The Archaeological Mystery Of St. Patrick’s 6th-Century Burial Ground | Time Team | Chronicle

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] this is Cathedral Hill in down Patrick one of the most sacred sites in Ireland the place where according to Legend Saint Patrick built a monastery and was later buried are there any traces of those early monastic buildings on this hill are they lying buried somewhere here under 1500 years of some of Ireland's Most Fascinating history time team have got just three days to peel back the layers and find out foreign [Music] foreign presumably this church is pretty modern well most of what you see is an 18th century rebuild of the medieval Abbey that was here that was founded in the 12th century and some of the buildings actually 13th century but that actually might be a clear sea tone because you can see the rather strange site where it's on the flat there and then it sort of drops you can see this line here yeah parallel yeah with the ground here and then the line carries on there but the ground just slopes I mean you wouldn't build like that because you'd go for the top of the hill uh you wouldn't project out like this unless there was some reason why you couldn't build on the top you know perhaps there were some earlier structure there that they were trying to avoid when you built this church which might have something to do with some Patrick yeah I mean some Patrick's fifth century this is 12th onwards so there's a long period of the early Christian period when this might have been respecting something it was plunged on top of the hill so what's all this then this is another clue to the early importance of the top of the hill which Peter can show you on this this plan that he's got here what you got there yeah this is a plan of 1799 which I came across last year and if you take that as being the corner of the cathedral the corner is repeated here and on the basis of that we can locate around Tara which was taken down in 1790 and what we're trying to do here is we're mapping out the exact location of the round Tower hoping to go and find it so what were these round Towers these round tires they rose up to a height of about 70 feet and they're called cliche in Old Irish which means literally a bell house or a belter and presumably the the monks would have gone up uh the tar and rung the bells um out of the top windows and what sort of days is it probably about 10th 11th century or there about so it isn't anything to do with St Patrick's no but they are an indicator of an early site because they tend to be in the middle of the center of the complex where the church come have a look at what Victor's drawing you'll see the sort of context of them so this is just like an a tower on its own yeah stuck in the middle of the landscape here we are look you see Victor's done a drawing of what it wants to look like in the 10th Century so we're up on the top of the hill and we've got our high crosses and our churches and there's the the bell tower in the middle of the early complex of buildings there so how does that help us as far as 500 years earlier is concerned when St Patrick was around well I think that the that this drawing shows you the monastery as it would have been in the 10th Century with the round Tower next to the church which is almost certainly on the site of the church which would have gone back to the time of Saint Patrick [Music] right so we're looking for the remains of a bell tower if we can find it then it will confirm that this was the center of an early Christian Monastery and other buildings which predate the bell tower might be close by [Music] it's flat field next to the cathedral occupies a large amount of the top of the hill and ought to have been a good place to build this is the first Target area for geophysics archive photos show that this field was the site of tennis courts around 1914 but hopefully they didn't scrape away all the archeology when they built them yeah we really think we have Tony well oh it's just right on the trail it's just yeah picking me way back through this sort of makeup for the car park and then all of a sudden we're into really big stones and look look at these voids look look it goes right the way down in there and look the chalk line absolutely slap bang on the line now is that a coincidence or what and it's coming along you can see here this is very very hard and compacted and then here really big stones again because everybody that's Rubble filling a rubber trench up though as well Nick was saying it it may just be part of a rubble Foundation or something like that all right I mean this is like rock solid and I think you'll find that there are also big Stones underneath here as well listen to that well listen to that it's Hollow in it history hit is like Netflix just for history fans with exclusive history documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you with familiar faces such as Dan Jones and Dr Eleanor janega we've got hundreds of documentaries covering the greatest figures and events of medieval history we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle that's the bell tower was still standing till the 1790s and was drawn by several artists so this is 1789 and you've got your round Tower in the corner can look at the other one again now the round Tower is still there but that's not where we're Excavating no we're Excavating uh in another area and I can only hope we're Excavating on the right spot because some of these representations of 1790 show it to have been on a different spot well why I mean if there was just one like that you'd think oh well it's artistic license he just wanted to balance I think the point that you hit two against one the two separate representation shows as if it's in a different spot but I mean is there a certain amount of artistic license shown in order to go and fill out that particular um spot on the left-hand side of the picture we don't know the spot that we're digging in um is based on the plan that I was telling you about earlier but I still feel that who is the artist of the the plan that he's a very reliable draftsman and I still believe in what he did well let's hope for Phil's sake we are digging in the right place back at base in the museum the first geophysics results are ready and Sue can superimpose them on the tennis court area but what do they show we need John's expert eye to interpret them well I broke my glasses should be clearer but it's not um the black the high resistance it could be Rubble spread demolition or whatever it could just be geology but what's a possible interest if you can actually see these lines it could be that we've got the remains of buildings one possibility is that this could be something to do with the Benedictine Abbey the the 12th century I'd be rather than the than anything earlier but I think we would expect that to be at right angles to the church hold on I'm getting terribly confused about dates is the Benedictine Abbey part of that presumably tacked on to that it's well I mean that's been addicting Church fabric inside there yeah so if we dug down here and found a foundation you would be able to know whether it was part of that Benedictine or whether it was from an earlier phase it would very much depend on the nature of the artifacts that we found with the foundations I think you know so that we could date them and possibly the character of the stonework itself I was worth the go to put a trench across that so should we put something in I I just thought uh I don't know eight by two or a ten by two or something like that okay you can fix something across the middle there then yeah what did you do the lens fellow the printer broke down I've got some little screws and not can we get on as ever time is the enemy and the sooner we get trench number two underway the sooner we'll find out exactly what's here I'm just beginning to realize quite how complicated this site is this church was started up about 10 years ago and it was rebuilt in the 18th century but the shell of it is this here which was part of this Benedictine Monastery we think and by the side of it there was this 10th Century Bell Tower and in the 10th Century it probably looked like that and underneath that hopefully there was a wooden structure which was St Patrick's original Church grenza to Stewart over and Stewart are looking for evidence of a boundary ditch in the fields around the hill yeah that's right drenzer I'm in the island Lane East field at the moment so you're down here still just north of the cathedral it's a slight feature showing quite well on the air photographs looks like part of an enclosure going around Cathedral does that show on the ground at all as a bank or a ditch or anything yeah there's some terrific Earthworks here karanza there's a strong bank and a ditch outside it's a nice dip on it and it looks if it's been filled in oh that's fantastic bang and a ditch that's more than we could have hoped for Nick Brannon found remains of an early Christian ditch in an excavation carried out here in 1987. could it be that Stewart and corenza have spotted more of the same ditch continuing on the other side of the Hill another element of an early High cross like this one which currently stands at the back of the cathedral and which Peter believes could date back as far as the 8th or 9th century and what was the significance their significance was to go and tell the Bible story to those who weren't in the position of being able to read the Bible themselves because we can only presume that most people looking at a craft like this would have been illiterate so this is like if you like an early comic strip an early film strip and in each panel there is an illustration of a scene from The Bible but when Saint Patrick arrived here five centuries earlier he wouldn't immediately have hewn a stone cross Brazil no no I suspect uh you can't prove it but they were probably staggered in with a rather light wooden cross which they'd have plonked into a site probably already maybe sacred to the local inhabitants could be and use that as a preaching Focus who was Patrick he was well he came from Britain uh Roman Britain in its last days he was kidnapped and shipped to to Ireland and spent some time here and then managed well Twitter escape to get shipped back to England and then got the the missionary urge the bug bit him and he came back to Northeastern Island basically he wasn't the first Christian Missionary to to penetrate Island there was nearly a bloke called palladius further south but he was the first in this area and he evangelized the area and became well effectively its patron saint and of course finally patron saint of all Ireland [Music] joining us over the course of the weekend will be several local musicians their job will be to give us a flavor of the different periods of History we're digging may I use [Music] days [Music] this tune dates back to the 10th Century around the time of the Bell Tower but have we found any evidence of the bell tower in trench one then you first taken this down a bit haven't you we've actually just here earlier you just you just found this feature we're thinking it might be the wall but was a bit narrow yeah I'm afraid all that uh all this excitement got the better of us I'm pretty sure it's probably a drain but what's this doing here well this this really was this really was beginning to get a lot more exciting when we took off the layers of the tarmac we got this rather nice what we think is a wall trench it's about the right width it's exactly the right width they said um that's right what's that in the Box absolutely enormous slabs and underneath is there's voids I I have this sneaking suspicion that it may well be a drain it's rather fine drain though so no early Christian Bell Tower to go with this tune as yet and the news from trench 2 isn't too good either still no sign of building remains of any period to match the geophys signals detected here but apparently we now have another trench Meg what's going on this is very untimed team we sit around we discuss the strategy and then finally we dig a trench yeah we thought we wouldn't tell anybody we've just been hiding down here and getting on with this this is Stewarts doing it yeah she was behind it Stewart couldn't wait he wants to know if this bank and ditch belongs to the early Christian period or the later medieval Benedictine Monastery which occupied this hill sorting out these two periods is clearly going to be one of our biggest challenges this weekend I think we've got an enclosure which really just follows the Contour all the way around the hill and defines the hilltop as a as an important area whatever the area is I'll leave them to it I want to talk to John about the geophys results from trench 2. John it's hard to believe that you could dig such a big trench so near to an old church and find so little isn't it it does seem odd I mean I wasn't convinced by the results this morning as you know and it suggests it's been all leveled bulldozed away when they built the tennis courts so there might have been some interesting stuff here and it's just yeah I think the changes I was getting was geological the trench two's closing down but what's the story now with trench one I was going to ask if you found the foundations to the tower but by the look on your faces that question's pretty redundant isn't it well no we haven't got it Tony I'm afraid um well I say I'm Not Afraid at all I think we got a very nice Stone drain that it's 18th century and it's only a drain so we've got no clue so I think we're gonna have to admit we can't find it after digging one trench look Peter said how significant this thing is we've just drawn one Circle yeah surely we there's another shot we could do we've only got one set of measurements I mean those measurements we would have sworn were accurate we've put our our trench in on the basis of that we got no other measurements to go on and we don't really believe the artists do Drew this uh wasn't trying to make a nice view out of it so he's actually moved the tower across oh that's just because you think of yourself as a scientists it's because that's what they did in the 18th century when they did drawings are you prepared to let go of it the only thing I would say is would it not be worthwhile doing a little bit more of that trench there just to see if by any chance we might be missing something about it that is exactly it I mean there is scope for it to be underneath there and we've definitely got to go for that in the morning yeah yeah Mick what else are we going to do tomorrow well we've started one of the trenches on the boundary around there and when John's processed his geophys from the the field next door we'll probably put another one in there I mean it's looking very much as if the top of the hill has been severely modified but round the edge around the periphery of the site it probably is still well preserved and so we'll go for at least two areas there and think about it again then and if we're looking for settlement we may actually find the limits of it the enclosure around it rather than the middle that's our business okay so that's the end of day one I don't think we've ever found quite so little on our first day but remember what time team's like if you've got nothing today we'll find the world tomorrow consider ourselves lucky we even found the drained but he always says that at the end of the day yeah it's the beginning of day two and we've been having absolutely no luck whatsoever over by the church which was where we hoped to find the foundations of this Tower because it looks as though later building has obliterated any evidence of it but Stuart now thinks that he's found a ditch which could be the ditch around the early Christian settlement either that one there or maybe one around there geophysics have been working in the next field along have they found any trace of the ditch continuing there this is the magnetic results Tony so we've got the church behind us and we're stood in the field about here you can see a series of Stripes that's the original plowing that's medieval we can ignore that but what's of Interest are these two strong curving anomalies which look to be like the boundary ditches so we've got two ditches in this field but which one lines up with Stuart's ditch in the next field along sort of the first one about here somewhere I mean roughly here yeah a big anomaly curving across and then the other ones couldn't be about 15 15 meters down something like that so another Ark coming through here this is roughly where it is in the other field but I can't tell you which one's the one that links up what are we gonna do well what we've decided to do is investigate both of these features both the outer one and the inner one but to put one trench across the whole way across both of them would mean 25 meters long which is a bit big so what we're going to do is put a interrupted trench in if you like like a dash of the line so you can join us up later if you need to exactly well I'm getting caught up in the excitement about finding ditches but I'm not really sure why why is it so important to know if there are ditches circling this hill one of our problems with any site is to define the extent of it yeah unless you know how far the site goes in any direction you have really no idea whether in the middle or one side or whatever we're assuming we're in the middle because we're up on the hill [Music] we haven't given up on top of the hill in fact we've opened up a small test pit just to check the geophys results on this side of the tennis court and as you can hear rehearsals are underway to recreate the sound that would have echoed around the monastery a thousand years ago [Music] so let's try and let's let's try from the beginning [Music] outside the cathedral we've now checked the other end of trench one and can find no sign of the early Christian Bell Tower we do know that the foundations around Harris were very often not very deep they were sometimes only about you know three feet deep oh really yeah so it may be that in doing various works here when the cathedral was being restored between 1790 and 1818 it just took the whole lot away but it takes a real man to know when to stop looking no I I think you know with reluctance by I say yes I think we'll give it up but uh I still as I say I still feel that my my original plan was correct we can still show how we think the bell tower would have looked standing next to the medieval Abbey around 1400 A.D of course the modern Cathedral Tower wasn't there then it was an archway in the Gable here very similar to the one you see in the other view the existing East window of that sort of scale about that yeah yeah but clearly you weren't walking through that so I suspect what you're gonna have to try and do is assume it's been in filled somehow with a more human-sized doorway in the middle here okay one important activity carried out by the monks here in the early Christian and medieval periods would have been the making of parchment local man Joe McDonough is here to show Phil the main stages in making parchment from calf skin so we covered with inward Lane lime yeah lime yes and we'll roll it up like this oh this way does it yeah now what's the lime gonna do language we'll uh kill after here after off the skin so it's only on the hair so long on the hair side yeah I will talk with the twine yeah and then how long is it going to stay like that we're going to a piece of horse manure sorry into a piece of horse manure horse manure the whole process would have taken several weeks but obviously we haven't got time for that this is the one that's been in the horse manure for three weeks absolutely that's it we'll leave it out flat right and I will this should be it should be um cured so what you got to hear it where would this have actually taken place within the Mastery walls within the monastery walls yeah well why not it's very smelly though that's all that's why not [Music] after removing all the hair and washing the lime off the skin it stretched as far as it'll go and then left on the frame for several days to dry out [Music] when it's dry the fat can be scraped off the other side of the skin more easily watching this is calligrapher Michael gullick who together with Victor is going to produce an illuminated page of manuscript for us this weekend some parchments would have been very carefully made from animals very carefully chosen for the very best books if you're going to write a letter or an account you'd use much cheaper much less well-made parchment I mean you get quality and parchment did you get quality in anything else sure and long lasting stuff wasn't it well I mean the the Delight is of course that they happened upon a material that is long lasting that will last literally for thousands of years whereas if they've discovered paper earlier we wouldn't know nearly as much about the civilization of the time of our early Monastery and of course on that Hill there must have been parchment makers who are churning this stuff out but I mean we've certainly got a quote for instance in the 9th century of a bloke and my my Irish is hopeless but sermon who the Romans called the teacher of the world committed to writing this knowledge on the island which is which is the old name for Dan Patrick so we know that at least by the 9th century they were doing this and probably much much earlier probably back to the notional time of Saint Patrick finding very little yesterday it's great to hear that Stewart's trench is beginning to turn up some nice finds what's that it's an arrowhead it's an armor-piercing Arrowhead can you see there's a point there's a little flange to it's for penetrating chain mail so it goes through a little hole as it goes through it forces the mail open and it can go straight into your body and what's the date do we recognize it um we reckon about 12 13th century at the moment but that's just come out the top sole so it's not stratified we can't say exactly it doesn't date anything it's a really rather nice nice find doesn't it well I love the idea of this place being under attack and uh what about the the color well it indicates where the dish is at the moment we're still in a lot of topsoil here which has come down off this slope yeah and so we're still digging through that but once you get over here that's starting to look like the edge of the ditch but we're still a long way to go down yet well I'm gonna have to be quick to keep up with the number of trenches today because while I've been here with Stuart mix got filled to open up another trench out here what's this one all about this one here is because Nick did a small trench where was it Nick it was just down about six feet downslope from us I did a very very very small change through what is a clearly a depression in the ground not this weekend sometimes this was about 10 years ago it was a follow-up to excavations I'd be doing on the other side of the Hill yeah just a little look and we found a rubber trench and I'm convinced that what we've got here is some sort of medieval building fine medieval building you have got to be quick to keep up the thinking is that there's another building on a platform across here and what looks like a road running between the two buildings and you see Best Buy coming somewhere through here and what you've actually got is a raised raised road yeah so this is one ditch on one side and then up here for the crazy job and down there yeah so that would be a a road of some stasis presumably yeah but you can see under the trees look it's coming straight up the slope yeah and it's heading through the Hedge that way and he's heading straight for the church this clearly is not the sort of thing you bring Stone up or supplies or anything like that because you wouldn't get up that slope yeah but it is the sort of thing that you might come in as a pilgrim or a visitor and come up the slope and face the the church in front of you with buildings on each side which could be guest houses chapels something like buildings yeah according to Mick it'll all be much easier to see from the air now that's the trench there where Stuart first thought he saw the ditch yeah across the Earthworks there then there's Island lane and then there's an interrupted trench yeah that's the one that crossed the good geophysics of the the lines of the ditches coming round like this but the earthwork doesn't really yeah that's a low sunlight look yeah you see the trench going up and down you see all the Mounds across around it there's loads of Earthworks down there but mix right I can see the roadway the building platform on the left and the shape of the large building we're digging from up here it's also much easier to appreciate how this landscape is made up of a series of small hills imagine how impressive a monastery on this hill must have looked when it was completely surrounded by water as we know it was in the early Christian period [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you back to work and Phil's making good progress in trench six where he's now beginning to find evidence of the medieval building all this collapse in Tumble you can see all these Stones they all higgledy-piggledy it's obviously where the wall has tumbled and then most importantly yeah I think we've got a mortar floor geophysics are getting good results in this area too what I've found is two curving ditches here as you did in the earlier as we did but I've managed to look at them on the screen what I need to do is go and plot the data out now and give me half an hour but how are we getting on in Stuart's trench on the other side of the Hill oh let's just come on laughing it yeah it's moved on a lot since since earlier on what what we've got now is is a ditch where we thought there was going to be one there's a cut down there yeah there's a cut just just over there that bit hasn't been taken out but it's now looking like a good ditch it's a hell of a wit isn't it yeah and it's got a bank on the outside of it there as well yeah so I've actually now got a defined where we thought it would be I've had one or two finds come out of it which have nothing that actually dates it yet but there's a few bits over here worth looking at Declan there's a nice pieces these are pieces that we've got most of the fines came from the top soil yeah um obviously find medieval Pottery I guess a nice piece of Base and we also find bear in mind the uh arrowhead from the top soil here as well but we are just after finding one piece of medieval pot actually from The Fill of the ditch right this is uh probably locally made stuff again you're probably doing the big 13th century right so these would be fingerprints on the inside exactly but it would have been smooth dogs by hand the 13th century stuff in the top that bodes quite well for it being considerably earlier lower down doesn't it um considering it's depth um I don't want to commit myself so what do we think this ditch would have been for well the obvious thing to think is that it's defense because it's around the top of the hill and in some cases they did reuse earlier defensive sites when they put these uh early Christian monasteries in but it's much more likely that it's actually meant to be a sort of boundary uh not a defense but something that says outside this is the ordinary secular world you know the everyday world and inside this is something special it's a defined religious area a sacred area perhaps it's much more that sort of boundary rather a lot of prehistoric sites are like that so given how big it is do we think that it's most likely to have been the very outside the outer one I think because below this you see it drops away and it does all the way around the hill it's the only the flat top they're going to use inside the cathedral a replica of the Book of Kells which was written about 800 A.D is being closely studied as it'll be the inspiration for our page of illuminated manuscript the colors in Kells itself like most Irish books is fairly limited there are not in fact many colors it's the way that they were used one of the colors which is most striking is in fact the yellow which is a sort of substitute for gold before working on the actual parchment itself Victor has to master the art of using a quill pen hold it in your right hand just as you would normally now dip it into the ink and then that's it that's fine be fairly firm that's it what you're really doing is you've got this sort of puddle of liquid and you're pushing it around on the surface of the paper [Music] the colors are obtained from various minerals and Robin's job is to grind the Rocks into fine powder while Michael mixes the egg white which will be used tomorrow to bind the color together foreign but today isn't quite over yet and the latest news is that an important find has just turned up in Stuart's Trench so what we have here is a piece of pottery superimware you can see it's got a basal angle on it just there so we did him with the corner of the pot and this is coil built it's not wheel thrown you can just see the sort of curvature of the coils so that's diagnostically early Christian very exactly the sort of thing we've been looking for yeah and it's coming from an early deposit Declan tells us oh that's marvelous because that's what we wanted to establish with this trench to see whether it confirmed your findings in the trench on the other side and whether this enclosure is one big enclosure then this is as good as we're going to get isn't it I'm very happy with it great so this bit of pot confirms that at least one of our ditches is early Christian in date so what's going on well we're trying to sort of put all the information together onto one map we had a power failure here early so earlier so having to do it by hand but all the evidence we have got at the moment is pointing to the fact we've got two ditches going around the hilltop but confusingly at one point the early Christian ditch is on the outside and at another point the early Christian material seems to be on the ditch in the inside so what we really need to do is fill in the gaps and then we can work out how these ditches join up and at what point they cross over and do you think you can do that tomorrow do you mind sharing glasses well with a bit of like more excavation in the trenches we've got and some more geophysics John yes to fill in the gaps yes there's hardly any of this left I'm afraid what are you not doing oh come on this is unreal rearrange their outfits put them back a few centuries this is a contrast between the black Benedictine Halley to say the 12th century and the early Christian Monk and these are all the sort of sackcloths here the Earthworks there oh thank you what's all this well this is this is the The Bell the hand belt they would have taken up to the top of the Bell Tower and he's got a missile or some sort of script and he's following the rule of some Benedict which enables him religiously he's a nice lifestyle and I'm following the rule of some Columbian which means that I have hell to pay all the time what do they wear underneath me oh what's in by the benedictines they certainly had linen vests I told you this was surely it's now become a conversation about underwear join us for day three when hopefully we'll be able to pull all these little bits of information that we've got together and find out what early Christian Life was like in this fantastic side it's the beginning of day three on day one we started Excavating here looking for evidence of the early Christian Tower but pretty soon it became apparent that the whole Central area around the church way out to here Beyond this hedge had been flattened by some later building work and had obliterated any evidence that there might be of medieval or certainly of early Christians so we shifted our Focus to the periphery of the site Way Beyond that Hedgerow and we found two ditches which appear to be intertwining one of which we think is Medieval and the other which we hope is early Christian but we didn't give up on this whole area here in fact we've thrown more people into Excavating than we ever have on any previous time team I think we've now got eight trenches going in various areas and we appear to have hit gold in this flattened area where we thought there was nothing on the end of day one Nick what is it that's so significant about this particular trench well what we've got here we think is uh surviving Benedictine War line coming approximately north south one of the conventional buildings that we started off looking for what's particularly interesting for me is the contrast between this medieval building foundation and this dark charcoal Flex soil as you can see over there and also in the section on this side and this I believe to be the early Christian period land Horizon which predates the foundation of their new team Monastery so we've got early Christian and medieval in one trench yes are we going to be able to pursue both or are we going to have to sacrifice one to get the other well if this wall carries on at that height we can chase it quite conveniently in that direction and I would hope that we can extend the trench in this direction to focus on the early Christian period land brilliant well this is a bit of luck because the small test pits put in here were positioned randomly just to check the geophys black signals showing here some of it's just Rubble but clearly not all of it so we'll have to get moving if we're going to accomplish all our goals today in the outer Fields our goal of course is to find out where the double ditches go exactly and how they join up geophys we hope will resolve this if they can fill in all the gaps in their survey at karenza's interrupted trench the dig for dating evidence for the boundary ditches has been slowed down by the discovery of another drain our problem is there's durian that we're bypassing it drains that thing with a slate stance yeah but there is some compensation in the form of nice fines okay look at that that presumable is there's another piece of a big tile like that the same sort of frustrations that would look beautiful on a building wouldn't it I mean that's a high status building isn't it you wouldn't get that it's come out of the drain it's coming to the drain yeah there's more of it coming out as well we've got quite a lot of time it looks like medieval roof slates and tiles have been used in the building of the drain that's amazing it's coming up freaking fast isn't it meanwhile inside the cathedral our two scribes are also working against the clock and having traced off their design they've now started work on the parchment itself it's a wonderfully smooth surface this it's difficult to imagine that this is the same material that we saw you and Joe producing I don't know what Joe was making was very crude partial this is very sophisticated parchment this would have taken much longer to make I find it fascinating that you can see this this kind of random pattern of of the natural surface of the animal well yeah on it these are the veins which makes a surface texture hello Tony oh Mick time to check on Phil's progress with the medieval building in trench six we're taking away all the rubble and you can see that we've got quite a nice little patch of floor and that is quite a nice solid uh laid floor that's the bit we could just sing that's a bit we could just see in the section yesterday and in the rubble we've got more of the Slate rooms so we know what the the roof looked like and what do you think of this then look at that dressed oh yeah block yeah and you can see the tool marks on it if you get the the light right look see that yeah they've prepared it that's presumably something to do with the medieval buildings of the Abbey undoubtedly yeah but look at this too I'd like to show you this bit out of the bag Ned ah look you see it's two bits squashed together so in fact it has had the gap for the glass to go down that's very good but look at this look what else we got like that I'm not going to take out the bag oh yes that is the window glass right I mean all those colors aren't no that's all part of the Decay the lamination I mean that's pretty typical of of early class it just Falls to bits you get these colored patination don't you when it's in the ground and it sort of rots but I mean the main thing is it's a very very high status building yeah I mean there's a monkey in a minute with that yeah and everything's still indicates we're talking about medieval yeah most definitely so we we want to stop with this and and really concentrate there's no nothing really more we can yeah we can add to it now on the on the far end of this trench we'd been hoping that you'd be able to confirm for us that that was a road with a ditch on either side yeah I mean Nick and Stuart are both deliberated on that long and hard and they're they're really both happy that it's a very early Road so this trench has done its job and we can now picture this High status building which we think was probably a guest house situated alongside one of the roads leading into the Benedictine Monastery Phil's next job is to help extend the test bit in the tennis court area where we think we found more remains of the Benedictine Abbey while at the Museum corenza is delighted to see that geophysics have sorted out the root of the ditches around the hill so that will overlap with what we've done yesterday so that that fits there and so we've now got the ditch running from the lane in the north all the way around to Nick's trench in the South and then the outer ditch some 15 20 meters away in parts coming up here and it continues around on the outside back up to that point so we've got two concentric ditches but do both ditches date to the same period time to get a progress report from Stuart yes I am Tony that's trenched through that one there what have you got as far as ditches is concerned well we've got an absolute belt of a trench here too and we've actually found two early Christian ditches a whitish one and then a narrow one outside it we've got dateable early Christian pottery from the inner one so two ditches and they're both early Christian nothing medieval yeah we've got two early Christian ditches but they outward the outside one was re-cutting the Medieval period okay okay corenza is John with you hello Tony it's John listening over what are your plans now as far as geofys are concerned John well if I had my way I'd be going home between Stewart's trench and where I've surveyed and we need to just finish off that area by dating and mapping the boundary ditches we're beginning to get an understanding of just how big the monastery was during the early Christian period but how are we doing in the tennis court area what's the current thinking about what we've discovered there I've been racking my brains Nick to think what this structure could be same here and all that can come up with is it because you've got mortar in it it's presumably part of the Benedictine Abbey yeah uh and then so I'm thinking well what the hell could it be in in a Benedictine Abbey and it depends a bit on where we are in relation to the church I'm thinking that it might be in the west range so The Cloisters are over here in the west range over here but I mean I've been to hundreds of elastic sites and and the only thing I can think of is it looks like bottom of the latrines or the guardrobe shafts coming down from above and then going off a slope like that but it doesn't feel a very satisfactory explanation really let's go have some lunch hang on not so fast just come and have a look at this before you go what's that then wow look at this down here I don't know what it is but look at that look at this got a really really black down in there it's got a really firm too and that's diving away look did you see it yep we've had that black Horizon behind you mind you it's I think it's it's running through fairly consistently I earlier I thought that might be the pre-building surface but you know the light of what we've been discussing it could be you know contaminated sauce coming down say from in the trees and Michael are quietly making progress enjoying the fact that they're repeating a process that went on here for hundreds of years until it finally came to an end with the dissolution Lord in England I suppose we're used to Henry VII dissolving the monasteries and of course the same thing happened in Ireland because the English ruled over here of course but it was a process over here that went on a lot longer in fact they were still dissolving Abbas in in Ireland and at the end of Queen Elizabeth the first train in 1603 but uh no Dan Patrick was one of the early ones to go and as far as we can tell 1541 was when it finished and of course at that moment in time it would become a quarry for stone for the whole area but as we've discovered this weekend they didn't take all of the stone they left some of it behind but what exactly is there still time to find out this is of this point is here I don't understand that at all um we've got yeah there's it looks awfully like mortar underneath there this yeah is actually sitting on sitting on that slope that slope runs in underneath this is sitting on the top of it I don't know what it does on that side there's water there it looks it looks it looks far more convincing on that side yeah yeah it's nice on that side what you've got is you've got the guys coming are building this wall they built this slope here when they've built that slope there they then put this this uh this block of wall in on top of that sloping ramp and then this ramp's been built after that and keyed into it the builders are actually working towards me so we've got a little snapshot of a little period of time during which this wall was built well time's almost up but it looks like the illuminated manuscript will be ready by the end of the day [Music] we started the weekend expecting to encounter several layers of history and we weren't disappointed our earliest finds were these bits of early Christian suitorene wear which date back to 800 A.D one piece in particular came from a cooking pot which Sue Has reconstructed when we say early Christian we can't take that back as far as Saint Patrick no because rather liking parts of England there is no Pottery in the 5th 7th centuries so we can't say it's a disappointment not to have anything no because we'd be we'd have a job to recognize activity from Pottery it's one of the big dilemmas of archeology you know how do you recognize the Dark Ages and there's no pottery our big success story was tracing the double ditches around the hill and geophysics have just one last bit of the circle to reveal just cut this out did I take Boy Scouts okay here we go that's close as I I can get it you can see we've got the one ditch coming through on the same alignment yeah but this outer ditch that's exactly where the earthwork ditch ends and and that to be a reason for that and there's a slight Causeway visible in the Earthworks and I was suspicious this might be an entrance and the way this bows out will create an intern for an entrance coming up the slope into the enclosure an early Christian entrance to the site presumably that's where the where that line of nettles stops it's the gap between the Nettles and the Hedge defining Island Lane itself so although we haven't found evidence of a church like this this Century we have found the early Christian boundary ditches which established the size of the monastery which developed over the next few hundred years and look something like this in the 10th century at least one of the ditches was reused by the Benedictine Monastery founded in the 12th century and karenza's long interrupted trench produced the additional information that this field was used as an industrial area during the medieval period we found this uh probable Kiln Christian it's very red isn't it I mean I've been chasing ditches all weekend and at last something really nice from the geophysics point of view we've got several other within this area we've just selected one right so there's definitely industrial working going on but does mix explaining to the bishop it was this area in the tennis courts which kept us all guessing today 6 32 day three reluctantly it's time to pack up Phil do we reckon we've solved the problem of this trench all right we finally cracked it Tony what we've actually got are two rubbish shoots that are emptying from a kitchen into these two vast pits and they're Fuller with an amazing array of bone animal bones we got fish bones we've got bird bones so they're obviously living on an incredibly Rich diet I mean they weren't starving and believe me and that fits with a historical reference I found in 1617 to a hall and a kitchen in The Cloister on the north side of the church yeah perfect Steve's 3D computer graphic gives us one interpretation of how this building could have looked complete with working rubbish shoots Nick did we get out of it what you hoped for yes and more so in fact I think the geophysics has been brilliant it's really nice to see medieval remains still surviving in this area it's fantastic well it just reminds us to have a look at this illuminated parchment then the last manuscript produced in nearby still fresh from the paint Bishop do you want to start commissioning do you want to see it yeah wow it's fantastic isn't it what does it say Tony I don't know it says the the coming of a host of the followers of time to Dan Patrick where they made great discoveries 1997. and who do we think this is supposed to be laughs [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 143,324

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages

Id: LgrK0BpaIDU

Length: 50min 45sec (3045 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023