The Ancient Druidic Mysteries Buried Under Anglesey | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] [Music] in early 2006 a light aircraft flew across the north coast of anglesey on an aerial survey of the island then the photographer spotted something strange and took this photo it revealed a massive earth work about the length of two football pitches until then no one knew there was anything here except a few lumps and bumps but what makes this even more intriguing is its location in a landscape rich in archaeology and on an island that was once home to one of history's most mysterious groups accused of magical rituals human sacrifice even cannibalism the druids [Music] so what exactly is this strange earthwork as usual we've got just three days to find out [Music] [Music] so [Music] we're in wales on the north coast of the island of anglesey [Music] this is going to be a tough sight it's windy it's never been excavated or even properly identified so we get geophysics started early send in stewart to survey the earthworks and take a long hard look at that intriguing photo nick we've got this huge sight here clearly visible yeah and yet nobody's ever dug it that seems a puzzle to me not only they've never been done but they've hardly been recognized even the great survey of angles done in the 1930s just said a few scrappy earthworks mainly destroyed are they mostly destroyed it doesn't look like it just eats i mean there's huge great banks and ditches any idea what period it is well they just suggested it might be roman but i don't think we know really do you think it's roman francis no i don't think it is it's got a very strange outline yeah we know of at least two sites on anglesey of that shape which are middle to late iron age and they're also known elsewhere in britain well i think it's even more exciting relax it seems to me maybe more than one period because you've got this then you've got another rectangular bit added on the end then you've got this bigger one around the outside about a quick look around and these survivors earth work so it's a really exciting sign if it is multi-period and those later things are later than the iron age then that's going to take us right through the key period of anglesey history it really is the druids and everything it's all waiting for us this massive earth works going to be critical if it's roman then it's the product of one of the bloodiest episodes in welsh history [Music] in ad61 the full force of the roman army descended on this small island their mission to destroy the stronghold of the british resistance an insurgency led by the druids in a merciless attack unprecedented on british soil they massacred the druids and their followers and burnt down their sacred oak groves [Music] but if our earth work was built before the roman invasion then it could be a remnant of the very people the romans set out to destroy a relic of a lost world dominated by the druids whoever built it geophysics show this was a massive piece of engineering look we surveyed the bottom half of the field away from where the earthworks are well preserved so you've got the top of the enclosure in the earth works but look really clear responses and possible entrance at that point there with maybe some sort of palisade outside and is this settlement stuff that's noise here well i presume so right is the black the bank or the ditch that's the ditch right so coming around and forming a complete circuit well that gives us some obvious targets doesn't it what 4v5 on that entrance and what probably a similar size area in the middle yeah so we put in three trenches over the large rectangular feature phil opens a trench over what looks like the entrance matt looks inside the rectangle in the hope of finding evidence of settlement and bridge opens a trench across what mick thinks might be a stone rampart we'll have two bucket widths from there that show you that line go let's do it the relentless elements have made the ground bone dry digging's going to be tough and that's going to start raining look at that damn rain coming over here and it's about to get even tougher you're in the best place yeah i know he is in conditions like these it takes a keen eye to spot any archaeological signs of life and luckily for us there's one man who's ever vigilant ian our expert digger driver just say you've got the natural way it comes over the rise yeah and you've got the natural there just in between there that's not some sort of ditch where you've got the natural there and then go that way yeah just through there it's a changing color and it's softer material it is annette you feel it yeah just tidy that up take that other job you ain't got your print out in your pocket no well i've got it in my head though hey i've got it in my head is there a lit is there a linear coming through here there should be no well that is it then oh look at that he he spotted that he felt it in the job phil with more than a little help from ian has uncovered what appears to be the entrance to the enclosure the ditch across the front would have made it impossible to approach the entrance directly it looks defensive but is it roman or iron age an imperial fort or the last refuge of the druids [Music] i know we've got evidence of iron age celts in this part of the country but do we actually have tangible evidence of druids if you go over to another corner of the island to raf valley angle scene back in the 1940s workmen not archaeologists discovered in the peat where there had once been a lake close on 150 objects of iron and bronze and we have some replica examples here and some images this image of a bronze decorative plaque think of this as the mercedes-benz sign on the front of your fancy car but put this on the front of your wagon or chariot and the question is who was directing the dumping now let's use a better word deposition gifting of these objects including um swords they'd been bent and broken before they were thrown into like who was doing that so this is what francis would call ritual deposition just like you have on your own site at flag fen over in cambridgeshire yes absolutely this is this is one of the classic ritual sites throughout britain and europe you have deposition of offerings into bogs and wet places it is a religious activity and it's only towards the end of that period in the last three or so centuries that it actually gets attributed to the druids they were the blokes doing the stuff nevertheless it does seem frustrating doesn't it that given the wealth of archaeology that there is around we haven't found any kind of druidic temple or tangible representations of druidic practice think of the the oak groves that were cut down by the roman troops attacking anglesey in ad61 you know what would be left of those because oak just disappears it rots away just ashes you know how would you make those links [Music] we want to discover whether the earthwork belongs to this complex iron age druid culture or whether it's a roman fort built to suppress the local population [Music] we've put a trench over some exposed stones that mick thinks could be a rampart bridge has cleaned them up and they're looking good [Music] well mick this is fantastic we don't usually find archaeology like this on day one it looks very impressive doesn't it yeah it's not what we're looking for at all what do you mean well i thought it was probably part of some sort of iron age rampart structure sure well of course the problem is it's outside the enclosure it's the wrong side of it and it now looks if it's the end of a barn or a building going off in that direction and it turns out to be much more to do with a post-medieval farm site post medieval roundabout when do you reckon 1800 something like that probably what we've got is this complex the all these earthworks over here we thought the site might be multi-phase yeah multi-period it is the pattern of them suggests a farmstead quite late in day and it's obvious when you look at it i mean i hate to say this but he's absolutely right about the earthquake stewart's right you are giving stewart the man who you always say oh him and his high floating idea absolutely but he's actually come up with trump's in understanding what it means is we've got to go that way we've got to look at the interior of enclosure over there and not worry about what's going on on the outside particularly if it's that sort of date so day one in our search for a prehistoric settlement yeah and we've got an 18th century farm very fine though very fine it's another 1700 years ago [Music] so far this is our only dateable evidence in fact despite some of our best ever geophysics our trenches are beginning to look worryingly empty sure notice a few it's a charcoal let's see there's one yeah quite a lot of it mixed into this deposit but yeah doesn't seem to dignify anything really you should have had have you had any pottery no nothing charcoal chocolates of charcoal some quite chunky bits of charcoal actually in the subset my instinct is if you've got a blank area then you extend off it you find something i agree with you but i think there's a what i call a different plan now the result of the earthworks and the geophysics if you look at that enclosure on the map and you look at this bottom half badly affected by later ploughing on that being post medieval farm then our best bet for getting the outline of this enclosure is going to be up the top there yeah have you followed this side i followed it so far could you explain it back to me so in the relentless wind our plans and our minds are taking a battering but as the clouds gather yet again the archaeology begins to shine through ah francis yeah i was saying there's not a lot of hope for this trench there's actually a coin down here perhaps this can help us to date the earth work definitely copper alloy of some sort and very very fragile as well see if i can get underneath here somehow it's lying right on top of the natural isn't it there we go that is extremely looks very coinish does yeah if i can turn it over be very careful wow so we know we've got a coin you know made of copper i'm going to copper alloy and that's about as much as i can tell from it i think conservation there yeah cool brigid corbin 999 and it looks like bridge is going to be busy rick come and have a look at this look oh coin it's out of context but could be dateable now that's come off that spoil tip over there and that looks to me like something early early rather than later than exactly i mean any dating evidence for this site's gonna be important that's right but i mean if we're trying to prove some link between the local iron age people and the arrival of the romans an early roman coin is absolutely absolutely that's great so we send both coins off to bridge but even if we can date them on their own and out of context they can't tell us whether this was a roman fort or an iron age enclosure and in matt's trench there's no sign of settlement nothing that can help tell us whether the earth work was built before or after the bloody invasion so we've put it to bed and opened a new one over the bank and ditch hold on for one second if we can find the bottom of the ditch it could contain fines that'll help us discover when it was dug follow this edge is that the ditch fill is that a proper edge i think ditchfield is really soft and actually this is fairly soft but i'm hitting much more stone in fact you can see them yeah and hear them in fact like matt bridge has found the edges of the ditch but not the bottom in fact both trenches seem to be getting deeper and deeper nine feet yeah 2.7 meters well i mean i'm absolutely speechless what a tree but what's amazing is how what a small space it's fitted into them we never thought it was going to go that deep do you think that it tells us anything that shape that incredible depth and narrowness well i mean normally if you see something as narrow and steep and v-shaped as that you'd say roman but we don't know that is its shape and if it was roman i'd expect to see a lot of pottery knocking around we haven't had a whisker of a finder nothing at all no charcoal no we've really tried hard to find something [Music] if this ditch was roman we'd expect to see pottery coins or other finds and the enclosure would probably be laid out in a neat rectangle but it's empty and irregular which means our enclosure is looking less roman and increasingly iron age just as things are getting really interesting the weather we've been battling all day wins as you can see the weather's turned really grim on us and everybody's been sent home but it's been a fantastic day this is what we came here to look at sorry the rain's tipping down on it these huge earth works but look what geophys has discovered that whole field is jam-packed full of archaeology there's our farm here which we think is 18th century but look at this great big curve which the archaeologists are saying they're pretty sure is prehistoric and of course there's this massive earthwork and francis is still saying that he's convinced that it's iron age i think it's something to do with the size of the ditches so tomorrow what we want to do is get down deep into the heart of it and see if we can find out something about the people who lived there because if they were iron age then they would have been the people who were here at that extraordinary moment when the romans first arrived in anglesey beginning of day two here in anglesey and we're just beginning to come to grips with this strange earthwork which covers this entire sloping field yesterday we found a big ditch which francis swears his iron age and if he's right that would be great because it would mean that the people who lived here would have practiced the druidic religion and would have witnessed the horrible cataclysmic events that occurred when the romans invaded except francis having said all that we hadn't got any proof at all that this ditch is iron age have we no and i don't expect to get much but tony you don't get iron age pottery in this part of the world the depth of the ditch is fine i'm quite relaxed about that what about the shape of it does that help you at all yeah that's fine i mean there are a number of examples of that shaped enclosure around sort of farmsteads in this part of the world it's not actually a rectangular is it well no i mean i think that's the point though it's not as if it's been laid out carefully is it it's a rock square so what might that imply i would guess it's more native than roman no roman army has come along with textbooks and measures have they don't that's right that's right i mean would you expect the buildings in this to be around the edge or should we be looking for buildings in the middle wherever they've been excavated these sites have produced buildings right in the center right so really we should be looking in that middle area there then probably for the for the buildings definitely and it's a bit tricky because that looks like where we've had the modern ploughing doesn't it well the the top half of the site hasn't been the bottom half has i mean my inclination is to do something as near account to the middle but over those two different degrees of destruction if you like and see if we can't pick a house up in the middle i'm happy with different degrees of distraction yes yesterday we opened a trench in the middle of the enclosure in search of settlement without success today we're trying again this time over an area that we hope has survived the plow and while we look for signs of iron age life inside the enclosure stewart thinks there might be clues outside he's sniffing around in the field next door with the local farmers see boundaries in this field here can't you have you seen that which suggests there were fields all around it and so on well i've seen aerial photos of this field years ago on this like circular nordical circular shapes there all right but even with one field this is a massive sight which makes it even stranger that our only fine so far are two small coins [Music] see it's just breaking down that dirt nicely but it's yeah that's fantastic can you see that on the monitor yeah i can because that feels roman coin apparently yes why are you laughing no well we've been slaving away at it and we can't work out whether it is or not i'm feeling very dubious about the whole thing at the moment i must admit dubious about what well i just can't find any decoration or whatsoever there doesn't seem to be any dye or stamp on it that you it's likely to be found on a coin with the microscope failing to shed any light on the archaeology stuart and may take the opposite approach they've gone up in the chopper to look at the bigger picture so look in that field over there oh this is absolutely i just as you're flying around i can hardly take my eyes off all these field systems it can see in the fields around it seems the farmers were spot on about the shapes in the field next door there's circular features i can see field they see a trackway or a droveway going down there which is what you'd expect i mean what it does show is that the enclosure that we've got is at the heart of a very active prehistoric runway landscape it's not sitting by itself is it but what's the connection between our iron age enclosure on the hill and the shapes in the next field we're sending into your fizz to have a look and extending our search for the people who built this earthwork even further which might not be such a bad idea because back in our enclosure we're struggling to find any trace of them we've widened matt's trench over the deep ditch so we can get down and dig it out by hand and phil's still plugging away at the entrance but so far they're both empty the only trench with any fines is bridges we've got a lot of charcoal flecks there's a lot of degraded stone and we've got a lot of animal bone really big ribs it sounds promising right so that sort of size that sounds to me like modern cattle but it's not you've got big barn 18th century you've got a ditch you've probably got cattle in the area you've got to drain it that's why you've dug this ditch it's just a recut of the early ditch done probably in the 18th century my feeling is that we're going to waste our time if we spend too much effort here absolutely okay let's just call it today it's beginning to look like any evidence of the people who might have lived here has been destroyed by later farming any sign of any buildings then raksha no unfortunately no it's it's all gone nothing nothing at all no this is all natural really and it's the same story in raksha's trench in the middle of the enclosure if you see here there's ridge and furrow coming all the way through so it must have been plowed away there's no structures or anything what about joining it up with with the trench over there do you think we could actually take a strip that that goes right up that far i think it's always an advantage to join things up isn't it yeah can do gives us a much better chance of finding something yeah the almost total absence of fines is puzzling there's plenty of activity on the gfiz but nothing in the ground while in the field next door we can see shapes on the ground but the gfiz results have come back and they're empty not that stuart's about to be beaten can you see these trees yep on the hedge line yeah they once there so we've got one two three four without the aid of geophys we're relying on the highly scientific between the fourth and fifth tree method to plot in our trenches so what i'd suggest is we put a trench across this ditch across this earthwork and up to on to the other side and you should if it still survives you should hit it in a trench going across there okay i wish you a little bit hopefully we'll find something in this field to help us date our site because so far these are our only finds and dating them is proving difficult we've called in fine specialist kai painton to take a look initially when those coins were dug up everyone was saying rome and roman possibly early roman really exciting but then these waves of doubt began to hit us oh maybe it's not a coin at all are they coins are they roman the good news is they are coins they are roman one of them could potentially be quite early and one of them might be a little bit later this one here looking at the size and what it's made of this looks like it's what they call a cistercius which could be as early as first century maybe even a little bit earlier but this one i mean it's in karate condition but it looks like a coin called an ass so it's a grotty ass and it's it's made of some kind of a very coppery alloy which is why it's sort of blue in the middle it looks like quite an early coin so this could well be a first century coin about you know the time of the invasion here i think as kai says they've been they've been around for a long time they've circulated for a while so you don't think that the early coin was being clutched in the hand by a roman warrior as he murdered the druids on this very spot i think it's possible that i have to say unlikely in fact the coins are so worn they could have been in circulation long after the romans invaded several hundred years after they'd wiped out the island's druids their brutal campaign was so successful that today it's easy to think the druids are more myths than reality if someone mentions druids nowadays we tend to think of hippies in white sheets on salisbury plain don't we but do we have much tangible evidence that they actually existed in ancient times we must be careful because whose territory are you on now you're in wales and we have living druids our own intelligentsia who come together for our big cultural festival yes but those kind of druids are just an 18th century conceit aren't they that's that's a fantasies our druids today are our intelligentsia in wales uh they are musicians but also think of those poets and those people who continue oral traditions so then maybe we we have a roots into prehistory into the pre-roman periods as to how these people behaved and what their special roles were why do we think they were an intelligentsia well there's there's plenty of documentary evidence caesar tells us that the druids in gaul france today which he happened to be conquering at the time that they came over to britain to study that is the best teaching the best source of learning so what was this knowledge that they were imparting well i mean there seemed to have been three types of druids basically a priesthood and then soothsayers sometimes called ovates or vartes from the latin and bards and it's the bards we see a lot of in wales because they're the poets and the singers and and the artists but we can broaden their role you know were they the scientists you know we use it's a modern term scientists they were foretellers of the future um we are also told that battles between the native peoples the pre-roman peoples their own peoples they'd come in as actual peacemakers so they knew that they're playing many roles but that's not how the romans saw the druids is it they saw them as blood drinking cannibals tony as you know the natives didn't do the writing it's the romans who tell us the story it's a story that includes blood curdling accounts of elaborate human sacrifice but is that just roman propaganda or could the druids really have conducted such ceremonies i'm traveling across anglesey to find out there's certainly a powerful sense of pre-roman history here it's not hard to imagine iron age celtic people living and worshiping on this enigmatic island one thing above all others that the romans seemed to hate and fear about the druids was their practice of human sacrifice the most terrifying manifestation of which was this the wicker man roman historians claimed the druids built giant wicker effigies in the shape of a man caged sacrificial victims inside and burnt them to the ground david freeman and his team from the talon archaeological group are using traditional woodworking techniques to build our very own wicker man to see whether such a thing could really have existed do we really know that this actually happened we've got two pieces of documentary evidence no physical evidence so unfortunately mind you this is not so much a wicker man more a wicked pair of trousers it looks like way at the moment uh the top half of him will be a different color so from the waist upwards but of course we're not going to stuff it with human beings what are we going to put into we're actually going to stuff it with straw so that we get a good flair a good effect i'm kind of a bit disappointed is it difficult to make um the main framework's going all right my big problem is as soon as we start to bend in smaller circles willow should bend extremely easy but we're so short of water in the wood at the moment it's just breaking i hope you're gonna be able to make it in time what you may not have noticed is that victor is lurking behind us scribbling away and given that it's victor yes here we have a wicker man that's pretty amazing victor look look at this little arm that's horrifying it's horrific actually i hope they can get somewhere near it because i particularly like the head it's made out of leaves and things and there's a little face here as well if it's going to look anything like that it's going to be really spectacular wouldn't it yeah will we quite looking forward to this see you later there's no sign of druids back on our iron age earth work in fact after two days of hard digging the painful truth is there are no houses no domestic rubbish no sign of iron age people at all we've got this huge ditch going all the way around this field we put in a trench right in the middle of it because we thought there might be an iron age house somewhere around there but we hit natural so we put the trench to bed also i thought yeah i thought it was natural as well but he's got a different idea now we're certainly attacking it again with a great pick what's going on francis well i think we got a bit of a problem we thought it was natural but when we put a trench through the bank beside the big cut through the ditch over there yeah i wanted to do that because i wanted to establish the bottom of the bank right which would give us the top of the surface that people walked on in the annex okay well we have established that if you go about six inches or a foot below that you'll remove the old topsoil that was there and below that that's where you'll find the pure natural okay that's what we've done over there and i've followed it down and i've dug a hole here right in the corner and you can see that the stuff in the hole is very much paler and firmer than this rather granular gray stuff on the top in other words you thought we'd put it to bed but in fact we've left a blanket on it so you can't see what's under the blanket is that the difference in the yellow is the natural yeah and we got the gray on the top here which is weathered natural yeah so the post holes of your houses if they exist and that's a big if will still be under this blanket so if we are going to find evidence of the houses does that mean we're going to have to take off all this yeah we're going to have to take this off we're going to take that off up there and we might even have to extend this and take more off so we get more of an idea of the plan so we haven't we haven't actually finished the job basically that's why we've not found it mind you the hardest job of all is standing still in this wind isn't it yeah yesterday we had rain today we've got wind and you feel completely battered at the end of it and some of us can't remember the plot as a result it's armageddon we thought we'd got to the bottom of our trenches we hadn't we need to dig down deeper to get to the iron age ground level and when we do if francis is right we could find 2 000 year old houses evidence of the people who built this massive enclosure who may have practiced the druid faith there's one day left and everything to play for beginning of our third and final day here at anglesey where we knew we'd got this great knot of massive earthworks which we thought were iron age but when we started to excavate them there was no sign of human activity no sign of human occupation nothing except this natural earth and stone and quite frankly we were all getting pretty worried but then yesterday afternoon francis came up with this theory that this wasn't the natural it was a blanket of earth and stone covering the natural so he began excavating underneath it and lo and behold you're not just a pretty face are you francis i must admit i am a bit chuffed yeah yeah we took it off with the digger and lo and behold underneath it we've discovered post holes show me the posters down here i've labeled them up they've got sort of uh lost in the rain yeah but they're quite distinct against this really bright natural and then in the middle here this great pit and i don't know what it is around here like this yeah it's absolutely huge so what this means is that we've got to re-examine all the other stuff we were stripping yesterday with one day left with one day then phil what do you reckon this might be well it is i mean to all intensive purposes it is a big fit whether it's a rubbish pit whether it's dare i say a grave i really don't know the only way to do it is to dig it and find out suddenly all got rather exciting sealed beneath the blanket of earth with a roman coin on top we can be confident these features date to before the roman invasion even if we're not entirely sure what they are yet [Music] it means we've finally uncovered the remains of angles's lost iron age world a world the romans tell us was dominated by the druids [Music] they claim the druids burnt sacrificial victims inside giant wicker effigies but is this just roman propaganda we're building our own wicker man to find out but dry willow and strong winds are making things tricky they've got their work cut out if he's going to be ready to burn tonight and back inside our iron age enclosure the race is on to make sense of our pit francis what do you reckon this is i mean it's got good edges there it seems but this pill is so extraordinarily dry stoney and loose you know it's not what you would expect from a pit of this sort of size where you might be hoping for all sorts of burials or whatever well exactly i mean i'm half expecting to find a sheep's head with a modern ear tag in it aren't you well yes but on the other hand the surface that was above yeah didn't show any side with the silence no no it was sealed wasn't it yeah yeah it's the strangest thing [Music] in the field next door we're investigating a series of shapes stewart and mick spotted from the air we've put in three trenches and discovered a network of ditches so you think all this is probably fields and agriculture then dude i think we've got to go back to the agricultural idea and and keeping animals here and headaches and pins that kind of thing and just no evidence of settlement whatsoever so it's a landscape around our mind settlement that's what it seems most like perfect with a vast network of fields and a massive strategically placed hilltop enclosure this was more than just a simple farm whoever controlled it must have been a powerful chief so with time running out we concentrate all our resources on the main enclosure everyone that is except henry he's wandered down to a boggy area in the valley to take a core of soil the grey stuff at the bottom is 2 000 year old mud it's a sign that in the iron age this bog was a lake [Music] this is so typical of you on day one you prowled around the side on day two you moved into the next field and now we're what 200 meters away in the middle of a bog yes it's all about landscape context i keep banging on about it but knowing something about the site isn't it isn't sufficient itself unless you know something about the landscape that site lived within and how it developed and where we've walked to down here doesn't think they look like it to you perhaps but this was a large lake here in pre-history so what do you think the relationship would have been between the lake and the people who lived up there well there's two relationships one is very practical one is supply of water and from the crop marks we do have evidence now in the field where bridget's digging of a trackway which actually leads down from the fields towards this bog they're bringing animals down to to waters that's very practical of course the other is ritual once you get into pre-history that awful word but we do know that lakes and bogs become areas where in prehistory people are depositing votive offerings metal work so they're actually chucking it into the lake that's right these are spec really are special places in pre-history so there might still be iron age objects in this bog that were cast in 2000 years ago i think that's the case we're not going to be able to dig it are we no there's no i mean it's actually very large there's no way you even attempt to dig something like this we'll let it lie from his hilltop home the iron age chieftain who ruled this corner of anglesey could see the source of his power economic and spiritual laid out before him and he made sure that anyone looking back could see it too if you remember the jeer fish showed another ditch on the outside of the main big ditch so we put this trench in and what we discovered wasn't what we thought it wasn't another ditch right but we came across these big rocks we found about five of these and they went in a line across the trench here so i put an extension in yeah and i think that's the foot of a wall so you got a wall through here we got a wall this in other words the bank that accompanied the big ditch yeah had a revetment right to stop all this stuff tipping her over yes we've just got the bottom of it it may well have been higher yeah in which case you could have seen a stone wall down there in the valley and it would have looked really spectacular and it sort of enhances this impression that this is a very high status important site it would have looked like a fort on the horizon wouldn't it yes in an imposing structure like this we'd expect to find substantial houses [Music] but so far the only sign of iron age occupation is a series of small post holes they don't look much but mick and francis are impressed it's probably the best evidence we're going to get for settlement on this side for actual buildings and structures isn't it yes but dating them with any precision is impossible other than by absence of pottery but they're right in the center of our enclosure which is where we know they ought to be so they're at the center of power if you like and if we could join them all up into coherent pattern i think we'd find they'd be round houses about sort of eight meters diameter thatched roof that sort of thing but the posts can't have been very big they're pretty small but i think the problem is you see we are seeing just the bottom bit of the post hole all the rest of it the actual foot or mooring which is supposed to has been eroded by plowing across this site we're right at the bottom of them so you're happy that there were actually iron age people building shelters here not just putting up fences yeah i think it's more than shelters yes it's houses this would be a substantial house you know the where people have reconstructed their quite substantial buildings and at nearby melon clown on a team of experimental archaeologists and modern builders are demonstrating just how substantial their reconstructions show these were simple but brilliant designs carefully placed posts bore the weight of the roof and defined the large communal space and a thatched roof would have kept out the very worst welsh weather it was the perfect house for this hill a substantial weatherproof home fit for even the most powerful chieftain so is the mysterious pit next door another part of this domestic picture even francis wouldn't get this excited about a rubbish pit oh this is looking good hang on i see another of these yellowy snails just under there there yeah yeah right so what it looks like then francis is a kiss so it'll be a little grave possibly lined with stone and probably what bronze age early bronzer well it certainly is the appropriate size and shape for a crouched information if you know so much about it do you really want me to bother and dig it [Music] this is completely unexpected looking for signs of iron age settlement it seems we've found a bronze age grave not two but four thousand years old [Music] the oval grave was lined with large flat stones the body would have been curled up inside it seems the acidic soil has destroyed the bones but the discovery helps us rewrite the history of this hill we're saying those post holes are about 2 000 years old and that burial is about 4 000 years old in other words the people who were looking at that burial were as far away from it in time as we are from the romans but think now if there were a heap of stone over this burial pit yeah it was there it was being respected by the builders of these new houses it's odd isn't it because for our special places like churches and synagogues and and what have you tend to be very much separate from our everyday lives and yet that seems to be right in the middle of iron age everyday life but then as as we all know the landscape has changed and the way we read the landscape has changed and i think we've lost so much meaning in terms of you know the specialness of the hill the ancestors who have worked this land for millennia and that's the mindset i believe that these people had and of course we were advised by those special people those druids who are helping us to make sense of history three days ago this earth work was almost unheard of one of the few clues to its existence was a photograph now we've uncovered four thousand years of history on this welsh hillside it begins with one person buried but not forgotten because two 000 years later this hill was still a special place the power base for an important chieftain it gave him a link to the past shelter food even a sacred lake he had it all and then the romans arrived life on anglesey and on this hill changed forever the curiously empty ditches suggest wind and rain began to fill them with earth soon after the invasion the roundhouse post holes were covered by a blanket of soil and a roman coin dropped on top it seems the chief and his people vanished and the once mighty earth work was abandoned the roundhouses fell into disrepair or were even demolished and the terrifying events of the roman invasion were hidden beneath gentle pasture [Music] this exposed hill bears witness to the island's darkest hour dave it's really come on isn't it yes it has growing nicely we're almost on the last stage despite dry willow and strong winds dave and his team have proved it would have been possible for the iron age celts to build a wicker man let me show you the head does that remind you of anybody [Applause] as dave puts the finishing touches to our wicker man it's easy to forget that 2000 years ago this would have been a gruesome spectacle but stuffed with straw instead of humans it's far from terrifying in fact it feels strangely familiar phil certainly seems to be feeling a connection it's tempting to find faint echoes of this ancient custom in our modern traditions from corn dollies and the green man to guy fawkes how much of the ancient british way of life did the romans really destroy how much do we owe to that elusive elite the druids still unscathed [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 134,520

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, druid, druic history, ancient britain, ancient rome, british history, anglesey, pagan rituals, druids, druid rituals, pagan history, archaeology, tony robinson

Id: UoDbAnDtzTM

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021