit you'll see a slot there and one the other side yeah that's the port callus which came down from 30 feet above in fact right there which has gone so 600 years ago this would have been the ground floor of baron williams castle with rooms for servants and guards and up above it his family's main living area oh it is it's really quite wide but did you notice coming up it's a left-handed spiral so that if i'm defending i can swing myself easily with you with my right hand that's a disadvantage you definitely are yes all right so this is where we get our view over the hall this is the doorway straight into the great hall and presumably this is where the high table and so high table sat somewhere in here right but this would have meant that the port collis would have come up across those windows yes across windows that size not the three windows there which are the victorian ones but if you look above them you'll see the head of what was the original window here but you're absolutely right the port colors did come up over it and it did in other castles too it's not unique and that was thought to be acceptable that you had your posh room with the port college trending through yes it was a castle was a mix of it being a fighting machine yeah and it being a posh house all of this information will help victor build up a reconstruction of how the castle might have looked in baron williams day but how are our excavations going we now have two trenches what have they found so far isn't this where there was supposed to be a buttress from your printout yes i don't think we've gone deep enough yet um i'm sure it's there might not be a buttress but there's definitely walling or stone coming in at this angle and we've gone to bear earth on that side i'm convinced when we take off some of this rubble we're going to see a wall coming through on this sort of alignment it's really clear on the geophysics i mean you're calling this rubble this looks like uh it's a structure to me oh yeah where oh yeah well you're the other one he's usually so cynical you tell me where you think there's a story it looks like a pavement or something there's no wear on it it's also it's just fallen stainless it's all rough surfaces we talked about it being a buttress in which we had a linear coming through on this line and something coming off at right angles this is the something coming off at right angles okay so it may not be a buttress but i'm still convinced that under there we've got a linear wall the foundation let's go and see it's amazing the way they can always decide almost straight away which bits are actual archaeology and what's just rubble it all looks like rubble to me claire oh tony no that's not rubble is it this isn't something what you mean even you can see that yeah exactly that's a good edge though front edge of the wall i can tell that obviously it must be man-made because of that straight edge front edge is there any mortar or anything between yeah that's what this yellow stuff is this yellow stuff that's the mortar and in the middle of it so success we found a medieval wall it's difficult to say at this stage but judging by its size and position this just could be one of the buildings baron william built as part of his home [Music] we're nearly at the end of day one but carrenza has noticed a series of faint lines in the grass which may outline a bigger range of buildings they're on the same same alignment as this trench other exactly in a rectilinear layer you can see that line coming right back to where they picked up that feature at the in the trench there with help from the local kids carrenza is starting to map the patch marks as they're called which may mark the position of more buried walls victor's now finished his restoration of the effigy of baron william so we now have a picture of the man who built the original castle [Music] but what else have we achieved on day one i'm getting worried that we're all a bit complacent because robin read me an inventory which has got about nine or ten different rooms in it all from the medieval period and at the moment it seems to me we've got evidence of of one little l-shaped corner and a little bit of wall we've only got another two days are we actually going to produce for denny a picture of what this area was like during the medieval period i think if we find out what if anything these parchments represent i mean they are we've only seen them from one angle from a very bleak angle from in the tower um i think if we put a trench across those find out what they are then we'll have a much clearer idea i mean if they turn up that they are walls and they look as if they're structural then yes if they don't no they do not know if they're not there's something of course it's just they may be garden features from that 150 years of the country house period sure uh beds of one sort a series of beds of different periods paths of different periods we may have a wonderful bit of garden archaeology there but as far as as the inventories are concerned and there are two of them describing ranges of buildings separate from the keep itself the geophysics backed up now by those big walls that we found only little trenches but we we now know that those that there is something real archaeology in the background that we do actually have big enough walls that look to all intents and purposes to be medieval they've got bits of medieval rubble in the backfill of their destruction sitting behind the castle it looks as if the inventories are right as we as we had hoped for that the gatehouse lead somewhere leads into a courtyard around which the buildings the hall the chambers the kitchen the barns that are mentioned in the inventories actually exist absolutely we haven't got a detailed plan yet maybe we won't in two days but to know that they're there is a great step forward tony you've done wonders for one day i think tony's bottle's gone yeah i do because because tony criticized they were piddling little castle this morning i thought it was a good yeah yeah yeah we did it yeah yeah clutching at straws knowing he's trying to be awkward i'm on your side everybody here says you're doing well yeah you're sitting there nitpicking that's put you in your place day two saturday and already we've got a lot going on we've brought in graciela ainsworth our stone cleaning expert to work on some of the heraldry on the east face of the castle [Music] the geophysics team are extending their survey to see if carrenza's parched marks really are walls and in the incident tent victor and beric have now finished a reconstruction which shows how the original west face of the castle looked in 1400 a.d [Music] but we now know that this isn't a complete picture of the whole castle because we found the remains of other stone buildings that went with it well our trenches produce further evidence of what these buildings were like i don't know what david it's flemish um 15th mid 16th century how did you know that well these little things here you see there's a little hole there there's a hole there they're called nail holes and this is how the tiles actually shaped because they're put on a square form with four nails sticking up and the wet clay was put on and the nails held the clay in situ while they went around the outside cutting it shaped with a knife didn't anybody else do that no the only the flemish used this particular technique would this be contemporary with our baron hilton then building the castle it's about the same date just about yes the late 14th century imported flemish tiles tend to be rather smaller four or five inches square whereas these are eight nine inches square which would suggest that their first part of the 15th century so at least that's fantastic we found our first solid piece of archaeological evidence that this building is contemporary with the castle the expensive floor tiles we're finding tell us that we're dealing with a high status building flemish tiles like these would have originally been coloured and been laid out in this sort of pattern on the floor of a prestigious medieval building but these aren't the only finds to come out of trench too and uh we were just remarking well there aren't any roofing tiles and phil comes up with this which is a stone you know roofing tile with a nice hole drilled through the top to hold it on so would this be round about contemporary with sir william well we don't know about this but the stuff that it's coming out with is it's all about sort of 1400 1380 to 1420 so it couldn't be better this is coming out with it so we've got what was probably william's roof yeah and we've got his floor yeah well what happened to the bits in between oh well they would have been robbed out in succeeding centuries i mean once a place has fallen to bits like this was clearly doing it becomes a big quarry for everybody to help themselves so the the thousands of tons of stone also been on a site like this get carted away our excavations are going really well and so is the earthworks survey which is attempting to cover the whole park at the moment stewart's working in an area to the south of the castle and it's here that he's finding evidence in the landscape which seems to relate to more than just one period in the castle's history have you got the earthworks plotted out yet that you've done in the edm we have yeah i think we've got something really quite quite interesting developing here i just wanted to show sue how much sort of further beyond the castle the whole historic site is right down a long way from it now yeah we are um if you want to have the stewart take you through what we've got here it is quite interesting because we look as if we're right at the edge of the the landscape gardening i suspect that because we've got over this side we've got a whole series of what's called ridge and furrow it's a it's a plowing technique which which may be medieval in this case of very broad ridges which go up this slow and you can see them over this direction the stripes over here you can just see someone coming along the vehicle across there yeah yeah oh there must be in a hurry must be pretty yeah it illustrates it quite well that doesn't it just the way it goes yeah it is yeah so you've got you've got plowlands out this side arable fields crops growing that sort of thing possibly even from the medieval period onwards an earthworks survey is just as much a part of the archaeological investigation as the hole's dug in the ground this is huge isn't it does that is that's actually blocked that air isn't it it looks to be the same at both ends doesn't it can you see how we're in a big deep big deep gullet this is this block so it looks like a pond oh you think it would have been a pond down here yes i mean it if it was a if it was a long channel or if it was a road or anything like that it would yeah it wouldn't be sharp ended like it is right i think we ought to really go and check the ends to make sure it is i mean it's what it feels like once you're in a pond yeah profile it doesn't look like a medieval fish pond it looks more like um sort of a lizard part of an elizabethan water garden or features where you know what i think it looks like the way it sits with the symmetry of all the terraces it looks very ornamental we're finding dramatic evidence of extensive gardens designed at least 150 years after baron william built the original castle elaborate hillside gardens of the elizabethan period looked something like these gardens at deerham in gloucestershire typically they were laid out in an intricate geometric design and were made of raised walks with fish ponds and orchards which included cherry plum pear apricot and apple trees but a garden like this doesn't make sense positioned here to the south of the castle the castle's views are to the east and west so what's going on our garden expert rob bell thinks he may have the answer because what i think is happening is that on the long terrace the one we're on now quite a lot of this was actually occupied by buildings yeah yeah um that initially at the the western end of the terrace where they're digging now but that relates to the the 15th century house yeah and then you've got some extra building which appears to be totally undocumented but it's there in the ground yeah which is extended along the terrace yeah now in terms of date we may be able to find out as the excavations progress yeah but my guess at the moment is that this dates to around about 1600. so what you're thinking of another big house or part of it coming out bolted on to the east of the medieval castle and south facing which could explain all your terracing so you're thinking of something across perhaps between here and the chapel looking that way down over there that's it i mean yeah that's right you've done all the work barry is this a new story this is a new story and it's great when i saw this plan yesterday i was wondering what earth are the gardens doing over there yeah this gives us the answer rob's theory is that there may have been a large building here built about 200 years after the castle around 1600 a.d and positioned to enjoy the gardens to the south could this be what the patch marks are showing what does the geophysics make of it you don't sound as though you've got anything really strong for us i haven't got a rectangular building oh i said it's shown on the part there i've got some high readings that match one of the walls right at the marked but it's the same wall on the other side we haven't got anything for that uh no so further excavations are needed to prove these buried walls are really there if so will we be looking at buildings contemporary with the original castle or could they represent the outline of a later jacobean range of buildings from about 1600 a.d do you think you should see buildings all the way along this terrace more than likely it does make sense while i feel set the other building fierceness yeah but you see the funny thing is the funny thing is that once this lot is knocked down the the main axis of the house then goes back facing east it's all getting very complicated as i suppose we might expect given that there have been hiltons living here since goodness knows when and there's still one thing i'm not clear about from yesterday how do we really know that the castle was built around 1400 all those shields that you can see up there represent the the the rather wealthy illustrious marriages that the hilton's made to accumulate their lands sort of architectural bragging absolutely i couldn't put it better myself right up at the top is the the banner of the king of england of the time which has the arms of france depicted as three fleur de lis and they only started putting the french arms on in that form uh in about 1405 6. so it couldn't have been built before that's right that was when henry the fourth great seal showing that came in but a more accurate idea of the the building of the castle uh we can get from a badge on the other side so come off and have a look come on good old baron william obviously believed in slapping a whole range of decorative bits and pieces on his house this stag dates to the reign of richard ii proving that the building must have been built before he was deposed in 1399 but i must admit i'm much more interested in the strange sculpture that graciela is cleaning it's called the hilton achievement of arms and apparently baron william could have had this lot on his head when he went into battle oh yeah how's it going it's going really well actually it's um i'm just slowly removing the very top layer of sulfation leaving just a small amount left on the stone so the stone can actually continue to breathe which it hasn't been doing for several hundreds of years um and i'm being able to find the very large cracks and fissures in the actual stone work so it's actually proving really interesting removing the black sulfation to see the condition of the stone it is actually a fairly silly looking figure isn't it well obviously you're bringing a modern eye to this tony try and throw yourself back enthusiastically into the 15th century and think what it would look like i'm scared now really good the geophysics team have got a massive job on their hands to try and provide the community with a geophysics survey of as large an area as possible stuart and bernard are busy producing a map which will pull all this new information together meanwhile our new trenches are beginning to produce results phil hey you've got something what is it what do you think of that then oh wow this is pretty smart isn't it yeah nick was saying earlier that he didn't think i was excited enough but i always get excited by these sort of romantic type pines what is it exactly well we're we're ranking it's a small well a small silver coin i mean it looks pretty certainly silver yeah and the other side you can see there's a cross across it and there's the coat of arms coat of arms there we've got the king going right cross going right across it stop it being clipped how does it help us in so far as dating is concerned at this level it's come out of the top top soil so it doesn't really take us a lot further sort of but i mean it it is it is a nice it is a nice find right i've seen it let's yeah see that cross there to stop people slicing the silver off the edges of it quite like a shield yeah this silver coin is actually one of three which have now been found in this trench they're elizabethan and they all date to the mid 16th century so they fit with the gardens which have been found to the south but in terms of answering the parchmark question our new trenches are producing results which are inconclusive we found this wall which was marked by a patch mark but not any others it is possible that some of the patch marks represent later archaeology such as garden features and these are confusing the plan it's going to take longer than a weekend to sort out this lot but we do have our medieval success story we're finding further bits of baron williams 15th century home and the white company have arrived we can find medieval buildings but they can show us what the people who lived here got up to the white company are here to bring home some of the realities of medieval life so what have we got to do tomorrow what's our priorities i want to finish off one of my my trenches which will show us exactly the sequence of events inside the uh the major building that we've got we've got a lot of stratigraphy in there i hope to get a lot of dating evidence from there that's what i'm going to be concentrating on tomorrow what about the geophysics though john what have we got because you've been bashing away steadily all day yeah i mean basically we've got a series of features walls paths series of garden features that are all on the same alignment as a castle i seem to stop where the tent is and from there on we've got things aligned with the medieval ridge and furrow so we seem to have a limit to it now on the plan tomorrow we're going to go and look at some of the lower terraces see if we can get some more things of interest there and we're going to continue looking for your tunnels yeah i was just going to say that last night we finished off and the plan was because you told me never to believe these archeologists because they always come up with new ideas new plants but the last plan last night was the tunnels we were going to explore the tunnels well what's happening with the tournament we've started this afternoon we've spent an hour or so on the west of the castle from the known point where they're meant to start and it's too early yet to say stick with us it's the end of day two uh denny and i i think are going to go off to a local pub fairly soon we're beginning to get something of the medieval experience as you can see by my streaming eyes and we're going to have some semi-hot smoked mackerel and some beans when they've boiled up and then the boozer yeah forget all about this food [Music] surprisingly good actually day three and the white company prepare for what's going to be a busy day with an authentic breakfast of cordle a kind of medieval porridge made of oats honey and wine i wouldn't be surprised if half the estate turns up today and i must confess i'm a bit worried do we know enough about what's in our trenches to get the locals really interested in the archaeology as long as we've got something that can capture people's imagination you see down in this wall here yeah it's not just a single wall its core is a different color to both that face and this face the two faces aren't parallel so we've got a wall which has been uh refaced at one phase or another that's the outside of the building but over here we've got some really exciting materials and we've got a line along here certainly of uh wall plaster yes remember this is the inside face of the building it's brilliant it's so clear this is pretty fragile stuff you say and yet this depth below ground level it's perfectly preserved you've got coloured floor tiles here and here in the destruction deposit oh yeah that's shiny isn't it yeah so and what's this a post hole presumably well presumably yeah this rubble was already here when this protocol was cut so it's got nothing to do with the construction of the builder it's just a later thing it's a later feature yeah it is too small a trench to tighten to anything else but it's it's cut through this rubble in other words we've got um quite a considerably uh embellished building here it's not the thing you keep goats in it's just what you'd expect actually isn't it i mean you come through the gatehouse over there and into some sort of courtyard and then facing you be this big hall that's right so that you'd come through the the gate and opposite you would be you know this great feasting and banqueting hall which would be very impressive as you came through the doorway this is presumably what we've got here so might there be like a big outer wall encompassing all the stuff that's in here yeah so what you're going to do now well there's a lot of recording to do isn't the first because it's a destructive process archaeology you're digging things away all the time you've got to have an adequate record of what you've taken away the best analogy is that is the trifle you know with the with the layers in it right you've got you know your sherry at the bottom and your biscuits and all that sort of stuff and unless you take that apart carefully and record whether your jelly comes on the top of your belmonge you don't understand how the thing was put together you know if you just sort of dig it away and eat it you've lost it you're gonna watch how an archaeologist eats a trifle you usually cut a section through and you know see where the chocolate is thank you for that mick thanks for sharing that thought with me we now know enough for victor to add to our reconstruction of baron williams 15th century castle [Music] the geophysics team are continuing their work to trace the tunnels while i catch up with carrenza to find out if the earthworks survey will be useful to the locals in their plans for the park so it's gone really well i think we're really pleased it's enabled us look beyond just beyond just the castle and actually see it within its its whole landscape and to see that it's it's not a purely defensive thing it's a it's opulence it's showing off it's i'm the lord but i want someone nice to live so we've got the farrows origin furrow there we've got the terraces there with the castle there and this stuff is what well this this i think is another phase of the garden it shows how these things change and develop and increasingly become more ornamental in fact as castles and lordly residents go on you've got more terracing cutting here there's a pond here a lovely pond down there which you can actually see from up here it's just in the trees there you see this sort of sudden change in the long grass from light to dark that's the pond there and at the back of it there's this flat bank that you could walk along the top of it's very hard it would have been a hard surface so you could walk down from the castle round the ponds and up again this this terrace here might have carried a summer house or something like that what's really nice as well talking about the defensive position the castle rather the lack of it's about that the castle isn't on top of the hill as we said but when you get down here it's on the horizon so you walk down through the beautiful ornamental gardens around the pond with water playing and looked up and seen the castle on the horizon dominating the whole of this beautiful landscape all of which was completely artificial so they wanted to make ornamental gardens here maybe we should be suggesting to them that they should try and breathe life back into these ornamental gardens here i think so i think so if they could get all of this to work in a similar way maybe get the pond reinstated the walkway along it i think that would be wonderful and we'll be completely in keeping with what we've recorded the white company often demonstrate techniques from the past here they're showing the local kids how decorations would have been made for a medieval belt so you carve the cuttlefish mould and i'm going to make it look like a nice little flower if you're a medieval jeweler or somebody who's making pilgrim badges anything out of very very cheap based metals like lead and tin if you use all lead then it comes a sort of a reasonable sort of grey gun metal colour but if you put start putting lots of more tin in it eventually you get so much tin and it starts looking like silver so if you're clever enough you could probably sell a lead tin badge it doesn't cost a lot to make and you can sell it off pass it off a silver if you're lucky and the other half of the mould has also got a channel in like that and we meet the two together so we've got that hole there okay get the lead which has been melting on the fire and you can do this with gold or silver right hold the mold nice and tightly and there we are and it takes a little while to dry so it's not molten anymore right tap the mold ever so slightly which will help the badge to come out and we'll be very lucky hey presto we have a belt stud in the shape of a flower and then demonstrations like this and the evidence being produced by our trenches all help us get a picture of how life was lived here in the past and make the hole in the center of it for instance this is a 15th century jug handle and here's victor's reconstruction of how it would have looked just the kind of thing baron william would have used for his ale or wine there's a jaw in the end look at the row of teeth in it that's going to be oh is that that's that's probably a thing a full skull nut a skull yeah lots of sheep then is it you see there there's another piece of skull or um something more bone there yeah cut chop through there look you're looking at all the yeah the sort of scepter inside the bone aren't you another jewel there yeah i mean it's looking like a great butchery pile yeah you know you've chucked all you've cut all the meat off and you've chucked all the bones to one side so maybe we're looking at the sort of uh domestic quarters then really you know so if we've got our hall across here right perhaps we're in the service buildings at the back over here work in the trenches will continue for as long as possible today but we're beginning to run out of time and people are starting to arrive keen to know what we've found in their park graciela thinks she'll finish in time and the geophysics team are busy processing their survey of the castle grounds what they found is evidence of a further series of buildings running along the terrace some buildings seem to be connected with the medieval plowing on one structure big enough to be a large house could just fit in with the 16th or 17th century gardens unfortunately we don't have time to act on this information but it does provide the local people with a plan of the archaeology of the site essential information before any work can begin here shot is a so sharp no we because we're not actually because we we do fight and practice with each other we don't want to as you can see it's blunt but in reality the sword would have been fairly sharp all the way down and then the last sort of six inches or so would have been razor sharp would have been very sharp indeed it's funny watching the white company in action really does give you a reminder of the kind of world that baron william lived in 600 years ago you must be absolutely roasted in that oh yeah yeah it looks like a pressure cooker it doesn't seem like it would be particularly practical to use in a battle i mean there's all these myths about brought up by the victorians about pondering knights being able to winched onto horses and not being able to get up all this sort of thing but it's you know it's all complete nonsense really i mean it's very flexible the white company are really getting people interested in discovering what we've been doing here this weekend and there's plenty for people to see visitors to the incident tent will be able to get a really good look at graciela's efforts in cleaning the achievement of arms they'll also be able to compare it with how it looked before she started work as well as getting an idea of how the original 15th century version looked complete with fancy colors so on to other business before we get to grips with the archaeology what news do we have for the locals about the tunnels well the good news is we found the entrance to the tunnel and the bad news is it's covered in concrete i think what happened was that a few years ago somebody must have filled it up to stop the kids getting hurt down there and uh so we can't get in but the geophysics people have managed to map the way the tunnel goes it might just be a drain or something i mean you know we all get dead romantic about what these tunnels are but presumably they had to do the sort of business that we do up in the castle and it had to go somewhere but uh it goes off in this direction and they're going to give you a map of the route that it takes and then hopefully when you've got a bit more money you can dig this stuff out and exploit it yeah that's not really the answer that uh i wanted to give you but yeah well we know something's there and we can follow it up in the future can't we oh well you can't win them all but we can get excited about the discoveries in trench two eric little the castle guide for over 18 years is certainly going to have to readjust his ideas the more we look at this i mean the bigger the better the more prestigious it becomes and we've learned in three days more out of this one trench that we've known in the last 10 years yeah yeah a different story to what yeah this thing this building probably goes at least as far as the next trench that's right it does it does run off in that direction by the time we get out towards where the red and white tent is yeah it looks if the buildings have stopped by then yes but it means that between the gatehouse and up there there would have been a lot now a lot of buildings i think are the ones this one's very complex certainly so you're talking about the great hall being at this level is yeah but you see that that's probably the one used by the family actually whereas this one would be a much bigger more splendid one for functions where the the hiltons were trying to impress people yeah yeah yeah i must admit i didn't really think we'd find the medieval buildings this weekend i thought they'd have been obliterated by later construction on the site but we have we've produced in just three days real evidence of the buildings which were part of the castle 600 years ago and there's still so much more to find today for instance this trench has revealed some of the flemish floor tiles in their original position on the floor of the great hall amazing that the preservation is so good so we've now reached the stage where we've produced enough new information to allow us to picture how baron williams home appeared when it was first built in 1400 a.d this is victor's reconstruction based on the geophysics plan backed up by the evidence from our trenches and the inventory of 1435. victor's now able to show the locals just what it might have been like for baron william as he walked into the gatehouse [Music] and stopped briefly in the guard room before continuing towards our newly discovered guest hall [Music] very nice indeed but this weekend's also produced new information about another period in the castle's history there's evidence to suggest that there was another large building on this terrace built around 1600 which faced south and was positioned to enjoy a whole series of fancy gardens as phil calls them and this is victor's impression of how they might have looked we sort of landed you with a bit of a problem really haven't we you've just produced so much information i'm not quite sure what you're going to do next that's been brilliant tony um he's saying the unit rest where he's generated it hasn't been advertised or anything know that all the people's aware of what we're doing this will go forward now well i hope so we can't let anybody down i mean we've found so many things that the archaeologists are really pleased with the people are really pleased with and it's up little snow to get the show on the road

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 62,339

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, time team, saxon graves, wiltshire, tony robinson, history documentary, anglo saxons, king arthur

Id: _0MSTfFqrWw

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020