Is There A Lost Norman Castle Beneath This Hill? | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there this hill is called castle hill local legend says there may be a castle somewhere in the area possibly dating from the norman period and the landowners believe that the lost castle is sitting on top of their hill waiting to be discovered we asked you a nice flat site and this is what they come up with but there are no clear written records and no obvious reason why a castle should be here as there's nothing to defend so was a castle ever built on this site if so who built it and why as usual we've got just three days to find out mind you it's taking me the best part of three days just to climb up here [Music] where are we gonna set up base camp here at 450 feet castle hill in south somerset is the biggest hill for miles around come on until we sort out a vehicle route it's a real challenge for everyone who wants to get to the top he adopts the rambler attitude with a rucksack on the back he was walking like that when he left the ball jimmy did nobody tell you you can get a vehicle up here the hill lies a couple of miles north west of the village of cru kern and one mile south east of hinton george john's magnetic survey has given us a promising first target it looks like there was something on the summit of castle hill it's a good place to start and phil's wasting no time in marking out the first trench do you ever thought getting a job at a council hey at least we've got a good start with this fantastic geophysics we have it looks as though on the top of the hill here we've got what could be a big structure yeah it's the prime location for some sort of tower yeah something like that yeah do you often get stone norman castles turning up you get stone keeps even if the rest of it is timber you get a mound with a tower on the top or a tower with a mound packed rounded well we've got this lovely geophys where do you want to put in the first trench anywhere in the middle there just to see what we're getting see what it looks like got everything to play for with it let's have a look let's see so trench one is going in slap bang on top of the hill where gia fizz is picking up signs of an intriguing structure when you're ready with a bit of luck it could even turn out to be a castle keep [Music] that's exactly what the land owners the irishes would like us to find suns andrew and paul irish have been fascinated by the giant hill in their backyard for as long as they can remember so guys that's in your back garden it is it's been a fantastic feature of our childhood really having the the hill there all the stories that go with it and a bit of an adventure playground in itself really what's the local folklore that suggests that there was a castle up there well so far as we know um there was uh some sort of medieval castle there so you want us to find some definitive evidence of the castle it'd be fantastic it's really hard imagining people living up on top of the hill it's so incredible to try and imagine how the building was up there and how dominant it must have been in the landscape let's hope we can solve the mystery for them and prove that their hill was indeed the site of a medieval castle well there we are look that's south somerset meanwhile mick and alex have hauled themselves up the hill to survey the wider area could there be a reason hidden in the landscape as to why you'd build a castle on this spot for me it's the sort of strategic significance of this location i think that's the thing you know because that's where the somerset levels are which is boggy and waterlogged for probably six months of the year at that time yep so anybody coming from the east from winchester from london going down to the southwest peninsula that way have really got to come through a relatively narrow gap so this could be controlling i think so that corridor and the kind of traffic that would be going down here not just military traffic we've got no i mean you know you've got people who are trading their goods moving about but the significance is when an army comes through yeah if you could perhaps map just what area of ground it can dominate i've got just the tool mic but it involves a bit of technology okay well let's try it whatever was built up here may have overlooked a trade route and played a vital defensive role so it's entirely possible it was a castle marianne and castle's expert mark morris are looking through the local historical records for any mention of one in the area this is a mid 12th century charter it's given by baldwin commerce exxon earl of exeter or earl of devon and at some point midway in the chart he says castry may de cruca my castle of croucon there you have it in black and white we have a castle at crew kern and this is um a document from 1148. and are they talking about that castle um possibly it has to be said we're not exactly in the middle of crew cone right now no it's a couple of miles away there could be any any number of hills or castle sites around here so it's back to the archaeology to give us some answers i think so keep digging the historical charter proves that somewhere in the vicinity there must be a lost medieval castle but it doesn't tell us what it would have looked like or precisely where it was built phil's making good progress in his trench and is already unearthing what could be the foundations of a large building oh really well tony i mean we this this trench is absolutely diddled with archaeology and we think we might be getting to get the lines of robbed out walls you've got a very very good edge explain to me why you're confident that's a good edge because i see the same color there as i see there there's one and there's the other that one has got sand and nothing much else this has got loads and loads of little stones in it totally different okay yeah i believe you so we've got stony stone stony stuff across here and there we think we've probably got the other edge you can see here it's very very sandy and here we've got this sort of stony gritty stuff and then out on this side beyond where we think the wall line might be look we've got masses and masses of stone rubble now whether or not that's where they've demolished the wall and thrown out the stone that they don't need and taking away the stone that they do need i don't know so it's looking good and we have also got our first piece of pot can you take that 12th century or a boat there yeah it looks like we've got a really big building here but is the building large enough to be a castle the results of the radar are now in and as we suspected confirmed the existence of a large rectangular structure on top of the hill as we go into the ground you can start to see this rectangular structure taking form that's great isn't it i mean it's looking more and more like a keep we've got this clear ditch following this line so what we plan to do is put a trench across there to look at that ditch see if it's related to the structure is it me or does that look absolutely central to this rectangle but if it was a hall block with a first floor hall then this could be a pillar supporting some sort of vault in the middle so where's that on the ground if we've got this big pier it's going to be at this point here and that will be supporting the upper floors it's starting to get a bit exciting so we're extending trench one by three meters to look for this mysterious central feature and to see whether mixed grand ideas about this site are correct while raksha and matt are opening up a second trench on the lower slopes over what appears to be a ditch see the orange is just coming up there the blob that we're coming through could be this ever so slightly darker but couldn't it because we're trying to look for an anomaly first and then the ditch should be a bit further up the hill down at our base camp alex is using some specialist computer software called view shed analysis it maps the entire area that can be seen from the top of castle hill what we do with view show analysis is we take a point in the landscape which we've taken from up there on castle hill okay and what we then map is all the other places on the landscape that can be seen from that point and that's what you can see in the green that's very good isn't it we can see all of this with the naked eye when we're up there but this really helps us to map it just looking here at the foss way okay the roman road which is something we could see parts of from up on the hill well this confirms we can actually see here where the foss way crosses the river parrot ah that's a really important point to control that isn't it yeah i notice you've got on the map here crow castle here because this might be the earlier castle mightn't it well this is the thing this early documentary reference we've got is refers to a a castle at crook yeah and for me the place name crow castle is so similar to that early reference and the proximity to crew kern as well which we know was an important anglo-saxon market town and mint might suggest that this is one of the first places you put a castle yeah i think you ought to go and have a look at this and see whether there's anything to see at all on the ground but not before you had a cup of tea i think i will too so alex and mark are going to investigate another contender for the castle in the documents nearer the town of crew kern but with its spectacular views of the area our castle hill is still a prime candidate and some new finds from raksha's trench are looking very promising pots lots and lots of them look at those isn't that fantastic maybe got getting on for 20 shirts come out already just while the guys have been cleaning yeah there's no glazed words there's none of the early stuff it's just solid 12th century pottery by the looks of it and it's cookery well there were general purpose pots i mean imagine this of the early medieval equivalent of a brown paper bag that you could cook so we now have evidence that people may have been living on top of castle hill in the medieval period and all afternoon the archaeologists have been sifting through the rubble in phil's trench in search of building foundations have you established whether this is rabble or could it be something more substantial that's what we're trying to do now tony i mean we've got it all cleaned up we really gotta strip it off and find out whether it's masking a wall or whether it is just rubble this does look like a very very good contender for a foundation trench you can see we've got a lovely edge coming along one edge there and then another edge back here so that if that is a wall it's going to be a really deep substantial wall but this is where you've extended the trench that is some hole you put in there yeah we still haven't got to the bottom of it this is john's central pillar yeah and i mean he is literally going down and down and down and down you haven't found any evidence of it yet not of the wall no i mean i think it's literally the decayed mortar from where they rub that stonework out [Music] meanwhile alex and mark have made their way a mile and a half down the road to look at another hill they want to work out if that could be the one mentioned in the records so here we go mark when do we get it describe this site as crow castle well yeah it's a late reference it's sort of 18th 19th century it's the first one i can find at the moment what i think is significant about this site is the fact that we are much closer to the town of crew kern if someone says my castle at crew kern there's the town so you know castle hill is a mile or so further away yeah so that would argue in favor of this site yeah and it's it's not just a hill is it that's been christened crow castle because we've got some actual earth works this is a modified hill so there's a number of factors in favor of this site as a castle and i quite like the idea that in the immediate aftermath of the battle of hastings you've got rebellion and there's a desire amongst the normans to kind of look down on the anglo-saxons so that they can't get bands together and attack the invading norman so this hill much closer to crew kern could well be the site of the castle in the historical records if that's the case then what are we digging up on castle hill a forgotten castle or something else we don't tend to see many yurts on time team but the team have taken to them like ducks to water reminds you all of glastonbury doesn't it look at you all it's very civilized well thank you bunch of hippies having a cup of tea of an evening end of day one have we got a castle well what we have definitely got is a mid 12th century castle at crook whether this is crook castle anybody's guess and i've been out looking at a site called crow castle close to crew kern and that's increasingly looking like a candidate for this this castle that's referred to which raises the question if this isn't a norman castle what is it mick yeah but i mean look at the look at the latest geophysics there's our trench which is producing buildings and norman pottery on the top but you can now see we've got three lines of ditches that one this one here and then one outer here and they could be the triple ditches of an iron age fort a prehistoric fort so you know it might be that it's got an earlier past as well as the the norman stuff so is the site prehistoric is it norman let's hope we find out tomorrow love and peace beginning of day two here at castle hill in somerset and we haven't shown you this side of the hill before it's the less steep side that our four by fours use to get to the top sort of tradesman's entrance we're attempting to uncover a mysterious lost structure on the top of castle hill phil's put in a trench over the summit where radar has definitely detected a large rectangular building and raksha has been digging in what may turn out to be the defensive ditch surrounding it initially we thought we were finding evidence for a stone-built castle but a discovery early this morning suggests we may have been on the wrong track phil was pretty confident about what was happening in this trench but he said we'd know more once we lifted this rubble well as you can see we have lifted half of it and there's this little scatter of stones down there which has caused a little bit of a disagreement between my colleagues what are those stones well we think it's a post hole we think there's been a big timber in there and those stones are the packing around it and what do you think that means i think there might be a big timber building here that's underneath all the stone work that we've got yeah but you're ignoring the radar go on then where we put the trench in yesterday yeah remember it was on the magnetic noise we hadn't got the radar results at the stage we then extended the trench because we got what we thought was a central pier on the radar the big hole that phil had the big hole but the strongest evidence for stone footings either side of this trench so you're saying that rather than being a wooden building or a building with wooden supports like mick saying it could still be a stone building except we just haven't picked up those stone walls yet yes i think there are other possibilities as well though because i mean we could have had a timber building replaced by a stone building or the rubble that we've got could be the platform for a a big box frame building on big you know 18-inch square timbers and then you still might have a stone building which is you're saying we haven't seen yet but we can get this wall over here if we extend the trench that way can't we i think we've got to do that because we've got to test this theory see how quickly he moved away from his wooden building theory i'm with you john he's right you wait and see wait and see if mick's right this could turn out to be a timber-built castle with stone supports in the meantime we're going to extend phil's trench and look for any undiscovered stone walls [Music] and in raksha's trench marianne is catching up on some of the many finds from the previous day that may give us an idea of the date of the site they're beavering away in trench too there's some finds that are coming out there are some good finds and we're actually very excited we are indeed this is what looks like to be a medieval pin and would that have been used on clothing yeah so it would have fastened i'm not quite sure if there was a class but it's definitely some kind of pin fastening on on some kind of garment it's really beautiful it's made out of copper alloy if you kind of move it around in the sunlight you can almost see the gold gilding on it so very high status fancy goods yeah but the exciting thing is it came out of what it looks like to be a pit stroke ditch we're not entirely sure yet um it's full of 12th century medieval pottery pretty good start for day two isn't it good for one drink over in phil's trench we've been opening up a large hole where we thought there could have been a central pillar but we haven't yet found a base for it so we're digging deeper and deeper it'd be nice to actually see where the bomb is meanwhile alex is listening to farmers tales about some large stones plowed up many years ago on castle hill andrews told me that you were up here in the 1960s working down this land with the tractor is that right yeah this was a hill that was non-productive agriculture so we thought well you know let's have a go put in a rotavator and try and reclaim it and get a bit more agricultural usage of that and then we got the plow up and there was these two big stones and i could see they were going to be a nuisance they were going to break the farm machinery so you know as a responsible person i just dropped the player and gently pushed them yeah out of the way so you just sort of push them to the edge of the this steep slope thinking and all of a sudden these stones seem to be quite famous and i can't find them if these stones weren't natural it's further proof of a man-made structure on top of castle hill so where do you think this stone came from then oh over there yeah in the distance you can see the ham hill quarry all the the um the local stone in the areas comes from that that quarry originally from ham hill quarry right so potentially then if we've got the normans or later building a castle up here that's the type of stone they'd instantly go to that's right and it's obviously a not that far right so maybe we should then think about going over there and have it have a look and see what they've got and we should let you get back to your cows alex and andrew head off to ham hill quarry to investigate this local source of building material in the meantime mary ann's trying to find out whether our pottery fines date from the main period of norman castle building all the evidence is looking mid 12th century but the norman invasion was 1066. it was and we do have a the majority of castles built immediately after 1066. however in the middle of the 12th century you have a period which historians call the anarchy rather evocatively yeah we have a civil war between on the one hand king stephen and his cousin matilda so these are grandchildren of william the conqueror struggling for the throne and what it leads to very quickly is a civil war that people have called the anarchy but people have called the anarchy as soon as government breaks down as soon as there is a civil war people start building castles so there's rich men doing big building works but also this kind of idea of forced labour constructing castles or fortifications there's a rush to re-fortify one of the best illustrations of the way that royal power collapses in the middle of stephen's reign in the middle of the 12th century is the coinage the coinage had always been since the 10th century one coin with the king's head on it and that ran throughout all of the kingdom in stephen's reign stephen's coins are only found in the east and the south east in the southwest where we are there are coins being issued for matilda and you also get even individual barons issuing their own coin so you have two sides competing for people's affiliation uh and and fighting against each other so um there's always the possibility of extreme violence it's not a great time to live and it's always the peasants who suffer the sand is reddened so it's burning there's a lot of burn in there and it's actually quite a bit of charcoal in there as well this means we could be looking for a lost anarchy period castle rather than a conquest one it's too early to tell for sure and in the meantime things seem to be getting ever more confusing you really don't know you're so sort of convinced that it's a castle i mean you know it's kind of oh it's a stone castle oh it's a wooden castle what happens if even the castle we're halfway through the dig but are we any closer to solving the mystery of castle hill hello remind me what is the date of the pottery that we've got up here tony it's all 12th century nothing from the 11th century which means that it can't be a 1066 conquest castle it has to have come from this king stephen reign of anarchy and if it was an anarchy castle that was put up in a hurry then that would explain why it's not on the records because it would have been pulled down again really quickly once the anarchy was over and also it's not to say that it wasn't a massive timber structure because you know they built it to mean it but it also would explain why there wouldn't be documentary evidence people weren't sitting down scribbling notes about what was going on where it was a pretty chaotic time so exciting the history and the archaeology are actually fitting together which they don't often do it's a great theory but will it stand up in a few hours time or will the archaeologists have thought of something entirely different we just have to wait and see we the afternoon of day two in crew kern in south somerset and we're digging up a large hilltop structure which we're hoping could be a medieval castle evidence now suggests it may be a timber castle dating from the anarchy period in the 12th century and a new find in raksha's trench may help us confirm that raksha hiya word is you've got a good find the word on the street is correct i have this lovely horse riding spur a spur yeah it certainly is isn't it yes if you put it that way up the hill the rider's heel will be here and then you would be goading the horse with that pointy bit there any idea of a date well we're actually hoping it's 12th century because it's come out of this massive pit that we're digging at the moment and all the potty that's come out of it is 12th century so if it was then that too could be part of the anarchy wars that's what we're hoping where there are spurs there must have been horses so does that mean somebody was keeping cavalry up on castle hill we've got horses and we've got people spurring them we've got horse men the medieval french word for horseman is chevalier so we've got knights and knights go with castles like ham and eggs you know so this is good stuff the fact that we've got that spur and what does that mean for how they're managing this landscape when we're talking about castles in this period they're functioning as cavalry forts okay they're a place where you can keep um 30 40 100 men horsemen and they can ride out from that castle and control the area does that mean there should be evidence of more buildings than just this central squarish tower we certainly expect more i mean in a sense the tower is just the sort of piece of resistance that's the the the tower crowning the mound it's the lookout it's the symbol of lordship but we're going to have to have places for knights to sleep so a hall of some kind we're going to have to have places for horses to sleep i.e stables there should be a bit more evidence on the top i think there should have been a fair few buildings on that hill yeah there could be more outlying buildings still waiting to be discovered up on the hilltop and phil seems to be making a breakthrough as he extends his trench to where the first radar survey picked up signs of stone remains now look that is looking a bit more solid so it looks like if we've got a wall did it film the more of it we see mick yeah the more it does look like a wall it means when we first got down on it yeah well you couldn't we wouldn't really know whether it was just a block of block of masonry or something like that but it's getting bigger and bigger but what is it meg is it a wall phil ah but it might be a war but is it a castle is it a keep is it the hall is it a chapel even you know it could be any of those couldn't it you better go and ponder on these things i'm pondering as i sit here phil so the story turns yet again substantial stone walls means that the stone building theory is winning out over the notion of a timber structure there's not yet enough evidence to prove it's a castle but this dig's not over yet one thing's for certain building any type of stone structure up on this hill would have required a massive investment of manpower the best local source of stone is found at ham hill quarry 10 miles up the road quarrying it and transporting it in the medieval period was no mean feat you've got here an enormous block of ham stone when you work in these quarries is that right yes we do this is the stone that they're using to build all sorts of buildings from the medieval period right up to the present day is that right yes correct and what's it like to work um it can be very hard it's it's um not the best of stones it's you you've got to pick through it to sort the best day um it suffers from clay beds and iron faults but with modern technology you can cut around the problem sort of thing so with modern technology it's a lot easier it's a lot easier yeah what would it have been like in the medieval period very difficult if you want to show me some of the techniques they would have used they would have used a pic similar to this have been in here as they got deeper down they would have different picks also with longer handles so they could work in a more upright position i guess it's time then i had uh had a crack at this just just to see what's like the safety goggles on there you go here we go right barely having any effect whatsoever here [Music] and that that really isn't easy that that's one pass through i've done there but that probably take me about three weeks in that word i think yeah let's just say theoretically then i have worked out a a significant block of stone first you've got to get it out of the cory face haven't you yes and you've got a bit of stone over here a piece of stone here with a bedding fault through it right it shows you how you know how we could how it would have been done how the natural bed is here yep and the stone here and they would have driven the chisels in along here to split the stone on its natural bed should we have a crack at that you can have a go if we want yeah but this is a two bloke job yes one has to hit it one has to hold her so one's got to trust the other yeah okay so you're the quarry man i'll be i'll be chisel monkey yeah he's gone in there now you see and now right now you can see that actually that's really smooth isn't it that is so what we're going to do is i'm going to think about how we're going to get it from here all the way to our site good luck rather you than me alex that thing weighs a ton back on site we're digging even deeper we had expected to find evidence of a large supporting pillar in the middle of this trench but now the picture's looking very different you've got a bit of construction work going on here yeah tony we've literally taken it down another layer but we still haven't got the bottom i don't understand though because you said that you thought that there would be a platform for a big pillar about two meters down that is literally what we thought it was gonna be but i think we've got to scrap that idea all we've got is this whacking great hole that is filled up with with loose gravel why are you still going down because we'd like to get to the bottom we really do want to know what it is at the moment we haven't got the foggiest idea what this hole represents but if you come over here i'll show you something that we do know about look we've got a wall here and it's not just here it extends right the way across this end of the trench john you must be chuffed this is what you prophesied would be here this morning yes so look this is where phil's got to there's a clear wall there okay it's been robbed out at the end but there's no doubt there's another wall that comes back on the far side we have got a stone building here ah but is it a castle so now we're absolutely certain we've got a decent sized stone building here but we still can't be a hundred percent sure whether it's a castle are the fines coming out of raksha's trench able to add anything to our understanding of the site so what you got there then paul a whacking great tripod pitcher it's basically an enormous jug with little feet on the bottom this is all the same pot and a lot of these shirts fit together as well raxx is still digging it out oh good grief as i was saying ratchet's still digging it out these things can be anything up to this high rise you know you've got one of these it's a big round thing that's an awful lot of pottery and what sort of date we're talking about it's locking from what i can tell like late 12th into 13. i mean this sort of pottery starts in the 11th we kind of get nicer quality as time goes on and this is quite good quality is it the sort of thing you use for cooking no i don't think so it's something that it's a jug so it would help liquids but some of them joined together already i'll get this cleaned up first time we can then we can have a look dig more dig more i'm trying it's really difficult promising fines with pottery dating from the 12th and 13th century but we still don't know for certain if we've got a castle here and now we've only got one day left the wind up there cool i know it's a different world down here with the days digging and some heavy quarrying behind us marianne has prepared some medieval workers grub what's all this there welcome to my medieval mead and cheese evening kindly surprised by the lovely landowners that's very kind of you so where did this cheese come from then it's all local the bread the cheese the mead it's fantastic mead what is anything else are you drinking mead you're going to stab the mead workers can't be choosers you remember three and a half hours ago we had that conversation where we said we know exactly uh what this site is yeah it's a temporary structure thrown up in the civil war uh the reason there are no records for it was because it was made of wood so it all was pulled back down again where are you going with that john was right phil's just found a stone wall up there that throws our theory out the window completely we've only got a day to get to the end of this puzzle by the end of which will we have a castle to show the family or will it be something else it'll be a chapel you think it'll be a chapel it could be what do you think it'll be i haven't got anything else to drink try that that's the local cider that's gotta be better cheers beginning of day three here on the infuriating castle hill in somerset which adamantly refuses to give up its secrets easily over the last two days at one time or another we thought we had a norman castle up here a stone one a wooden one the fact is we still know virtually nothing about it at all it's all castles in the air isn't it mate no car what what we don't know anything i just heard you whinging away coming up the hill there it's not a whinge it's an objective statement no it's not come on then what do we know about it how old is it how old is it well if it's the documents it's mid 12th century if if yeah yeah well we've got very few finds what shape is it it's rectangular you don't know it's rectangular well i think we do if that's what the geophysics is showing and we've got a rectangular building of that so what's your strategy we're going to put a slotted over there to get the other wall and we're going to put a slotting over here to get the end well you can do that to get the corners to it to prove it's rectangular because you don't know that it's rectangular i think we do it's true early for all these cerebral activities get me a cup of coffee and then ask me again all right i'll come back in an hour rise so we're going to extend phil's trench to the south and west to search for the building's corners and see if it is indeed rectangular as mick thinks it should be with a bit of luck this could give us the clinching evidence for the foundations of the castle if we give it another half bucket let's say out there and then we'll maybe push on back a bit and matt thinks he may just have found the western corner of the building's stone wall it's increasingly looking like a castle king yeah you're well on two aren't you so i've just got the edge i think i might have the edge here can you see the sand that's definitely it there yeah and there's the sand again so the corner it's right in front of you there like this we'll remove this backfill down at base camp paul's got some of the pieces from the jug he found in raksha's trench he's hoping that the high-powered microscope will give us some clues as to what it was used for the inner surface of the pot at the bottom is quite degraded and apparently fermentation causes pots with especially with limestone on the inside for the inner surface to flake off the lactic acid in the fermented liquid attacks the inner surface of the pot when you say fermenting liquids am i saying beer oh almost certainly yeah that's telling us something about what they were doing at the top of that hill i mean they were living there drinking their beer out of their pictures well they drank a lot of beer in the medieval period it was it was safer than drinking the water you see documentary references to beer being referred to as liquid bread um i mean it was a good source of calories as well as people drank anything between four and eight pints of period a day children as well lots of pictures then with some skillful handiwork paul glues together the 28 shards of pottery making up the side of this jug it had three little feet on the bottom a spout and a handle on the top and probably dates from the 13th century a good find but it still doesn't tell us who these people were or what they were doing here for the rest of the day the archaeology team really needs to get motoring it's hard going but everybody knows this is our last chance and matt just made another important discovery matt this is a pretty weird looking trench isn't it about nine tenths of it seems unexplored and it's just you beavering away here well this trench was positioned here to find the southwest corner of the structure and that's what we've got and if you look on the geophysics here we've got a strong corner behind us there we've got the wall line over there nothing much over here and so we thought well here ish and we'll catch it somewhere and we did we've caught it right on the on the edge of the trench here so this is your western edge this is the foundation trench we're digging it out have you got it where it turns we have yes it comes along here and that is the southern edge there so the actual corner of the building is just about there well well done you just got it just about that's the southwest corner of the building found and in the southeast corner phil's found a fascinating piece of evidence it's forcing us into yet another rethink phil are we beginning to understand what's going on here oh absolutely tony we are looking at the corner of the building here's the outside corner just in front of us here and you can see the outside line of the wall you go see it straight through and you can actually see the edge of the foundation well just sort of that way and right down here they're just a little bit in front of you is the edge there you go where you're standing is the edge of the of the foundation trench and you can see that line comes all the way through towards me that is the end of the building can you get out of my trench i've cleaned that please um so that is the outside corner of the building the inside building is immediately in front of where james is james can you show me where the inside of the building is you know when you said in your po face way like you always do get out of my trench please yes that was just when i was coming to this stuff here what's all this ah well there's a very strong possibility that that's mortar that has squeezed out of the joints between the stones as they're actually building the castle why didn't they clear it all the way yes but that could mean that the actual building was never actually finished and the point of it is if you finish a building you would tidy up all that sort of mud maybe they just never finished it that's intriguing do you want me to get a couple of bits of strings and tie them run too late it's gone [Laughter] an unfinished castle is an idea that the records seem to support according to the historians this was nothing out of the ordinary during the time of the anarchy we've got pottery late 12th century we've got a massive stone foundation of one building and we don't hear it afterwards at all i wonder whether this is started and unfinished it's not uncommon then actually for people to start out with some grandiose idea dig the foundations and political changes or changes in the family or whatever exactly when you talk about the family with the redverse family baldwin de redevieres dies in 1155 he succeeded by a succession of short-lived players anything could have stopped the building program and just thought we pack up shop so we've gone from a timber castle to a stone castle to an unfinished stone castle chaps we've only got a matter of hours how are we going to resolve this we just carry on digging you know we carry on thinking about it i mean if we've changed their mind that often in two and a half days who knows what will happen by the way you have about seven more ideas between two certainly so an unfinished castle is now our favorite theory and we know it's a real historical possibility let's just get the tailgate on given how hard it's proved for alex to hack stone out of the quarry it wouldn't come as any shock to him to learn the castle was unfinished i've certainly never transported anything quite as heavy as this no it's a fair way isn't it so it should be fun yeah let's see how we get on we've asked alex and andrew to use a traditional means of transport to bring the stones aside it's proving far from straightforward good boy robbie large shire horses came to britain with the normans these are heavy animals and need careful handling after a couple of hours slogging it out on the roads there's still a fair way to go let's hope they get back while there's still daylight back on site it's been all hands to the pump as the end of day approaches hey ed could you come back a bit longer just a little bit more to have a look at but has it been enough can we say for certain what type of building stood on castle hill back in the middle ages [Music] this morning i gave mick a really hard time about the fact that we hardly knew any more about this so-called castle than we had done when we first arrived a couple of days ago so mick what do we know i think we well we know the size of it which you were whinging on about this morning which was that's right i mean in its long dimension it's 17 meters outside to outside and width 13 meters the actual thickness of the walls is about three meters and about three meters yeah the fact that it's rectangular rather than square perhaps the 1170s something like 1180s perhaps something like that in style terms but i mean the other thing is that i i seriously doubt whether it was ever finished actually why did you say that well there isn't enough later material for for activity after 1200 you know there's no there's the very little pottery and stuff like that we don't have any bits of romanian sculpture it's like as if they haven't got that far yet with it what do you think the walls were made of or would have been made of it must have been a stone-built building i'm sure it must have been a stone-built building and they must have been intending for it to go up quite a way one thing i think you can be sure about it was that it was an incredible outlay of labor yeah all this stone had to be brought up here what about this huge pit thing that we've got yeah well i think that's a well our building there are very few keeps and and stone towers on norman castles we don't have a well built into them yeah and sometimes they are the most colossal engineering feats you take somewhere like um bambara castle in up in northumberland that we looked at there's a well there that that is cut through the dollar right i mean that rocks like steel and yet they hacked all the way through it to get to the water table does a well make sense to you well i don't see why not you see that all adds strength to the idea that it was never finished because we've dug it down three and a half meters and we haven't got any hint of lining now i can't believe that if they'd have lined that well completed it that they would have robbed out three and a half meters away absolutely isn't there one thing that blows your 1170 dating right out of the water gone we've found 13th century pottery on the side well we do but we don't have very much of it and most of it seems to be some sort of picture i wonder whether that is not the refreshments for the people demolishing polishing isn't that special pleading well it could be but it's the sort of thing that paul's coming out with there's nothing in all our pottery fall apart there's not enough of it for occupation so the mystery of castle hill has finally been solved there was a castle here but it wasn't quite what any of us were expecting it's been three pretty hectic days but i think we're finally ready to tell you what is on top of castle hill it is a castle but the surprise is though it was never finished but the reason that it wasn't finished may simply have been that the family who owned the land fell on rather hard times it might have just been that they ran out of money and they didn't have anyone to take on the building project but the truth is the size of the foundations is absolutely epic three meter wide walls up to 80 feet high oh gosh imagine up there imagine what that would have looked like if there had ever been a completed castle on top of that from the foundations and walls we've discovered we can now tell what the castle would have looked like if it had ever been finished the keep would have measured 17 meters long and 13 meters wide with three meter thick walls made of stone probably from the local quarry it's very likely that the big mysterious pit in the middle was a well that was also never completed and from some of the pottery we know the unfinished castle was finally abandoned and torn down in the middle of the 13th century an incredible amount of labor for the men who brought stone to build the castle only for it to be torn down again alex we don't need it you don't need the stone the castle never got finished can you turn around and take it back again no i cannot you don't need stone for a rockery do you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 202,521

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, missing castle, archaeology documentary, archaeology, british history, tony robinson, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: e6S5kckxM1Y

Length: 47min 9sec (2829 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thinkB4WeSpeak]

In Somerset UK a legend of a castle that used to be on a hill near a farm is investigated by a team of archaeologists and historians. Using primary documents, GPR, and strategically placed trenches the team puts together what the building might have been. They also use historical experimentation to show how stones would have been moved from a local quarry.

[u/Spoon_Millionaire]

So this is just Time Team but on a YouTube Channel?

[u/ConcentricGroove]

It's funny that the guy who's always standing in a pit is called Phil.

[u/ItalyExpat]

I just recently discovered this show thanks to YouTube. It has some interesting topics but I find myself fast forwarding through half of every episode because it's a 20 minute show stretched out to 45 minutes.