The Abbey Habit (Poulton, Cheshire) | S14E12 | Time Team

welcome to poulton in cheshire which 850 years ago was owned by the cistercian monks then it would have been a hive of industrial and agricultural activity dominated by its nerve center porton abbey the abbey's been lost for centuries but 11 years ago a local archaeology group set off on a quest to find it so far they've uncovered a chapel hundreds of skeletons and neolithic henge and a massive artifacts from the mesolithic right through to the roman but no abbey that is until now 11 years on and in the middle of 9 000 years of activity they've discovered these earthworks and they're convinced that this is the abbey are they right we've got just three days to find out [Music] the village of poulton lies five miles south of chester on the english border separated from wales by the river d [Music] for the past 11 years a local archaeology group the paulton research project have been excavating a chapel here they haven't got a precise date for the building yet but they do know it's too small to be an abbey church and although they've been investigating the surrounding fields they found no evidence of the abbey on this site but mick whose passion is anything monastic is relishing the search this is better for you than england winning the world cup oh absolutely yes yes by a long way a cistercian abbey yeah yeah a lost sister schnabby as well which that's fantastic yeah how long did it last well it it was only about 60 years it was here so that's that's both a problem in the sense it'll be very difficult to find it because it may have been timber built it may not show up very well but it's also a hell of a bonus because we do find it'll be like a time capsule all the structures and fines will be of that brief period that's very important we know that the abbey isn't in the vicinity of the chapel and our best clue to its location lies in this field 700 meters away next to the river d [Music] mike emery from the portland research project believes that the earth works in this field are the remains of the abbey i'm fortunate enough to have a 1650s map roughly 1650. he's also found a map of the paulton estate from the 17th century and it clearly shows a stately home in the middle of this field next to the river mike thinks that this building was converted from the original abbey based on this map eight years ago we put in two small trenches and one of those trenches actually produced a very fine winding staircase sandstone staircase descending into the ground but why did you dig here because of this claustral arrangement of buildings basically which has this sort of to us appeared like an abbey does that work for you well it does because very often later buildings on the site will reflect the layout of the the early monastery if you've got a cloister in the middle the church on one side and ranges of buildings on the other three sides that can be reused and reused and end up as a square like that jonathan is that indigestion or are you just well i can kind of see this sort of cloister plan but at the same time i mean a courtyard plan would be an absolute classic for a great medieval house i mean i do know that we get a lot of monasteries in the 16th century being converted into houses so yes it's possible okay if this is the abbey how are we going to prove it well i think we we could do a survey of the earthworks because they might actually reflect what's going on underneath we could reopen your trench and have a look at the stonework in that and then i think we'd do some geophysics right across it and see if we can see the plan of the layout in the ground to kick off our abbey quest we're opening our first trench on the site of mike's previous excavations while digging gets underway in the potential abbey field we're also investigating the chapel site because at the moment we don't know why the chapel is here or how it relates to the abbey but helen's already on the case why are you digging it well because we can already see where the structure is clearly the thing that we haven't got is any absolute dating so there's no pottery there's no fines it'll be found to to tell us when the first structure on the site was put here and that's important because we want to know how it ties into the date of the abbey but getting a date for the chapel is going to be difficult because the building's gone through several modifications over the centuries luckily alan wilms-hurst a member of the portland research project has been digging it for years and knows its layout like the back of his hand the very first phase of the chapel is actually from here this wall here which is from the west side comes right along here and actually finishes on that corner there you'll also notice beyond there there's the chancel has been added at a later date i see and what's this great chunk over here at the west end this at the west end it has been added at a later stage whether it's at the same time as the chance or we don't know it's a tower thanks to alan we can reconstruct the ground plan of the chapel and they're going to concentrate our search on its earliest phase the nave so bridge is digging a section across its wall here to see if she can find some evidence for when the chapel was first built [Music] in the abbey field matt is trying to locate the staircase still doesn't it still looks quite back philly yeah you've got at least nine possibly ten courses of brickwork to go down yeah mike took these photos of the staircase during his previous dig and he thinks it may be part of the abbey we've got to prove it but at least we know we've got something concrete to uncover well at least something medieval sandstone a little bit more out from take a bit of that back this side this side yeah so the staircase could well be coming down there somewhere and we'll need all the help we can get because the abbey only lasted on this site for 60 years its short lifespan means that we could find a rare example of an early abbey unaltered by later building phases there we go but it could also mean that there aren't any substantial foundations to find at all there it is here we go we have the deed um that set the monastery up so we've brought in historian alan thacker to help us out and what seems to have happened was that the earl of chester ranoff iii uh appropriated uh the monastery at pulton and used it to endow his new establishment near leake so in layman's terms the earl of chester who lived near paulton viewed the monks away from the abbey here to his estate at leak in staffordshire he hoped that by sponsoring a new abbey called dulacress on his estate there he would guarantee his own passport to heaven at the abbey field matt's a step closer to finding the staircase and fingers crossed getting our first glimpse of the abbey here matt there's certainly not an absence of archaeology in this trash no the trench is full isn't it we've got stuff from as far as i can see lots of periods here we've got these quite modern looking brick walls in the middle there over in the corner there's some sandstone and then there's this line of sandstone going along here as well what about the staircase well the staircase we've been trying to orientate ourselves and i think it's something to do with this sandstone line here so it could be right underneath your feet how's it looking for you jonathan well i mean it's looking very interesting i mean we've got this apparently early staircase running through here but this is not necessarily the only thing i'd like to see what do you mean well there was a trench put in somewhere over there about eight years ago which showed this which appears to be an early doorway so that's that's the rebate of the door and then the door would have shut and swung against it so what's going on here oh that's interesting i think that's actually an earlier war and this door has been punched through it so that's potentially the earliest thing we've had on the site so far now that trench was somewhere over there so what i'd like to do is sort of reinvestigate this wall and maybe it'll tell us all sorts of things so you think there could be hints of something abby-ish on this side well certainly an early building yes so we're opening a second trench to investigate the early wall shown in the photo but that's only part of our monastic maneuvers we're also going to survey the earthworks in this field to see if they're part of the abbey you're carrying all the stuff i'll come with you instead of using high-tech gadgetry and global satellite positioning mick and stuart have decided that sometimes the old ways are best and are using low-tech pen and paper and an apparatus invented by the romans i'm just going to go out and stick a pole in the tree stuart i'm absolutely amazed with this as usual phil is fascinated by anything archaic the real value is you're building a plan up as you go along and that's what's the beauty is you're actually looking at the earthworks while you're drawing them [Music] that is 15.9 that's that it's as simple as that go on i feel you might as well do this one it's useful to make isn't it [Music] can you get out the way i'm trying to do a bit of serious surveying here you know right there then yeah down in the chapel field bridge is struggling her progress for finding dating evidence for the chapel is being hampered by the hundreds of skeletons buried on this site these need meticulous excavation but then again perhaps they can help us out with a date alan have you got any dating evidence at all for the burials um it's a bit tricky that because the grave phil we found medieval pottery but also roman pottery so there's quite a mixture so it's very very difficult to date exactly i know you've had some analysis done of the bones um have you found anything that tells us who these people were and what their lifestyle was like yeah well most of the the adults we've found their bones show a lot of wear and tear so it looks as though they're mainly labourers and quite stocky they're all from a lot of them so we think that most of them are sort of labourers from the local parishes at the abbey field mick and stuart with a little help from phil have finished their survey which has produced an accurate plan of the earthworks up here we've got three grumpy old men who've been extolling the virtues of technology invented by the romans there's nothing like a wooden tripod and a big flat thing isn't it it works tone it works what is it you've been doing well we've been surveying the earthworks here look but it but it doesn't look like the sort of plan we'd expect from an abbey at all there's nothing like a big hollow cloister or a big mound with the church with nothing that's shouts out this is the layout of an abbey on this site i mean we've looked at many earth work sites somewhere over the years between us make probably hundreds of them and the earthworks here look more typical of those you find with a large house and gardens and orchards and paddocks around it and that's very much what this sort of rectilinear plan here is indicating for instance this very large depression here is a pond this is a decorative pond on the edge of the garden around the house for instance that's what this is on here so everything says house and gardens but there's just a few background features in in this area here which might pre-date it and that might suggest there's something here before the house so how are we going to find out about this abbey well i think we have to go back to the historic maps we've got which we've got paulson hall on and you know we've got noisy earthworks sort of in this area here which is somewhere beyond where the digger is down there we'll put a trench in there just see what we get so a trench goes in over the earthworks [Music] in the other two trenches next to it the archaeology is looking more promising by the minute the staircase made of medieval stones beginning to emerge and we've uncovered a massive medieval wall that must have been part of a huge building [Music] but although the archaeology is looking positive mick and stuart just aren't convinced that we've found the abbey nick you can't spend three days going oh this is a tricky job oh no the abbey's not here what are we going to do fire me up with some enthusiasm for what we might do the problem is with the abbey field as we call this over there is that it doesn't feel right it doesn't look right topographically for the setting for sturgeon monastery main ingredient really for establishing siteman abby is a water management system yeah because when the cistercians build a monastery they need flowing water through streams to divert into the claustro buildings to flush the lavatories provide water for the kitchens etc the great water engineers basically so if we can identify places where that where those stream patterns are then we can really narrow down where the abbey might be so you're going to don your metaphorical habits tomorrow and go off on a prayer well we might go in the helicopter over in the abbey field we've had a bit of a setback first of all the earthwork trench has revealed no trace of the abbey but only 19th century brickwork so we've decided to close it down and in the staircase trench we've got lovely steps made of medieval stone but not necessarily a medieval stone staircase nick fantastic look we've got the staircase it's really good isn't it yeah but there is a problem with it which is there's a brick under it where's that down there look in that corner oh what this thing down here yeah what do you think that means well it probably means it's either isn't medieval or it's been repaired at some stage but gonna look at this over here well this is the trench that jonathan got us to put in isn't it yeah and you see we've got this whacking great wall in the bottom of it yeah that must be medieval so is this it have we got the abbey well i don't know whether we've got the abbey this may not be we've got lots of other possibilities to look at that valley over there for example has got all sorts of likely sights in it isn't it in wales which is another country yeah so tomorrow a first for time team looks like we could be digging in two countries at once well i think that's exciting beginning of day two here at poulton in cheshire where we're looking for evidence of the lost abbey and yesterday in a field way over there after a not very promising start we came upon some really chunky medieval masonry so that's looking quite promising and this site here the chapel site we've got lots of skeletons loads of masonry but mick i don't understand how this site here can relate to that one over there there's 700 meters between the two yeah but i think what you have to remember is it's almost certainly on the same block of land belonging to the cistercians so even though it's a long way away this is bound to be connected connected in what way well there are two possibilities for this because we've got a chapel here with a lot of burials now of men women and children which you wouldn't normally expect to get on a monastic cemetery and it's quite likely actually that it relates to the settlement that was here before the abbey was founded so these would be anglo-saxon people it could easily go way back to the late saxon period yeah the cistercians acquire a very nasty reputation very quickly for for getting rid of peasants you know chucking people off the land to create the isolation that they want so this might be related to that all right then what's the other possibility well the other possibility is that they don't allow lay people into the abbey church anyway and so there's often a little church out on the edge by the gate house that local people can use and it's called the capella ad portal the chapel by the gate and that might be what this is either way it's still connected to the abbey even if it is a long way away and of course we're assuming that the other side is the abbey we don't we don't really know that and he doesn't even think that that is the ability over there it's the wrong sort of site whereas if you look down this way see where that land drops down there that's wales well yeah but there's a stream down there there's a much more likely site where you can use all the watery sources so i think stuart and i are going to be fostering down there today so we can find it did you speak welsh just a little bit probably coomer not bad despite mixed skepticism over in the abbey field we're still hopeful that we may find well an abbey oh there it goes i'll tell you what if that was in situ that i'd never moved like that would it we know the staircase isn't part of the abbey but we've found a massive medieval stone walls that might be phil you've dug deeper in this little section of the trench why is that well you know the trench with a big wall in it the big stone wall that's the one over there now what we needed to do was try and find out whether that wall continued on into this trend yeah to see whether or not we were dealing with one massive building and is that it and that is it but you see the interesting thing hang on so that wall there is the same wall as this one that's right so that's a heck of a long building isn't it exactly and at the moment we don't know how long it is and we don't know how wide it is but we are beginning to piece this thing together look this brick wall is actually sitting on top of the wall so this wall must be later and you can see again here we've got this row of stones and that stone is also sitting on the wall so that one must be later so we've got at least three phases of which that wall is the earliest it might be the earliest but is it part of the abbey the wall certainly showing up on john's geophys running through both trenches and that's not the only wall on his plan we've got some really good results now you can see all the black the high resistance showing this building complex and here we think we've got a parallel wall to the one in the trench so we're going to extend this trench as matt started to do yeah and that looks like the parallel wall coming in here so we can start to get the dimensions of the buildings yeah and also a return and that will be just under the grass here and so that could be the gable end of whatever this building is by extending the trenches to uncover more of the walls we hope to get a clearer plan of the building to see if we've got the abbey or not in the chapel field helen and bridge are still struggling to find an exact date for the chapel so that they can understand its relationship with the abbey hi bridget hello and at last i may have had a breakthrough i think we might got something that might date the stones and the structure that we're looking at here this morning we've got this bit of pot that's actually inside the construction cut associated with the building of the chancel right can you please tell me a date may i pull it out i think in this instance yes it would be a good idea okay i'm not even sure it's a piece of pottery it looks like more like a piece of tile so oh yeah look look at the back of it that doesn't like put a quarter does it looks a bit more like a tile so it could be a roof tile there's no problem with it being medieval but what you've got to find is something incredibly distinct luckily helen might just have that distinctive evidence what is that it's a bit of stone oh no i'm really trying hard to learn pottery but i've got a long way to go i'm sorry so frustratingly still no date for the chapel in the abbey field more of the walls have been exposed and jonathan finally thinks he can identify what kind of building we're looking at jonathan all i can see is a tumble of stones and a jumble of walls what is it right we started this trench trying to target what we think is this very early wall running through here yeah and it's telling us an awful lot more because we've got pad stones do you see the positions of those passengers i'll get in there we've got a a pad stone here and the other one just there so they would have taken the timber posts for the uh the superstructure and are they on the inside of the building or the outside this is the inside of the building now the other wall that should go with this is somewhere over there we haven't found it yet but we do have a bit of the floor surface you just see this clay here on this little mortar bed again it really gives one the idea that we're just looking at a very basic service or agricultural building but on a very large scale so disappointingly it looks like this isn't the abbey after all but that doesn't mean it isn't part of the abbey complex we know from the documents that this was abbey land and it had a farm on it so this could be a monastic farm known as a grange which mick finds just as exciting what i've tried to do it is is draw all the things that you might have so the main thing is is a hall for people to live in and that could be quite high status and it's going to have a big open rule you know high up to the roof with smoke going out through them you're one of those to have a normal window here yeah yeah it's it's meant to be a louver to let the smoke out of the hall but jonathan didn't like it either and then you're going to have at one side the service here the pantry the buttery the kitchen where the food's prepared with vents again for the smoke yeah and then the other end will be the private room whoever's in there but then you'd also expect because it's a monastic farm to have barns and stables and you know cattle houses and big stars and and you'll also have a you know bakery and a brewery to make the basic food stuffs and it looked like a big house with a farm yard attached to it middle of day two and instead of getting easier this site is getting more and more complicated we now face two challenges not only do we have to piece together the grange on this site but also answer the burning question where's the abbey now we're pretty sure that we have a grange in this field mick and stewart are widening their search for the abbey and are looking for potential sites by a watercourse one of the reasons why we thought the abbey could have been on this site in the first place the cistercian monks were fantastic water engineers and diverted streams and rivers to supply their monastic toilets and kitchens that river is too big for early sisters to start to control yeah it's too wide and too too big a body of water i mean even to get a channel off you'd have to sort of have a very elaborate set of sluice gates at a high level right uh i don't know of an example of where they've done that it's too big you know you'd need a weir as well absolutely a wheel or a dam or something you know so really we need to forget the abbey being close to the river i don't think it's going to be just off the river it's going to be up a side channel somewhere so they head up river in search of a manageable stream see where the stream comes down and takes that right-hand cupcake as if it's been engineered yeah now that's the sort of place you might expect a monastery to be well expected as it looks as if it's going off around the field on that side look it does doesn't it it's immediately below where the chapel again if that was a cappella at portam or the early village site or whatever the number of ingredients all come together just on this area so to see if their theory holds water they head over to take a look at the stream and it's right angle bend the palm down in there mix yeah see if we can get down under the tree up here yeah suddenly plummets down into a oh look at grain that's right it's good it is some sort of sluice gate or something it does it could be a modern replacement for a much older sister replacement i think yeah yeah in the abbey field which has turned out to be the grange field a remarkable finds come to light in the wall trench good god my first impression without being able to examine it closely looks like a stirrup so we're going to stable then possibly well it's going to lift up do you want to look on the other side just lift it really really carefully i've never seen one come out entire before oh right that's brilliant in its full glory it may have looked like this with a foot strap made of a leather this trench has also produced further confirmation that these foundations are part of a grange we've got this one diagnostic piece of stone what do you think that is oh that could have come from well anything from a farm building upwards i mean this piece of stone seems to be associated with this wall over here and the evidence from that suggests we're actually looking at a building that's uh timber framed hang on if it's timber framed why have we got a stone oh we think it's actually a half timber building so the bottom part is stone and the upper part is is actually timber and in fact from the trench we've got the bottle and door here that would have infilled the panels on that timber frame part of the structure date date-wise i suppose 14th century a little late i would have thought and have you got anything of that kind of date well the best piece is this it's a medieval floor tile 13th to 14th century and do you think that this tile and this piece of stoner from the same building uh no i i don't think so i mean yeah it's a very fancy town it's coming from quite a posh building well where's the building that this goes with if only we knew if only we knew if we could find it the luxury farmhouse might be laid with a beautifully tiled floor like this while the picture of the grange is shaping up nicely the archaeology in the chapel field still hasn't given us any dates but can the documents help [Music] well it so happens that i've got here a document which i've discovered this morning it's a document of the mid-13th century that explains that at their grange the monks are setting up an oratory and that's a little kind of chapel thing yes he says that our order has received permission from the holy see that's the pope that in our grangers we can celebrate the divine mysteries but that that should be without prejudice to the mother church that's to say the parish church in whose parish they're sighted i think that the chapel that you're looking that you've been looking at in chapel fields is the mother church of poulton that means that it's standing in the mid 13th century does it give us any idea of how how how old its origins would have been well parishes on the whole weren't being formed in the 13th century and it would imply that at the latest it was 12th century and it could well be considerably earlier than that so this means that the chapel could pre-date the abbey the site still refusing to reveal any dating evidence so we're leaving it to the portland research project to carry on their meticulous excavation we've learnt enough to believe that the chapel was built before the 12th century and was a parish church serving the community of farm labourers and their families [Music] and the site was also used as the local cemetery later when the abbey was built the cistercian monks evicted the community from the land and the chapel then became a capellarad portem or chapel at the gates on the boundary of the monastic estate where the lay community were allowed to worship without disturbing the monks in the grange field phil's dug more holes in the staircase trench mick yeah why you ain't doing anything yeah cheeky devil come and have the look at the fruits of digging a hole come on down mike and have a look see what the master has got to say you can see the fruits and digging three holes i've dug that one behind you over there yeah and then there's this one here where the fines tray is right and now i'm in the third one right and i'm beginning to get some idea of consistency across the site in these three holes and the thing that is consistent is that we consistently get this big rich layer of burning look at all the charcoal and stuff in there like that and every time you get it it's overlaying by this nice clean clay right now we know the building is is multi-phase i wonder whether one of those phases was really major and that either the whole thing was raised to the ground or maybe it caught fire and this is the results of its demolition and then when they rebuild it they actually put in a lot of clay to make up the ground for the rebuild yeah yeah this looks like isn't it do you like that yeah that's very good if this was a timber frame building on stone foundations which jonathan was suggesting that this is the timber frame building that's caught fire wow just going to show what you do if you dig a hole i think we should do more of it but for today phil's run out of time to dig any more right bridge we came here to answer the question is the abbey on the abbey site and if it's not then what is there and i think we're some way towards answering that i think we're well on the way with that we know it's not the abbey right yeah yep yeah and we're pretty sure it's a grange it's certainly looking about you but what about the posh high status part of that site is there the chance that we can put another trench in to see if we can find that if we can come up with a good target then we will we will we will go for it now you two have been keen to see if you can find where the abbey is right yeah yeah is there one particular site down there that you think is a really good bet well there's one there's one area that sort of stands out we can see the streams being diverted on two sides and that's usually where you might find some evidence of monastic activity in the remaining time we ought to certainly do some geophysics if we can we might even dig a hole it would be great wouldn't it if we could find that abby it would be fantastic because we don't know what they look like at all from other sites well be a real first we won't know till tomorrow cheers beginning of day three here at paulton in cheshire and our big news is that the abbey field over there is no longer the abbey field it's the grange field because that's what we found there so where is the abbey well mick and stuart think that this field over here is a pretty likely candidate although why they should think that when there's virtually no evidence at all in this entirely featureless field i have no idea what is there a clue releasing the streams it is the cessation monks are looking for a water source they can manage to drive water for their for their infirmary kitchens all that kind of flushing the losers so they need a flowing stream usually and we've got that here you can see on this aerial picture here we're stood on this track here and we're looking up this valley up here the actual management the stream which comes down here starts way up here there's a channel comes through this field up here into this wooded area where there's a series of fish ponds oh you've definitely seen those yeah the fish ponzo and that's a typical monastic feature then the stream comes down there you see that very distinct right angle change there yeah yeah yeah streams don't do that do they they wander about so that's man-made yeah you can see so in there is the sort of place you might expect an abbey to be located it's extraordinary for me because i could go through that field a thousand times and think that nothing had ever happened there other than agriculture you haven't been on the right course the obvious thing is to do some geophysics and see if there's any buildings buried here and then you know see what we find so the team start dear fizzing the new field to test our abbey hunch the new abbey field lies just below the chapel site and half a mile away from our grange field the grange field as well as excavating some medieval walls just to complicate matters we've also discovered a rather strange victorian cellar it's quite extraordinary these two trenches isn't it you've got this thing here which looks like an early victorian squash court and then butted right up against it you've got something which is medieval have you managed to work out some kind of timeline for all this stuff well we can't give you a timeline in terms of actual physical dates we can't do that but what we can do is give you what we'd call a relative chronology so you can tell us what went before what exactly and step this way our first phase is up here yeah and that is our major wall which comes right through the trench and you can see it's actually turning away to the left oh we've got the turn there we've got a turn there which goes over there phase two is this wall here which is actually butted up against it so those are our two really medieval phases step this way here's our medieval wall running right the way through the trench yeah and then we've got a return of it going that way which is where the girls are yeah so far we're still in the medieval in the 19th century they make a big big change to think and in goes the seller that's where the bricks are they reuse probably some medieval steps and we've got another wall there which is later and at some stage this becomes a courtyard lovely piece of deconstruction i'm in awe at the quality of the archaeology but does it tell us anything at all about what was happening here in the medieval i think it does actually particularly if we look at this 17th century map there we go the right way around so that's our huddle of buildings in here and we are actually stood within this courtyard so we've uncovered these two ranges which appear to be the grange's agricultural buildings we also know that the grange complex would have had a high status farm house which might have been this range so we're putting in the trench over here to find out thinking that a high status residents would overlook the earthworks which we've identified as ornamental gardens [Music] while the search for the posh residence gets underway stewart's busy studying the aerial photographs to see if he can determine the boundaries of the monastic estate from the features in the landscape and an hour ago alan thacker who's been wading through volumes of archaic latin found an important piece of evidence there's a reference that reads as if it's a reference to the prior of pulton this is a new discovery i think and it implies that the abbey of julicrest maintained a monastic presence probably on the original site of the abbey of poulton under a prior from the data foundation in the 1140s through at least the 1250s or 60s over 100 years now that's very interesting because i've been one of my problems with this is i've been thinking well if they weren't here that long if the monks weren't here that long and then they were moved to eulercress it's possible that the buildings are only of timber and therefore our chances of finding them in the archaeology is going to be very difficult if you're saying to me that they in some shape or form it carried on into the 13th century then the chances are they would have rebuilt in stone perhaps by then which will make it easy for us to find it yes i think that's right that that's that's very encouraging and over in the new abbey fields john's dear fizz results have come through not quite an abbey yet i was gonna say i can't see stone walls and things on there but it's pretty encouraging i mean these are really good pit-like anomalies what like like storage pits or post holes or rubbish pits or something rubbish pits or something my other worry i suppose is that you know this probably got alluvium on the top of it doesn't it with the streams there must be flooding yeah and it has flooded quite a lot in recent years and you when you walk around you see bits of brick and tide and all sorts of stuff on the surface so i would guess there's going to be at least a meter of alluvium here before you get to archaeological levels i think we could do with knowing that actually because you you're not going to be able to see through a meter of silt do you um only big stuff right right let's do that and find out if we're dealing with that unfortunately testing the elluvium is going to be difficult because the mechanical diggers are tied up on the grange site so john tries to persuade helen and kerry to get their hands dirty how much would you feel between half half a meter and a metre and it's our first film half past four we've got one shovel and one matic you've got one shovel yeah you've got one matter sorry okay it's all yours bye oh he's so sympathetic isn't he pathetic in the grange field the trench we opened to find the luxury farmhouse has revealed absolutely nothing are we are we actually looking at that building in there so afternoon of day three and it's time to have a serious rethink about which range is the posh building having uncovered these walls we thought the posh range was over here but it now looks as though the building is orientated in the opposite direction and the luxury farmhouse is actually over here so phil begins to dig another trench next to the staircase one and within moments his efforts are rewarded that's a bit more like it cool these look a bit good phil where did these come up from well all around here in the trench tony i mean i was just literally working my way back look gone through a lot of burning which is sort of demolition all that black stuff but then look it's coming down onto clay with all these tiles and they're all been smashed up it's not a floor that's actually laid but they've broken it up and used it as a foundation for another floor but we've got all those gorgeous tiles what do you think these tell us well i mean i think in terms of date they're probably 14 for maybe even early 15th century but they're really quite posh tiles i mean this one's particularly fancy we've got a bit of a line on there it's been chopped off there but that should be the lion's head and we've got the rest of his body there but this piece in the corner is very telling this should be part of a bigger decorative scheme from a very posh floor now i was saying it's over there something the posh bit there yeah yeah but it looks as though the posh bit's actually over on this part of the site it's the dying moments of day three and now the wall trench is adding to the torrent of tiles oh wow cool look at that back in the new field the hole is only a meter deep and there's no sign of the bottom of the alluvial layer i think we all go back and leave helen to it yeah it's not my turn anymore john it's your turn fun it's your turn to dig come back good to see a woman working phil look we've got one from the other trench now it's broken oh yeah and yours aren't are they yeah you're so competitive what do you think this means surely it doesn't mean there's a huge floor extending across the two trenches no i mean they're redeposited from here somewhere but none of them are in situ at the moment unfortunately we're not going to find either the floor or the building that these lovely tiles came from because we've just run out of time it's caused us a lot of problems this site hasn't it half the time we thought the posh bit was up there and then we thought it was down there and then we thought the whole thing was facing in this direction and then in the other direction can we say now what the grange would have looked like on the ground i i think so actually tony but perhaps if we do it on this plan that's the best thing um you know the big wall that we've been banging on about for the past three days after three days admittedly running through here that's actually running through like this yeah then we've got some further walls running that way that way and that way so we've got this large block in there yeah then either side of it we've got a further wing like that and then probably another one over this side and our posh building is probably actually closing off and forming that courtyard plant that we saw on the 17th century plant so where would the posh building have been on the ground that's behind us so actually we haven't dug it at all no unfortunately not what about these earth works though because this was why we came here in the first place wasn't it that that's right i mean the earthworks have actually misled us quite badly because we assumed they were some sort of planned garden and therefore the posh bit would be overlooking that planned garden but in fact looking at them again i mean this big one here just appears to be a fish pond so it's just providing fish for the the main complex so the grange would have looked something like this there was a courtyard surrounded by half-timbered buildings there would have been a gated entrance in the front range the two side ranges were made up of agricultural and service areas with stables butteries and kitchens and the fourth range would have been the high status living quarters this central block was then surrounded by a series of farm buildings barns breweries and it's even got a dovecott [Music] stewart's finally finished his study of the landscape and his search for the elusive abbey and has drawn a map of the abbey estate the abbey isn't in the yellow area because the portland research project has established that the building here is a chapel and they've investigated all the other possible sites here and found nothing it's not in the orange area because the building here has turned out to be the grange so stuart thinks that the most likely place is the pink area where helen's digging this is a pool for a brook coming along here it's old course went down there that very wiggly course down there and the modern pool for brook is this big up here and that's it that's it there that's actually a diversion of it exactly the sort of thing you expect to see with cistercian waterworks and it would imply that in this pink area in here this is where the abbey site ought to be so i think we've got to grips with the story of the abbey in 1147 the cistercian monks were given an estate in poulton by a local land owner so they could found an abbey they built the abbey by the local stream the pulford brook which they diverted to supply the monastic complex with water the monks evicted the local community and annexed the local parish church this then became the chapel of the gates on the boundary of their estate the abbey only lasted 60 years until the monks were lured to a new abbey in staffordshire by the earl of chester and as we move on perhaps helen will find it underneath all that eluvium no come back come back i've had enough now [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 374,681

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, The Abbey Habit, Poulton Abbey, Cistercian monks, Poulton, Cheshire

Id: nL4sSh2V1E4

Length: 46min 57sec (2817 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ShadyPicasso]

It's like the UK version of the office

[u/Ike_SchatzInsel1]

Jack Begley is very much like an american Tony Robinson... when Tony Robinson is playing Baldrick!

[u/Transpacifica]

TBF Time Team makes up about as much bollocks as the OI crew

[u/prospero_duke]

Interesting fare, involving a pairing of series 'seasons' and 'specials' which lasted about ten years. Principal virtues involved (1) a variety of sites excavated (2) a variety of cast members (3) only three days devoted to each locale under study (4) the ability to turn off the screening of all commercials (now that's a breakthrough!). You can see very well what COOI is tending towards becoming in comparison, and on American television it's doubtful that suggestions of a concentration on one location for more than ten years (with archaeological projects that take 'five years' to 'a hundred years' to be thoroughly comprehended) will strike the same chord it seems to have done in Merrie Olde England.

More covered in this link:

Time Team - Wikipedia

[u/adh247]

Nice one OP! I love that you stole my title for this post!

I just wanted to add that Time Team is the shit! In case anyone is curious, they have about 20 seasons of it on Amazon Prime. It's the show I leave on to fall asleep to every night.

[u/Cleanbadroom]

Time team is the best. They really know what they are doing. They get answers. They probably laugh at oak island.