The Hidden Roman Villa Under The Suburbs | 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 welcome to the suburbs of suffolk we're here at castle hill in ipswich because the children at the local primary school wanted to know more about the castle that gives this place its name when we started looking into it though we didn't find some medieval stronghold but something much more exciting beneath these well-tended lawns and patios could lie the biggest roman villa ever discovered in suffolk so how big was this building and what on earth was it doing here time team and the people of castle hill have got just three days to find out [Music] so [Music] [Music] we know the castle of castle hill was actually a villa because of this man suffolk archaeologist basil brown starting in 1946 he spent the years before the housing estate was built compiling a partial plan of a substantial third and fourth century roman complex but time ran out before he could dig the whole site and the bulldozers moved in burying the farmland and his discoveries under a swirling carpet of housing there is a roman villa here we know it's here which is a good way to start we're now here to finish basil brown's job and uncover the true extent of the villa that gave castle hill its name and that means digging in at least eight gardens making it the most ambitious back garden archaeology we've ever done on a regular time team we've got a reasonable idea that the bulk of the the villa walls are underneath number 21 which is why we're starting here first thing we need to do is dig a trench to find some of brown's walls and once we've locked his plans into the modern landscape we can go hunting for the parts of the villa he didn't have time to dig but that's not as easy as it sounds i don't cut any aspersions on old archaeologists but it's almost impossible to tie these old plans into the modern landscape so you know why is that well because they just didn't record things in the way that perhaps they should have done by the standards i don't think that's fair actually i mean basil brown who did the excavations the 1950s and the other excavations in the 1930s they did record everything they found in great detail but the problem is that the landscapes completely changed you see this is brown's excavations here and it's all just open land nothing like this so they've referenced the trenches to field corners and fence posts and even buildings like this huge great big buildings obvious things to tire trenches into but they've all gone now and they didn't have anything like gps that could give them actual eight figure grid coordinates so they did the best they could but because the landscapes changed we don't know exactly where those things were because the references have gone jude you've dug here before haven't you yes we there was a little bit that didn't get developed until the end of the 1980s down here we found bath house in this area here and we found a timber building an aisled timber building about there so this could be part of really quite a big complex oh yeah so it's it's really quite an impressive looking range of buildings if we can find out where it all was and which bits joined together and that's going to be really difficult to do we're starting in number 21 tranmere grove because that's where jude believes the western end of the villa is and finding a whole mass of walls and corners is essential for establishing how basil brown's plan fits into the modern estate but there is a problem if our guess is only out by a few meters we could be digging in the wrong garden so to cover ourselves we're also going to dig in number 17 to see if and where it contains evidence of brown's excavations [Music] we're gambling a lot of our resources on these trenches but the amount of fines that have already turned up suggests we're on the right track you've got quite an impressive range of material i can see as we've got roofing tile right that's right what is interesting is that this material here is brick from a hyper coast or the piliar pili the pillars that support the hypochord so we're looking at building of status but particularly interesting is the fact that we've got this glass one burnt fragment which could be window glass and a very small fragment of vessel glass this is almost certainly the base of a shallow shallow vessel but i'm certainly encouraged that the level of material certainly um impressive segments of floor material that have been coming up from this garden area that's right gives us some hope the early geophysics results are also surprisingly good because in spite of the urban setting they seem to be spotting some very promising features under the lawn i think i think we've got something positive this is 17 isn't it it is yeah right um the black is high resistance so the black should be wall or rubble or something like that something big coming through now doesn't that match with those well in theory the the main axis of the the villa the east-west corridor is is coming through this garden here so we should get two walls sweeping right the way through well i mean it's critical from our point of view we actually see some archaeology in the ground and compare it with our results because it's such a nightmare for us this we're already digging in two gardens and it's not even 10 30. how many we finally dig is down to the patience and hospitality of the residents are you happy if we come in here next yes just to do our survey yes you know with the geophysics yes but the good news is if we can establish the exact location of basil brown's plans it'll make our search for the rest of the villa complex so much easier because romans love their buildings to conform to certain basic rules it does seem to be a fairly standard pattern that many villas will conform to that's what we've been working on i mean the kind of thing that we might have had here is a simple row of rooms but it's rectangular with the roof now that's very typical of early roman houses in britain and if he gets a little bit more money he could put on a corridor so you can see him just generally upgrading his structure and then he does a little bit more and then if he gets bigger family or there's more money available the estate's producing more he might be able to put on a whole extra wing with this in mind we can also guess at the prosperity of the inhabitants a single range villa would indicate a wealthy man two ranges suggest a very rich family while three ranges covering almost 30 gardens of the modern estate would mean we're looking at the property of an exceedingly rich and powerful dynasty the next couple of hours are just a blur of digging and scraping john did say we might have to extend that way he did he did and if i want to actually agree with him just for one just for once the trenches are extended the diggers dig deeper all classic day one activity which yields a huge and so far empty hole in number 21. it's been a bit more tenacious than ever we thought it would david john it's going down a hell of a way isn't it well that's it i mean we all all thought that literally just take off your top show a little bit of sub-shell and you'd and still quite a way to go obviously that's the horrifying thing the news isn't much better in number 17 where john's crisp gear fizz results hadn't exactly given us the massive masonry features we'd hoped for got the first bit of roman pottery so that's a good start it doesn't it doesn't register very high on the thrillometer but you're quite right it's row and it's a piece of black burnished where it's a standard piece of kitchenware right um very difficult to date that accurately because we haven't got the diagnostic shirt but it's um it's quite a clean piece isn't it so yeah um it may have gone back in the fill from um dazzle browns yeah um what sort of levels are you down at well we've gone through the topsoil here and we've just come down to this some kind of rubbery layer and it's literally just sitting on the top just there right okay popped up so it does look like you're probably still in backfield doesn't it well i'm not entirely sure it could well have come from the back floor above it yeah right okay and there are a couple of oyster shells and stuff down there so whether it's backfill or not we're getting certainly getting domestic stuff now whereas before this entire trench has just been rubble and the like to be fair to phil and matt they have established that they're digging through the backfill of basil brown's excavations it's our first clue that we're roughly in the right place and there should be some archaeology around here somewhere hopefully our diggers will find it soon meanwhile we're going to open up another strand of our investigation looking for the rest of the complex thankfully the standard design of roman villas means it's fairly easy to pick our next target given the amount of information that's come out so far what can we tell about the building the key thing for us is to see first of all whether this joins on to this and whether that's what we've got underneath i'm skeptical about this because you see i think that it might be sort of a more conventional winged coil building where which stops at this point in other words this what we see here is reflected here so you think that might be just a single building on this i said building i imagine that that is doing something like that yeah okay so in the best of all possible worlds where would you put in a trench today to begin to sort out those kind of we've got to go into these gardens here we've both agreed on that yeah we've got to join these two bits up to make sense of what we already know so these gardens in chesterfield drive the road immediately south of tranmere grove should tell us whether we have two buildings joining together to make a large winged villa or simply two separate structures and a quick inspection of number 18 suggests that we could be looking at a substantial property it's not very much but it's a bit of roman tile this is roman yep that's romantic how do you know that is roman guy you can just tell by the shape of the fabric and there's another piece here that's a piece of in-bricks the curved roman roof tile curved roman rooftop well it's not looking bad so far is it easy this archaeology isn't it yeah this garden is obviously the best location for our next trench i have to try and get into the whole ground here so you really reckon that this is closed so once gf's have surveyed it we can get some diggers in meanwhile back in the basil brown trenches the good news is that we may have found our first wall line in number 17. the bad news is it looks suspiciously like all the stones were removed robbed out in archaeological speak during brown's dig probably because brown was trying to see what was underneath so you're happy that that's actually an edge and you're still in fill yeah i mean it's not a a nice sort of straight edge to that that's all been messed about with well you know it wouldn't be too bad at this point and if you're rubbing out you're gonna be lifting up lumps out and chucking you're gonna this doesn't necessarily have to be inch and battering so yeah you say if you're taking the wall lump out all that floor levels can be removed which is how the mortar has gotten from there to the section here without anything linking it there it still looks convincing as a rubbed out wall absolutely yeah if anything it's even worse in phil's trench in number 21 after a day of digging through the detritus of brown's 50s dig he's found nothing it looks like basil took everything with him so we're going to finish with this trench leaving a temporary olympic-sized swimming pool for the owners sorry about this well it it went down and then it went down a bit deeper and it went down a bit deeper again we really didn't we really didn't anticipate it was going to be quite distinct and the archaeological misery doesn't stop there carrenza's been digging through brown's original archive and she's now discovered another complication even if we can locate brown's plan the plan itself may not be reliable i think we're gonna have an absolute bloody nightmare to be quite honest i think we've no idea what actually exists did and what never existed what did exist once and was destroyed in antiquity what did exist when brown dug it and was destroyed by brown and of course then what's been destroyed when the houses were being built but what's what's really bothering me actually tony is that we've got no trench plan what do you mean a trench plant well nothing that shows us which areas he excavated and which areas he didn't i mean you look at this and it looks if he's opened up this whole area and i think that's very unlikely so a lot of this might be surmise yeah exactly hang on hang on you were vigorously defending him as being incredibly scrupulous only a few hours well i was i was saying i don't don't assume that he's not located it properly and in fact you look he has picked up field boundaries and field gate there and buildings and things to measure off um so it may well be that he's located his plans accurately but that his interpretation of what's going on is actually wrong brown has also drawn all of his walls perfectly straight to fit exactly the graph paper he's using completely changing the appearance of some of the wall lines recorded in his site's sketches [Music] luckily we have the notes from which he compiled his master plan unluckily there's a lot of them and if carrenza and villar expert david kneel are to stand a chance of rebuilding an accurate plan they'll have to go through every page it's coming to the end of day one and this isn't the straightforward dig i'd expected this morning we haven't found enough of brown's excavations to fit his plans into the landscape and carrenza says we shouldn't trust those plans anyway but at least your fizz have nearly finished surveying their new area there's also a small reward for all our diggers hard work the first real insight into the people who once lived here i found it as a really nice piece of shame yes and it looks like it might have been yeah a bracelet possibly for a child looking at the size of it what's lovely about it is it looks like it would have fitted a very small wrist and you notice on the inside of it this wonderful turning mark yes yeah because it's so easy to carve isn't it and they and the romans used it for furniture and all sorts of small pieces of jeweller didn't they they did predominantly bracelets as i understand think about it's very fragile isn't it so it would break very easily [Music] you only have to knock it if you're walking around if this was a child's as you suggest with the size very easy for a child to break that wouldn't it would be very [Music] miles this morning we were really excited because we were going to find a lovely big villa and we put the trenches in and now it's the end of day one we've got absolutely nothing in that trench over there and here all we've got is a hole within a hole what is that it's a very exciting hole actually it's uh it's a line of a rubbed out wall so we've actually got minus archaeology well not not really i mean this is uh it's what we dug this trench originally for was to find the wall alignment that's the alignment there that's really what we cut this trench for it's something but it's not much for day one aren't you getting nervous no i'm still very optimistic actually certainly because of uh john's geophysical results uh all the trenches we've been excavating so far are re-excavating basil's trenches but couldn't they all be full of robbed out material i don't think so i think the the trenches here robbed out because they have been excavated i'm far more optimistic the ones that we're going to get to the east are still going to be there because they haven't been excavated so you think it might have been basil himself who actually rubbed out the wall it may well been yes yeah oh well that's not quite the perfect archaeologist then isn't it john have you got something really optimistic for us look the good thing is we've done a couple of gardens away from where basil brown did his excavations and we're getting what appear to be clear wall lines it could be we're filling in the gap where he didn't look so is that where you want to work tomorrow exactly i mean this is really the the missing link between the the northern range and the eastern block here if we have got a continuous range of rooms here linking the two so that's where we want to design our trenches and put them in tomorrow morning and where's this on the ground john well we're talking about five or six houses that way oh excellent so we know that we've got a roman villa somewhere and tomorrow we're gonna stop trying to dig someone else's roman villa and head off into virgin territory down this street here will we find it join us after the break it's the start of day two in ipswich and somewhere beneath this sea of 50s housing lie parts of a large villa recorded by archaeologist basil brown in the mid 20th century if only we could find it funny old trench and we started off with such big grand ideas and just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller but nobody would have dreamed we had to go down that far no they didn't tell us at the meeting they said it was about that far down well i mean you look at all the problems half out diggers are still stuck in tranmere grove trying to lock brown's plans into the urban landscape while geoffers have sent the other half to open trenches in numbers 14 and 18 chesterfield drive where the results suggest there's an eastern wing joining the main villa building if these results are correct it'll be the biggest roman villa ever discovered in suffolk if the results are correct it was described to me as a high resistance linear anomaly at the moment all we got was an anomaly i'd be glad of any anomaly to be quite honestly there it's yet another kick in the teeth for gear fears in fact the one truly productive trench we have is the one dug by the toddlers in the local nursery that's a bit of real pottery real roman pottery you find that yourself that's very precious i can't help feeling we're in a right pickle the archaeologists though are much more pragmatic actually i think we're making quite good progress towards really working out a strategy given that we're so recon so restricted on where we can dig i think we're starting to come up with we're making quite good progress on working out a strategy yeah i mean it boils down to the same problem we had uh yesterday in in trying to actually lock down basil brown's plan trying to work out exactly where he dug and where the main walls were basil brown has got an idea of what he wanted the villa to look like the problem we've got is that brown drawing up this plan seems to have ignored everything he didn't like or didn't understand and then straightened up anything that didn't fit right on his bit of graph paper so using this plan to then try and predict where features are going to be up here is really difficult but what we've now found is his original plans the detailed ones that these were kind of then drawn up from have got a lot of additional detail that he ignored so we've almost excavated new evidence from the archives if we still haven't found brown's villa then wouldn't we be better off just digging as many test pits in as many trashed gardens as we possibly can uh normally i'd say yes but it's the depth of soil overburden across this site which i think is the problem i don't want to commit anyone digging blind in these areas because it's going to take up so much time i think it's going to be a case of still working with the geophysics whilst using a lot of the excavators to try and really pin down brown's plan to really get these walls sorted but where should we dig next well our trenches in numbers 21 and 17 tranmere grove have found evidence of brown's excavations so we're pretty sure that they're in the vicinity of the western end of the villa that means the heart of the villa lies east in and around number 13. according to carrenza this is where the main dining room is and so that's where we'll stick our next trench all right it all sounds a bit circumstantial to me but in spite of any shortcomings we need to take basil brown's record seriously by many people in suffolk he's regarded as something of an archaeological god but that's because of his association with sutton who you know the famous burial anglo-saxon king's burial site um and he was actually paid by the landowner mrs britty to come in and do the excavation there and she clearly really rather liked him because when it became apparent how important sutton who was going to be the office of works the government was aware sent in charles phillips to oversee the excavations and phillips got rid of just about everyone else except basil brown and he couldn't get rid of him because he was being paid for the landowner and he had no jurisdiction over him so karenta and villar expert david neal will stick with brown's archive no matter how long it takes to sort the archaeological wheat from the chaff we don't yet know where is it well that's right it could be one of these three or you had another detail number one but it's got not got them numbered not the number it may be though so they may be key we'll be able to sort that out one thing they're now sure about is that there's not just one but several phases of villa david also believes a bath house once stood on the site of the trench in number 21 tranmere grove it's just a pity that all the archaeological evidence of it seems to have been removed by brown over in numbers 14 and 18 chesterfield drive we wanted to establish if the villa had an eastern wing but the trenches we put in this morning targeted on crisp geophys results have been disappointing to say the least phil to my untutored eye this looks like another trench with nothing in it that's because you're looking at another trench with nothing in it i'm learning anyway why there was fantastic geophase the geophysics were quite clear there was this big linear anomaly running down the length of the trench and i mean this was always going to be a crucial trench because it was going to tell us whether or not the main wing that runs east west actually was going to turn around and come straight down here clearly it doesn't so he's going to tell me that this trench is tells us that the romanville isn't here it is a great success in the fact that it tells you that the roman villa is not there in other words it answers the question of whether or not the roman villa comes down here we can now confidently say that these empty trenches mean there's no eastern wing of the villa these are separate self-contained buildings it looks like the villa isn't as big as we thought it was nor its owners quite as rich i thought this was going to be an easy time too we knew there was a villa here we've got drawings to show where it was well we can't we can be a bit positive about this we do know that the romans were here because look what came out on the spore tip from the metal detector all right mastermind tell us what this is interesting lady that's faustina jr who's the wife of the emperor marcus aurelius who ran from 161 to 180 if you remember the nice old gentleman at the beginning of the film gladiator richard harris that's the man now this is the mother of commodus that thoroughly unpleasant emperor who features throughout the film but the coin is very worn it could have been lost any time up to the middle of the third century a.d easily look it's got a little grin on her face she's laughing at us bunch of incompetence we are let's go and wreck another garden well phil's wish has come true and he's now in charge of the latest basil brown trench in number 13 tranmere grove oh this is bit better but we haven't given up on the west of the site all these gardens still need geo fizzing and there's a chance that the villa may have a western wing so guy and john have set about tracking down the last few neighbors who still haven't agreed to have their garden surveyed and if necessary dug up by a mini digger you said no all right okay well thank you very much is that the same stuff a bit more different back in number 13 phil may have discovered some vital locating evidence or at least evidence of something that used to be here her could this be basil's excavation as well could he have had this lot out if he lines up with any other getting to be a bit of a pain this robbed out wall is virtually identical to the one found yesterday it shows the same evidence of the stones being removed so that archaeologists could see what's underneath this is an occupational hazard of digging on a site that's already been investigated although the old adage all archaeology is destruction seems to be particularly appropriate on castle hill but it hasn't stopped our team inventing a new expression for it it looks like um it's been basil in the sense it's already been dug out so this bit here is on a player in this but it's not uh basil's had he's had his wicked wear with that if it is here it hasn't been basiled for our team a trench that's been basiled means it's been left so thoroughly excavated by brown that there's nothing left to see but at last phil has made a breakthrough in number 13 tranmere grove he's found our first bit of proper unbaseled archaeology phil for one and a half days you've been surrounded by nothing but fresh earth is that real archaeology that is some of the most spectacular archaeology you'll see for some time i assure you what is it it's a roman hyper call system the underfloor central heating system look there's the actual floor surface and then below that you've got this stack of one two three four five p lie big slab uh tiles that are in a stack and the central heating revolves around them and what's that brown clay behind you well that i think is the natural bedrock you see the point is that what i'm standing in is a there's a trench that basil brown dug in the 50s and was a trench that he dug because there was a wall here already well i think what happened was that he probably started his excavations over there and got into the line of a robbed out wall that was filled up with demolition rubble and he literally burrowed his way along through here following the demolition rubble and he literally must have gone through here so at last we've got something tangible definitely yes i mean we dug this trench to to find a bit of basil's excavations to find something recognizable that he found so we can actually lock down his plan and make sense of it and as phil said we got part of the wall and we've got the hyper course well this is obviously a great step forward in british archaeology but actually all we've discovered is something that archaeologists discovered first 50 years ago isn't it well technically yes but it gives us a chance to to better fix his plan and also gives us a chance we got undisturbed roman archaeology heading out into the room so if that's new does that mean that everything under here would be new as well absolutely brand spanking new archaeology tony results these little stacks of tiles or pillai would have supported an ornate floor and are a clear indication that we found a hypercoast the sophisticated underground heating system the rich romans reserved for their best rooms after all this frustration we've finally got a trench that not only has some fantastic new archaeology but also provides us with our best locating evidence for basil's excavation so far surely miles we need to know more about where the walls are what you'd think everyone would be happy now but there's a new problem a major disagreement about digging strategy and david are keen to spend more time and resources excavating areas that have already been dug in an attempt to make sense of basil's confusing plans if we can locate one or two more of those then i think the interpretation of this building is fixed while miles wants to find the rest of the villa if we can get into another garden and put another trench in i'm happy doing that but i'm i'm cautious to agree to anything here without actually a trench in another garden but not carry on where we actually got some growth because i'm we've hit um the north wall i'm hoping because only got the south wall within the area of the trench i haven't been up there to actually see that in a while the trouble is the area that we're hoping to extend southwards actually goes into another set of gardens so we come into a different problem if we're coming into into that area phil the miles come in phil over uh moles i think you better get yourself over to the gardener number 13. it's looking really really interesting and by the way can you bring some labor with you that sounds promising on my way thankfully phil comes to the rescue okay you've got a robbed wall and that corresponds with that line there right at the other end of the trench you've got a rubbed out wall there right so it looks as though the yellow and the brown is defining what's left of the interior of the building the untouched rubble material yeah yeah on that basis we might have a corner there because the yellow and brown the interior seems to stop so what we're saying is if we put a trench in there we may get your rubbed out wall coming through and turning at that point there and then we've got that dimension and then we've got an east west you've got nothing got nothing to lose no i mean if there's archaeology there we should find it we should probably be highly relieved and if it's basil again we can just dig it out even though it's another robbed out wall line we know it once contained a wall making it vital locating evidence it also means we can reach a compromise in the dispute over resources a new small sister trench in the garden of number 13 should give carrenza and david the information they need i mean i do feel that this garden is the one chance we have here to open up a reasonable area see what's here and then try and interpret it against the plan and try and understand what's going to be doing it's a nice discrete little feature and hopefully if it's all contained within this garden and if the owner's happy for us to extend there then by all means we can get hopefully dig that area and find that returning wall while miles has now got enough diggers to open a trench in another garden in chesterfield drive this time to see what's happening south west of the main villa range it's at this moment that the children who first invited us here turn up to see what we've done their timing couldn't be better any earlier and i'd have given them detention for bringing us to one of the most confusing and confounding sites i've ever encountered on time team instead they get the full phil harding lecture on archaeological stratigraphy so one of the things that we're trying to do is to unravel the sequence of events has happened on a site in a trench so if we can find a coin of let's say 300 in there the likelihood is that the next coin is going to be earlier than that if it's in this layer because it's going underneath this layer is earlier than that layer we've just about reached the end of day two and after eight trenches in six different gardens we're finally getting somewhere honest our latest trench in chesterfield drive has proved to be empty so there's no western wing this villa is shrinking before our eyes as is the wealth of its occupants but it also means that all our archaeological resources can now be concentrated on the gardens of tranmere grove but that's tomorrow and before the final push on this exhausting frustrating sight there's time for some archaeological brain food beer and sausages for two days now we really feel as though we've been picking around the edges of this frustrating villa but now at last we've got two walls over this garden fence one there and one there lined up like this they indicate where the middle of the villa is and we know what's going on over here because of basil brown's plan what no one's ever done is to dig beyond this garden let's hope tomorrow we can really get stuck in in the gardens over there to see if at last we can find out how big this villa actually is join us after the break beginning of day three in our search for the lost roman villa here at castle hill in ipswich we've already put in seven holes into six back gardens now it's number eight but we've got a few problems we're gonna have to demolish that carport because we need to get the mini digger in in addition there's this fence that's gonna have to come down and down here there's a cat's grave which is pretty newly dug so clearly we're going to have to keep away from that miles why are we creating all this mayhem oh we're trying to find the eastern limits of the villa tony our excavations in the gardens of the south found absolutely no roman masonry there at all so it's clear that if there is an end to the villa it's going to be somewhere in these gardens okay so it's around here somewhere but where if we look at this end we've got another blob that could just be real [Music] at last after two frustrating days of chasing basil brown's plans over half of north ipswich we may be finally about to establish the true size and shape of this villa we know from our empty trenches to the south that it's a single range structure now in number seven tranmere grove we have john's geophys results lining up perfectly with basil's last recorded eastern wall lines this could be the break we're looking for [Music] in spite of the havoc we've wrought around castle hill the residents have shown amazing tolerance even inviting us to dig more trenches in their already scarred gardens so you say you found a wall around here when you put your fence in when i was digging this fence post um there's a wall or a little piece of flint wall down there somewhere it's about spade and a half that there what i'll do is i'll put a hole in here about a meter square yeah and we'll see if we can find it again yeah and would you believe it while basil brown and gfiz have confused us local knowledge appears to have come up trumps what you got this one dan i think it's our first definite piece of roman war that sounds pretty positive i'm always positive stewart when i find something as good as this does it look um disturbed at all no not tall it's solid i mean the motor's in excellent condition the nodules haven't been bashed around or anything it's absolutely pristine that's that's rather nice isn't it that's brilliant it's brilliant yeah it's kind of a key little hole in this one in there yeah that square it looks like it might be another of those stacks of peli tiles over in phil's trench the hyper course he discovered yesterday just gets better and better i'll extend the trench along here get a pick and shovel and we'll actually see whether we can get any more of those and also the entrance of the flu we now have a mix of features from numbers 17 and 13. phil's hyper course system robbed out walls from brown's excavations and a hint of some solid archaeology in dan's trench it's exactly this sort of information we need to tell the story of this villa at last our dig is going according to plan or at least it was we thought that we might find the end wall of the villa here in the back garden of number seven but there's absolutely no sign of it at all and there doesn't seem to be any point in digging in number nine because if it had been in number nine we'd have found the rubble from it in number seven so another hour another garden another trench we're going to start digging in number 11 to see if we can find it here good morning thanks for letting us dig yeah but the problem is number 11 is right next to where we thought the heart of the villa was so the trench and the villa seems to be shrinking and shrinking and shrinking have we any reason to think that it might be here other than desperation well look we've got our strongest signals grouped around here we're in number 11 now and they appear to stop at that point which is over here so i mean i think the last trench certainly i think this is going to be our best bet i think for getting that eastern end which you've been searching for for so long but i don't understand i thought according to his drawings the villain went way way off in that direction indeed i mean we've been searching for the eastern end of the villa in the gardens right over there but it looks suspiciously like a lot of this eastern wall coming along here is actually wishful thinking on on his behalf he's actually sort of guessing that the the line is continuing off in the distance when in reality it's stopping somewhere in this area so we've been looking for things that aren't really there we've been trying to imagine that we can see them um simply because we thought the plan suggested that okay so this is our final throw yes but that nice gentleman there he's not going to like us very much if we try and get the mini digger through his garage isn't it no we've got a rather easier option it's actually taking down this fence and driving the machine straight through can we do that i think we can oh excellent slide this out [Music] after chasing so many archaeological apparitions maybe at last we'll find the true location of the east wall although gf's results have let us down before on this site that's not a wall isn't it uh no it's it's the geophysical anomaly though a mid 20th century it's brick it's tile it's rubble i can't date things yeah it's not villa so what do we do will it be further down we can't go down it's going to be too disturbed we need to look there over here yeah we'll get get kerry to open up a new area in there and uh right so that was our final throw and this is our final final throw and this really is our last chance we only have a couple of hours left and with so many other trenches still being recorded completed or in some cases still being dug we just won't have enough time to dig elsewhere but at least david and carrenza are now reaching the end of their dig through brown's archives and they're at last making sense of the different phases of the building i always think of archaeology as basically an outside activity but you two have been stuck in here for two and a half days and you've shown no desire to come out at all well we've ventured out from time to time but i mean basically we've been digging through basil brown's archive and it's every bit as confusing as the trenches really i mean you just look at this you see this is brown's field notes and you see here we've got an area here and it clearly says building there you look at the exact same area when you sort of got home and drawn it up this is exactly that area there's a whole load of additional walls and he calls it a park so essentially you two are like those policemen in old movies who get all the evidence from an unsolved murder and and reinterpret it discover new clues exactly that's right we've been rethinking these plans and um what we've probably got is an isle hall this area here being the hall the hyper course that we've got in the other trench that's the triclinium the main reception room but it also helps explain this foundation that brown found to the south which is almost certainly a porch in the portuguese or the passageway fronting the building running through here these these archives have almost been like an archaeological dig you know 90 percent of the stuff that comes out of the trench isn't of interest it's back flint's rubble it's nothing to do with anything but is that 10 which is telling you something and really these archives have been exactly like that 90 has been no use but the 10 is there something we can really use with a bit of luck we should be able to come up with two or three phases of drawing of the villa on this site really from the archives and the trenches will be able to tell us where it was and with bit luck a bit of dating evidence we've also solved another question we set ourselves why build a villa here in the first place does the 3d modeling help us understand the site any better well i think so because basically what we've got here now i've taken a wide swipe of the whole area you can you can see the river running through through here and our size little red dot just there um and what it sort of shows really is that the top of the hills well to the north of us just this lighter area and what we see is on almost a promontory of land south facing the the geography that you're highlighting here is kind of a pattern that you see elsewhere in suffolk in the roman period and these other two red dots here are where there's been other settlements found in the vicinity of ours yeah and you seem to get a pattern of these settlements close to to river valleys and along major route ways for instance there's a major roman road from colchester to connor coming up up here and here you've got access from the sea makes it kind of a key place so all the conditions are here immediately below our site which led to the growth of switch as it is now i'm wanting a flu for a hyper course that's right and i've got it this is the floor it is this the channel or the hyper coast is filled up with a lot of rubbish in there yeah now along this side you come straight onto the clay and sold a bit that you couldn't see because i covered it up with muck is that here you actually got there's flecks of charcoal on it too right there's the floor of the channel it comes along there and then it comes back through there and it goes back along there towards the furnace and back along there this whole thing is like we thought yeah a big central channel and there's the base of it there's the base in the tree so as well as the pillai that supported the hypercoast phil's now found the flu which would have led to the source of the hot air it's also a boundary between the rich and poor of roman ipswich outside a slave would keep a fire burning while inside the well-to-do owners would enjoy the benefits of the hot air circulating underneath their feet it also now looks as though at last we found the eastern wall of the incredible shrinking villa it's been robbed out and it's full of stone masonry bruce tile and mortar which is more important and that's that's what you're in that's what i'm stood in here now and from here on we've got the inside of the building where there's obviously been a lot of fire whether the building has burnt down you can see here it got a roof tile absolutely stuffed full of charcoal is that do you think that's roof timber yeah i would say so it certainly looks like it brilliant and then a little bit further on we've got what looks like a the dorb from a clay wall which is collapsed and you can see where the wattle yes yeah and that's burnt out so all the charcoal in that in that brand is actually the wattles that have burnt it is so i'm pretty convinced we've got the eastern limit of the villa so do you think that wattland dorb was actually on top of this this stone that you effectively got a stone wall as a footing with a wattle and doorboard on top yeah it certainly looks that way right so it's burnt and then you think then it's actually possibly been robbed it's been robbed after the burning because there are a few burnt tiles in amongst the um the rubble here right that'd be nice if it were because so many of the other trenches we've got have been robbed by basil basil brown in his excavations it's nice to actually see a a wall that's like it's been robbed in antiquity by the romans so i'd say none of this has been touched and the day ends on another high note in number 17 the discovery of the main entrance porch exactly where carrenza and david said it would be those corners go down that looks pretty good didn't they spectacular spectacular stuart um well it more or less speaks for itself we thought it might go that way there's a lot this yeah so what this confirms here this this wall corner here is that corner of the building we thought it might be that corner it's actually that corner there isn't it has to be it's this is actually one of the key excavations on the whole site finding this because it allows us to understand what was found all those years ago right and significantly this is the main porch into into the villa complex and if you turn around and walked up your garden you'd be you'd be walking into the villa what's it feel like to have the main entrance in your backyard feels great yeah vips this substantial corner is the last piece of a particularly vexing archaeological jigsaw puzzle our 12 trenches in eight different gardens and the exhaustive work done by david and carrenza can now tell the story of the castle hill villa it started as a wooden barn-like structure in the first century a.d before a more substantial stone building with a bath house at the west was built during the late second century finally the villa design was refined in the late 3rd century with a new separate bath house and other outbuildings this last villa stretched from number 21 to number 11 tranmere grove with its main reception room the traclinium under number 13 complete with a state-of-the-art underfloor heating system it may not be quite the massive villa complex we expected to find but hey size isn't everything although maybe if it had been a bit bigger we wouldn't have had to dig so many trenches to find it these back gardens look pretty much like they did 50 years ago when the whole place was a building site don't worry though we will put them all back together again it has been worth it though because our eight homeowners can now say not only that they live on top of a roman villa but precisely which wall or corridor or porch is under their lawn [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 43,660

Rating: 4.8999166 out of 5

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, british history, british archaeology, archaeology documentary, tony robinson, british tv

Id: xOx48N5ZHqA

Length: 48min 44sec (2924 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021