The Archbishop's Back Garden | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] sixty years ago an amateur archaeologist found what he believed were the remains of the very first Roman Road in London was he right and can we find it again and rewrite the history books about the birth of our capital city [Music] [Music] [Music] we're flying from the southeast straight into the heart of London Belarus is the roof that the Romans would have taken when they first invaded Britain you can still see the line at the straight Roman Road Valois but something very weird happens to that road few hundred yards before it reaches the River Thames it suddenly veers off to the right it turns and follows the meander around to the north and crosses the Thames here a London Bridge there that little dogleg can't be original can it the Romans would have carried straight onto the banks of the river so what we're going to try and do is to find the original last few hundred yards at the Roman Road and when we've done that we'll know exactly where the town of London first began if we ignore that dogleg in the road and fly in a straight line until we hit the Thames we find ourselves much further up river from the city and right over the top of the grounds of Lambeth Palace the London home of the Archbishop's of Canterbury since the 13th century so we begin our investigation on Lambeth pier right in the middle of the Thames and let's mi5 isn't it a cozy little triangle we're also where we reckon that across yeah I mean I think this is fairly convincing we've seen from the air looks very good from there look on the map got this road map here I think it's fairly clear the alignment of the Roman Road from Canterbury if you projected from the Old Kent Road it's heading straight for Lambeth yeah and then on the other side of the river the Watling Street the a5 which is the Roman Road up to the Midlands also heads for Lambeth but the crucial thing also make is that the road was known as watling street here and Watling Street there yeah flying originally one road straight away through the implication here is that there was some sort of Ford or bridge or something like that so we're going to be able to do something in in the Gurinder Lambeth Palace well I reckon that's the place we should start looking well open ground and everybody's quite happy for us to go and dig up the Archbishop's Gardner by a chap called bernhard davis in 1935 yeah and he put in some trenches in the garden over there and he reckons he found a road going through this point it would be nice if we could find those trenches again actually yet yes very lucky to hit the road just first thing is that 2000 years ago the Thames looked very different the Lambeth Bank was a maze of marshy bogs which is North London it confirms all my prejudices the Romans having marched through all this made their crossing at a point somewhere along the bank on the right if we can locate the first road the crossing point and the settlement connected with it we might be able to say where London began was it down at the city or up at Lambeth there are some good reasons for exploring the palace gardens first this land has been owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury since 1117 so it's been largely undisturbed for 900 years in the last few years roman potter has been found in the grounds and coupled with the Davises trenches there's enough evidence to suggest the road could have gone through here also the palace grounds once stood hard up against the river so perhaps the actual crossing point might be somewhere beneath this vast lawn anyway here's where we start by doing a geophysical survey but we're also going to try something completely different for the Romans to have put a road through marshes they'd have needed hide dry land to build on we're going to try and find that ancient dry land in the incident room carrenza meets Jane siddell a Museum of London archaeologists who's got lots of data on the ancient geology from bore holes that have been sunk in this area these are the spots which have been generally done by engineering companies clustered mainly here near the station and then further to the bottom end of the park at these locations marked on the map but there's still quite a gap in the middle of the price and so if we could get some useful cores out of that that would tell us whether this area is higher or lower than the surrounding area whether it actually would have been suitable for putting a road on that's right so we'll sink our own bore holes in the neighboring Park and Gardens combine that with their data and in the computer produce a 3d picture of what Lambeth would have looked like to the Romans if there's any obvious high land that's where they'd have built the road [Music] we start in the public park next door how would detect this Highland is by extracting core samples of the soil underfoot we're looking for layers of natural gravel which would have been dry land 2000 years ago but all morning we turn up good old London clay the gravel must be further down Davis dug two trenches here 60 years ago in the second he claimed he'd found the Roman Road but in the first trench here he found gravel layers the ancient dry land and some ditches we've laid the tape along it's eight foot deep eight-foot eight-foot day worried doesn't actually tell us how wide it is but it's probably about a meter in width hey there's a depression can you see this this depression the tapes lying along along the edge of it mix just on one side of it there there's a depression going across and there's a change in the grass texture at that end as well so within a we've been abandoned somewhere of this way following the line of the tape as much longer than I expect a big old know what I bet is not the trench if you fix that as well now we have national cattle yet we'll do that next week we're under those butchers I suspect at the moment I had no idea that he'd such a big hole meanwhile the geophys team are hurrying to complete their survey well though we can only work in the park and Gardens there are over 10 acres of them so they'll have their work cut out Robin and Victor are exploring Roman techniques for surveying a route through virgin countryside well they had their own team of surveyors known as angry men saw rays using the Roman equivalent of the modern theodolite which was called the groma and it was a vertical staff on a little stand on the top of which would be two cross pieces and from these would hang plumb Bob's and he would line these plumb Bob's it up with the chaps and the distance once the route was surveyed the builders would move in when working in marshy terrain first they'd put down a foundation of logs and build on top of that we're going to make our own cross-section of a Roman Road that way we'll know what to look for in our excavations Harvey Sheldon Authority on Roman London is here to supervise this is the sort of thing that would have basically we were looking for there's from the roads in Southwark running up to the Thames when you're going across marshy terrain you've got layers of Timbers like there's mainly older mainly young older probably what you get built above that will be a clay and gravel base upon which you put the that the metal servicing the gravel servicing of the radiation so in a day or two we'll end up with a sort of layer cake of different materials stacked on top of the logs none of the time team seemed particularly impressed by the size of this garden but they're all from the countryside so they used to big Gardens but to me as a Londoner it's amazing I mean this whole thing is a private garden that it's a few hundred yards down from the South Bank like a great NCP carpark got the Joe Fisher yeah and they are and what's the bit that you think might be the Roman Road well it's just possible that we've got something committed a slight angle here but the trouble is this is only looking half a metre into the very shallow and as the road is - it's about six feet deep it's dug is six feet under so this is probably much nicer the geophys team will bring in new equipment to take a deeper reading and if that's promising then mixed talking about putting in a trench near where Davis found his Road we do this long trench what 20 metres long something like that 30 metres over here yeah that's a big trend isn't it it is a long trench and also judging by Davis's work and other work we're probably gonna have to go down about eight feet so really I think we would get on with it but before we dig that massive trench we'd better check that Davis's observations were correct so we'll sink a test fit today on top of his first trench as the test pit got started some of the locals were keen to watch what was going on in the garden see distance as well around this year was used to be a mouse yeah you know yeah and I was thinking if you go down very deep you're gonna it's gonna fill up well one of the arguments about where the Roman Road goes through it is he actually uses the islands between the marshes in the meantime Robyn went to the palace library to get in amongst their archives he's looking through Roman accounts of their invasion for any clues as to where along the river they may have crossed it's magic isn't it this was once the medieval Great Hall of the Archbishop's of Canterbury it's like Goldman gassed up there what have you found well I've managed to locate the apparently the only contemporary account we've got for the Roman invasion of 43 ad from a Greek chap called Daioh Casius and he tells us the Britons retired to the River Thames at a point near where it empties into the ocean and at flood tide forms a lake and apparently the Britons managed to get over the River Thames they knew all the secret ways but the Romans had had trouble and eventually in pursuing the remainder in cautiously they got into swamps from which it was difficult to make their way out and so lost a number of men and Claudius makes his way from the Mediterranean and joins the legions that were waiting for him near the Thames taking over the command of these he crossed the stream and engaging the barbarians would gather to sit at his approach he defeated them in battle and captured Camulodunum so there's no clue here about where exactly they managed to get across another local resident the Bishop of Lambeth dropped in to watch his digging it's sort of radar almost that's probably a good way to describe it right and when you've seen them taking the signals that all gets built up into a plan of what there is underneath but this particular thing here he's trying to get the dips here we know that was four or five feet of soil if that you've just seen anything that training that's gone down four or five feet so we need to get underneath that to see what the archaeology is below that what we can presumably be fairly clear about there's nothing under here other than garden is that right because we know it's been the garden campus since 1200 I mean Roman yeah that's right I think we can in later time saying our Middle Ages onwards we're hopefully there's a lot of documentary material and so on is the other place that's right but once you get into that Saxon Rainbow as well who knows and indeed prehistoric you say I mean there's gravel under here so that could easily be prehistoric structures as warm that's very interest but I do wish you well jolly good [Music] at the test pit Phil's looking for a gravel layer and some ditches that Davis saw here 60 years ago yeah that's it and it suddenly something else turns up the Romans have been any convenient oh and they always leave big bits of pottery construction the Romans what shape would that be it's what we call a more tyria which is a flat now it's a rim dish and it has these heavy grains on the inside and it's used to pounding up foods so the Romans are definitely in Lambeth but has this piece of more terrier come from a settlement related to that first road it's a bit like a big slice through the ground with things going on towards the end of the day the geophys teams deep survey turns up something curious about 6 feet under the ground and this is this funny shape then what's gonna have a look at that another look so what do you think that thing is that over on the left-hand side there well it's difficult to see it's the black and white screen it's the the contours and colours aren't very good first to sort of see just now yeah he's kind of twist your arm and so is it like to be a road Cantus your Armour it's not like we're not seeing just now yeah it might be something archaeological could be right end of day one well we got two feet well all right we're looking pretty good actually cuz I mean for not very much effort we've been able to sink our test fit in and I think the most important thing is that we've confirmed Davis's section at the moment we've got some peculiar things which we don't fully understand it might just be a road Clare and Clare just doing a bit more processing but until they've completed that we can't be certain so 60 years ago this old guy Bernhard Davis was digging in this garden and we're the first people to dig here since but where we've dug is where he didn't find the Roman Road right but tomorrow we're gonna go back to close to where he reckoned he did find one and armed with our geophysics hopefully we'll find more of the extent of it and find out whether he was right or not amazing gonna be heavy tomorrow - Bernard Davis beginning of day two and we take to the river with Gus Milne who knows all about the river levels around the city during Roman times while carrenza is looking for ancient dry land around Lambeth what about the river itself we have to know about the river and what height the river was to know whether the land we discovered was going to be covered at high tide at low tide or not at all so we've got to find out what the river level was in the Roman period to know what the land was like you've done a lot of excavations along here haven't you - on Roman side sacks at a medieval which you must've go into love if that's right we now know that what we see here this river is nothing like the Roman River it's dirtier it's much deeper it's narrower and it has a much greater tidal range than in the Roman period we're coming up to London Bridge and we're now in the pool of London and all these buildings here are seated on top of and in front of the ancient Roman port which lurks underneath that log so that's that's way back under those office blocks you're absolutely right it's much further back a hundred and fifty meters to the north of the present river we've got the natural river bank with the first keys in front of it you'll see a cut back with a church has some Magnus the master on it that's on the head of the medieval bridge and to the north of that on the other side of the street we found the remains of the Roman bridge between the church and the monument that's where the Roman River Bank was with a Roman key and the old Roman bridge we've worked out how wide the river was by finding a river bank and we found how high it was by finding the top of the Roman King presumably the river was just as wide on the south bank - Oh even wider even wider can you see guys Hospital that the building right back over there with all the little satellite design in the grounds of that hospital 1958 they found the remains of a Roman boat in a creek so the water was right back there so just this side of present-day London Bridge the river is almost on but all Gus's work has been done down here at the city we're hoping we can apply his methods up at Lambeth why did they move the crossing point from up by Lambeth to down here that's something we're going to have to establish when we find out the nature of the crossing place at Westminster I think we can get the answer to that when we see exactly what that crossing is like back at the site the geophys team now seemed uncertain about whether they have any clear evidence of a road only by excavating will we know for certain Phil's got the digger started on the big trench near where Davis claimed he saw the road I had a lovely time on the boat know that but I still don't really have a very clear picture of what the Roman shoreline would have look like okay well perhaps a plan would help yeah this is a map of the River Thames present-day look how narrow that is that's our dear friend London Bridge right and you can compare that with the first century map here the river at low tide and here the river at high tide that unless you saw the killers that's the Suffolk lass Ryan saw the cathedral there this river at high tide is a kilometre wide but have we got similar sorts of evidence for real Lambeth and Westminster well we haven't yet and but I think we have ways of sorting that out provided we've got that 3d digital map that's going to be a good guide because what we can do is we can pump in this tidal information high tide at plus 1.25 blow tide ordinance date and we can pump that in that'll give us some idea but we don't of course know whether it was tidal or not so what you've got to do is to find out is the river tidal at Westminster and one way of doing that is the big little trench to see if there's any diatoms in it what are there diatoms and these wonderful little micro organisms which have particular preferences for saltwater or freshwater or brackish water if you find some of those I'll tell you how tidal them over actually was clever little creatures if you can following them films got the job of finding those little diatoms we did we need a bear virgin see that by the side of it where's our digger driver he's digging a third trench over by the river wall or that is he would if it wasn't for urban bureaucracy because this holes close to the street we're going to need a permit we have to check under the ground for electricity cables water mains sewer pipes the Jubilee Line and anything else right then what's your washer diagnosis nothing there nobody oh you all right we can get on with it thank blues Roy let's have to take her inside by now the team scattered far and wide Robins taken up residence in the Paris archives still looking for early references to the first crossing point Mick carrenza and I take to the air to see if the layout of the roads helps us understand the overall picture you can see the big Tower of the hall somewhere down there would have been a crossing point but where would they have crossed to is this somewhere obvious on the Westminster Bank motivated for was on an island originally this thorny Island should be borne island with water around it so they would have probably used that as a hard standing as well so from thorny Island they'd have moved through what are now sand James's path and Green Park and then of course eventually they struck up both westwards and northwest words with Road but particularly northwest woods we can see the alignment of that with the edgeware Road today that was the one that was heading north west along the a5 right up into Shropshire with one of the legions going off in that direction but it still begs all sorts of questions about in a way why London people grow up that laughter the Westminster you know there was this original Road crossing there their pasta bit some really good reason that it didn't suit them to develop it same question I asked Gus why did London grow up here and not a Lambeth we've got to try and answer that before the weekend's over at the third French we're looking for silt the ancient riverbank that would have had all those little diatoms in you didn't call me to watch that we took some of that throws up daddy saw go paper growing oh I see there we go down some 15 feet all we get is good potting soil I don't think it's gonna work Phil hang on a bit who you cut them over what'd you say I don't think it's gonna work no nope there's such a depth of maid grant I think perhaps those may have been some digging down Brian we know we can do with it there's nothing we can do with this material nope we just haven't got the right stuff this is sort of recorded in again meanwhile carrenza checks in at the big tree well it's it's going and nothing too exciting so far so what we're now doing is come in the full length to try and pick up the so called Road at this end but I mean do you think Davis might have thought it was the road not that he might have thought was the road but I mean Barney is picking up some small cut features which have got layman material in them so I mean the Romans are here but it's at the moment it's very much background but at the moment the feature that Davis thought was the road is still eluding us seems to be at our Roman Road work continues on the next layer though there's no sign of the road in the trench yet Robin's found something he thinks might be important from the earliest records of London this is the earliest detailed map of London that we've got of 1562 and this shows two sets of stairs near Lambeth Palace here one where the horse ferry left from but here Stan gates stairs crossing directly to Westminster Stan gate is a very old name when you say very old well yes I mean that we promise certainly means stone gate although the significance of the gate is a bit difficult to determine now but if we go into the 13th century our key Episcopal lovely word the Archbishop's register the our key Episcopal register we know that this there was an ancient way to this particular crossing point so a Saxon name for a set of steps down to the river and an ancient road that led up to it is this our crossing point and if so where is it now at our Roman Road they're putting down the final surface the Mettling well back up the trench Stuart has a revelation I think you'll like this well I think you're digging garden features there's gravel terraces that you've got down here actually formal garden terraces but what's the age of this this is 1746 this map showing all the gardens around the palace the streams coming in from outside the palace Carlton's coming in through here and it's been canalized into a formal water channel I think when when Davis was was digging here what he was doing was digging he was digging these garden terraces and this water channel it's not I don't think so Robin Road I think the layouts too too good so what was it Davis saw in his trench was it a layer of natural gravel or could it have been an 18th century Gardens path really frustrated me it's the middle of day 2 and Quay honestly we haven't found sight or sound of this Roman Road yet we've been wasting our time well they don't waste their time we were going for a fairly small slot in the garden to to pick it up and it may be that it's actually outside the air we've been looking at outside the palace gardens but where Harvey has a theory I think it is outside the garden and I would have think it's much nearer to Westminster Bridge so more that way than yes missus slightly to the north of the garden yeah I would think it crosses I mean there is an ancient road called the stained gate stones the work that I've been doing in the palace library speaks of the ancient king as highway in 1553 heading straight for stained gate we've got references to the Bishop of Rochester maintaining a crossing point there and an ancient way leading from stained gate to Carlisle house which is the successor of the ancient manor house of the bishops of Rochester before Lambeth Palace was created well can we dig up there it's entirely covered in development do you wanna go you know and knocker Thomas's Hospital door this is the problem that this is we saw this very clearly this is the only open space for a long way around it's the only place we could get any geophysics in this side but if it's anaphase you could put a trench in it was just wide Davis dug there of course I mean if it's gonna be no offers as you're suggesting then you know willing to sort of develop there so a big change in thinking Robin and Harvey think the road and crossing point are north of the Palace Gardens somewhere in the grounds of some Thomas's Hospital Robin's archives suggest stained gate was somewhere close to where Westminster Bridge is today and directly opposite is the Palace of Westminster built on top of thorny island that's what they would have headed for the first bit of dry land on the other bank on the basis of all this mix sent the geophys team over to Green Park to see if they could pick up the line of the road as it headed north west away from the river this is the lines the Roman Road might have followed north of the river we're in Green Park Buckingham Palace just their tongue we've got his time so what we're gonna have to do is a series of transects at right angles to the projected line of the road so you're going to come across from Constitution Hill sort of across Green Park yes sir and hopefully we'll get hoses these Peaks and matching in a line if [Music] like the geophys team in green park and wondered how davis could have got things so wrong I could see this layer of gravel at the bottom of the trench but whether it was natural or the remains of a garden path or a Roman Road I couldn't tell so what would a Roman Road have looked like this is really tasty as well the work that's been done here gives a very good idea of the Agra the raised mound on which a Roman Road would sit particularly for drainage purposes so that it would stand sort of proud of the ground levels so when Davis was digging in his ditch and he saw a gravel line like this which was actually natural gravel it was that that he mistook for a yes I think that's what happened and that's a very very common failing or a common habit I should say it happens today that people when looking for Roman roads they see layers of natural sand and natural gravel and when they get the gravel they think that they've actually found the line of the Roman Road itself why would the Romans have bothered to build something as big as this well actually the Roman roads are are in fact rather bigger than what you can see now I mean evidence for a number of the roads like Watling Street further to the northwest and the main road between London and Colchester suggests that they may be something like 60 to 66 foot wide this is only 18 foot wide so you're talking about a huge highway with a raised centre that's right carry on more or less - they're sloping tracks and then side tracks coming out on either way so that's right yes so you would have the race center for the fast traffic probably and the the lower tracks for the for the slower traffic but why well they would need a very good system of communications in order to be able to control the province to move their men around to move communications around at speed in Roman roads were obviously a tremendous innovation to Britain and of course when they fell into disrepair and disuse although a lot of the lines survived people were never really capable of building anything similar until the early 19th century at the big trench there's definitely no sign of Davis's Road but there's plenty of pottery that needs recording and which may point to a settlement in the area and we're just about finished taking core samples which means we now have new data that's going to change the picture of the Lambuth Bank photos to compare them with it or one you did in the surface what is the other one all these measurements go into the computer and sometime on day three we'll have our 3d picture end of data we've got the biggest trench since the Battle of the Somme but quite honestly I have no idea what we're really doing carrenza how far have you got we're still working on this topographical map to find out whether there was an island around here that a road might have run on and we sort of broadened out the geophysics as well we've been to the green park near Buckingham Palace to see if um there's a continuum line of a Roman Road going through that so we're trying to spread our options I think at the moment but we're waiting for the results from all of that which would be through tomorrow so basically you don't know either no well I have add some it to do with it strange very little in it so basically all we've got is a big zero no that's not the case at all no tomorrow we need to do right by the archaeology in the trench and we called what we have got and then I'll play new things to record here we are getting finds we've got some nice pieces of Roman quern stone here made out of lava and pulled from Germany and we've got quite a lot of pottery we're getting Roman pottery like this color coded where this might be similar to what Davis was calling say mean way in his notes the evidence doesn't suggest that there's a road in here but it doesn't mean that there isn't a road in the vicinity it's likely to be quite close to the settlement where there are features like wells and ditches and I would suspect that we would still find it or at least that it is still there somewhere about 150 meters to the north of this site whenever anybody looks at this part of London in future they're going to have to take into account the trenches don't buy time team here that show that the road doesn't appear to come in this direction it must be in some other place and the GFS boys are still looking for it baby maybe maybe by this time tomorrow they'll have found it let's keep our fingers crossed it's the beginning of day 3 and it looks like we've busted Davis's theory wide open for 60 years archaeologists have thought that the Roman Road went right through the Archbishop's back garden now looks like they were wrong but we've still got the second theory the one that Robin and Harvey Shelton were arguing which is that the road hit the river about 200 yards down that way remember at the beginning of day one we said we do three things with geophys we dig a trench and we'd also make a 3d map to see what the land actually looked like round here in Roman times we still haven't had the results of that map and it's only when we do that we'll know what the shape of the land was as it came down into the water and consequently where the best crossing point would have been for the Roman army but this maps using data from three different sources the British Geological Survey the Museum of London and our own measurements so it's taking the computer time to absorb it all or in there somewhere films getting back into the trench to clean up any remaining features including a post-war that looks pre-roman it looks as if what we've got in here are the remains of some of the formal gardens around in the early part of the 18th century what we've been doing is mapping out the tree spring it the Archbishop's social secretary is shown our survey of the garden and where the 18th century formal paths would have been what would be nice from the management of it for the future is if we we can establish these features are still here you could actually replant the gardens in in a period style if necessary meanwhile a local resident brings us a little late morning snack Phil Tony remember I know you enjoy right the jelly oh yeah no company dish come on they look absolute disgust take a bite you were down on the river yesterday weren't you yes well they don't have a Hills specially prepared for you and Tony do you know how they cash and Phil I'm about to be told yep you put a horse's head in the river and the Eels love the old meter the horse's head and they pull up the horse five days later and it's covered in these little wriggling eels hence the flavor you'll enjoy the Flair finish your eel off bill but they would have been pulling eels out the temp since Roman times all day this isn't something you delicous oh no forever yeah smoke him as well yeah yeah Tony I'll keep those here till later and let you and feel get on with you well thanks for breakfast all right but our search for the roads gone cold then Mick and carrenza had the brilliant idea of looking for it on water they commandeer a London Fire Brigade boat and cruise down river towards the Palace of Westminster [Music] they're going to drop a tape measure tied to a brick over the side to see how deep the water is opposite what was once thorny Island with the houses of parliament on one side and Sint Thomas's Hospital on the other the boat drifts along midstream let it down steady I think we don't want it to come off the end do we it's in the days of sonar this is really quite low - where's it going Mike where's it going ain't no more faith we drift across the sea soon we are very low spring yeah we will you know actually physically so the local boatman knows about a sandbar that stretches across this area of the Thames how shallow is it and where is it exactly in the incident room the geophys team were collating all their results everything in the palace turns out to be garden features while Green Park turns up nothing at all the ground has been too disturbed [Music] that's banging down on the 2 meter 60 where does that put us with the with the Roman River level then cos because it was lower wasn't it yes you have to knock off a couple of meters perhaps yeah no so we might to almost be looking at a ridge across here if it existed in Roman time that was before yeah check that out later because it's somewhere in the area the story goes that that you can physically walk across the causeway or something that runs across the lower side of Westminster Bridge I mean I've got nothing to bear there it's just here stuck well you know we heard a story that one of the piers from the Opera House it's a very tall Charlotte always limited as a part of crossing sometime in the 1950s this is very useful this gives us exactly what we need yes there is a bar here leading to their Island then instead of looking for the road on land we looked at the road from the river outwards at last a decent break we found the likely crossing point if not the road to it from here we went down river to try and answer that other question why didn't London grow up around Lambeth the answer could be seen from the top of Southwark Cathedral near London Bridge this is where the Roman city of londonium actually started isn't it so how come they decided to build it here rather than a couple of miles down the road at Lambeth oh they up the obvious reason looking from here is that it's higher ground it would have been drier a better place to build this is actually a good commercial site you know it's a good place to to bring your ships up with trading activities stone imports and all the rest of it you know you're not just supplying the Roman army that's developing into a civil settlement that's right and the water here is deeper than at Westminster or so our records seem to show so while Westminster is a good crossing place if you just want to get from A to B if you actually want a good birthing place where you want to bring deep water vessels and a Spartan yes for the countries you can then London is a better place you can put a crossing there but you can also have a port so we've seen two different criteria here aren't we down at Lambeth we're looking at a shallow River which is ideal for taking some the army and it supplies across the shallow water they're probably ferries you might even be able to walk across and that's ideal at that stage whereas up here we've got the deep water birth right here seems to be much deeper than isn't and you'd require that when you're imperial power and really pegged down the local people and you weren't so worried about military tactics you actually wanted to trade so deep water and building ports and all that back at the incident room our 3d topographical pictures finally taking shape now all we have to do is calibrate the possible tidal range and add that to where the river would be work in the trench was drawing to an end and we began analyzing all the finds these heavy roof tiles suggest a large administrative building possibly associated with the crossing point there's definitely an early Roman settlement here quite possibly the first Roman buildings beside the Thames the beginnings of London at last all our data from trenches boreholes and depth soundings in the Thames have been turned into a 3d picture the gray areas are gravel levels the dry land in Roman times the green is Marsh or bog let's see what it looks like with the river added this bit is thorny island where the houses of parliment now stand our work over the weekends proved that there was in fact a high ridge of dry land on the Lambuth bank and that's where the road would have been north of the Palace Gardens we also located a sandbar opposite which during Roman times would have been shallow enough to ford at low tide at high tide it's even more clear there was only one possible place along the river you could have got across last but not least we think we know where stained gates used to be what does floor is nice and going to do with the first Roman Road I was afraid you might ask me that well it back at the incident room bernard and stuart have Reap lotted john ropes 18th century map of London onto the Ordnance Survey digital map and that shows that Stan gate stairs as near as damn it lay right under Florence Nightingale here in the grounds of Thomas's Hospital and that's about what twenty yards away from where the thames is now yes it's a very good indication as to how much of the river has been reclaimed in that intervening what two hundred and fifty years and so this is where I believe the Roman Road approached the river and where the ancient crossing point was ah and I find it inescapable that this is the route that Claudius took and then this morning we got the marvellous news from Mick and carrenza on their boat trip where they found a fireman who had intimate knowledge of the the configuration and the bed of the River Thames at his point which showed that here there was a massive wide Bank underneath the Thames at this point the perfect footing for an ancient crossing over to what was thorny Island and became the home of the Palace of Westminster so this must be a that's crossing well I mean this is the question the time team came here this weekend to answer so maybe the story looks like this the first Roman legions having scouted the area could have crossed the Thames here under what is now some Thomas's hospital they built their road along a high gravel ridge forded the river at low tide to thorny island then continued to dry land the crossing they'd eventually have built weigh stations the roof tiles of which we may have found in the trench but when it came to setting up a permanent settlement they moved downriver built the dogleg up to the Thames then a bridge and Londinium followed and that's how we think London began [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 91,420

Rating: 4.9447446 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, roman history, british history, london, london history, lambeth, things to do in london, tower bridge, lambeth palace

Id: 48iYCIYgMCA

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019