The Hunt For The Lost Irish Palace | Time Team | Absolute History

according to the ancient tales of ulster king connor had three palaces at a place called owen macha well this is owen macha and massive traces of ancient settlement have been found on that hilltop over there and on top of another hill over there but no one's yet had a chance to look at the middle hill time team have got just three days are we gonna find king connor's third palace [Music] you started then phil just about tony one of the main reasons for excavating here is that this area features in a famous collection of irish stories called the toin mick i found this uh this bit in the tine that says connor's household was very handsome he had three houses the red branch the twinkling hoard and the ruddy branch yeah and this place is called grave row the red branch so are we going to find a palace here well we're going to try and have a good good look for one um there are marks on the air pictures here aren't there are you which is why we've decided to go for this i mean there's a couple of parallel lines yeah which archaeologically they do and they seem to be part of some big landscape feature that splits the whole navan area north south for a distance of maybe half a kilometer yeah so um it doesn't line up with any modern landscape features it doesn't seem to be a road it's not going anywhere in particular so it seems to be something ancient these are the faint crop marks showing on the aerial pictures which give us a good archaeological reason for digging here they appear to be about 30 meters long and could be parallel ditches or possibly a palisaded entrance to a settlement that rather implies a palace or something like that doesn't it i mean i i thought initially we perhaps ought to be up on the hill at the top there but it's actually too sharp a feature so you know they're not like yeah it seems to be the slopes are too steep on either side yeah but um the area of creve ro extends beyond the hill itself into this land where we're working well this is a much better platform here isn't it with this where we're opening the trend shop now we can't be sure which period stories like the toy relate to as they were passed down through the centuries by word of mouth before being written down for the first time around the seventh or eighth century's a.d do you think it's just a coincidence that this place is called red branch and they've got the red ranch in the toilet well it's obviously not coincidence uh there's some connection there's some connection but how far back it would go uh i wouldn't i wouldn't like to say that's what we hope this trench will produce what do you think some romantic middle-aged monk might have thought oh well this is likely to be the place where the red branch was so we'll call it the red branch i i i think it's i think it's very possible our field of creve ro is situated here in the middle of a massive late bronze age early iron age landscape at navan just outside armar in northern ireland and the discovery of the two big hilltop settlements horiz fort and navanfort which date from 1100 bc to 94 bc have prompted speculation that these could be two of the palaces featured in the toin so according to these stories there was this ancient kingship place called owen maka yes it was ruled over by king connor who had this hero called cullen yes and ruled all of what is now ulster basically and cullen went around killing virtually everybody he could yes this collection of stories the toin demonstrates that the kind of cultural background of the people that lived here it's the story of a gigantic cattle raid from connaught by the followers of queen maeve which is rather good and the it's an excuse for recounting all the doings of these two heroes and the the ultimate victory of the of the ulsterman centered around this one place it's been like that's right camelot or troy yes except that camelot uh never really existed whereas owen macha as the as the royal as possibly also the religious capital of ulster very definitely did and that's the fascinating thing about this collection of stories unlike something like homer's odyssey and so on it's much more tied in to the existing landscape we can go and try and trace the various places that are mentioned in it so all this area around here is the uh the territory of owen macha that's right well this weekend should provide a great opportunity to explore some of the references in the toy but is it realistic to try and find a palace site in just three days the time team's approach will be simply to concentrate on the archaeology that's there to look for features that might produce evidence of new settlements but even if not we'll fill in some of the gaps and tell us more about what was happening in this enormous ritual landscape i was just looking at these two photographs over over here and there's something quite interesting showing up on these there's navin yes it shows up on there quite well there's hockey's fort but further west can you see that circular field pattern there just there with a dark line coming out which might be a continuation of a circular enclosure a bit like hockey's four you see there's a dark line coming out coming around there i was looking at this other photograph the same area that's a lower level it is yeah it's a lot clearer now you can see quite dramatically there okay gosh yes and you can see that it's you can see the shadows cast for the trees there from the low sun so that looks if that might be a bank in the field they're casting a shadow that way there is this reference to three three hills in the twine so maybe yes everyone's sort of thinking that the third one's creve ro in the middle maybe it's further out there the geophysics team will no doubt be delighted if we've got yet another site for them to deal with this weekend in addition to surveying our field at creve rowe they've been asked by chris lynn to do some work around hovey's fort in the hope that we can learn more about some possible ditches which are showing up as crop marks and appear to be part of the defenses of the settlement and as if that wasn't enough on this photo we've got an enclosure right out here which is as far away from hockey's fort the other side of hockey's fort as hockey's fault is from navan so we've made the area twice as big as we were that's right do you know about that one well we know of it as a site but um we haven't seen any such good air photographic evidence and um certainly it's a site that uh in the sort of research that's gone on we've queried what is this yeah it's it's a place called um valley dew there's a timelocked place named near it which suggests it might have ecclesiastical connotations but um it'll be very old yeah but um tendency sort of i mean creva row is that a name that's like to have been given to this area bearing in mind the fact that the knights of the red branch turn up on the tone or is it like to be original name is it bothers me well you would like to think that the name is a survival from the time when the tales oh phil yeah this mig over you catch us at a rather exciting moment over here got a teeth bullio axe get out what neolithic axe the best it's all neolithic i told it's all new super we're we're just looking at each other here and and and chris has just said super over what sort of condition is it it's superbly ground i mean there's no evidence of the actual flaking left and there's a fairly substantial chunk missing out of the blade so i guess that's why they threw it away over the time team are clearly excited because this is an object which you just don't find every day but this stone axe comes from the neolithic period which is at least a thousand years before the late bronze age early iron age period we're interested in the era when we think connor's palaces may have existed what's more the axe was only found in the top soil here so it doesn't necessarily mean that the feature we're investigating at creve row would turn out to be neolithic in date nevertheless the time teams still feel it's a significant find why people were able to reinvest these monuments in each new age each new generation continue to re-sanctify them and do their own thing inside them and it's only logical to presume that this sacred landscape had its origin in the neolithic the other thing i mean in westies you get these huge neolithic sacred landscapes with everything we've got here yes so the story could have been celtic people moving into an earlier ritual yeah and i don't think people necessarily move in i mean you've got if you you've got a landscape that might be neolithic and bronze age which goes on being used into the iron age goes on being used until and then some patrick arrives and then patrick yeah and amar becomes the the cathedral and it's just a logical ritual progression ceremony or center yeah i'm so jealous of phil i've always wanted to find a grand slam sometimes at first i must admit i find it difficult to be quite so enthusiastic about a lump of stone like this although once it's cleaned up and victor's finished with it it's easier to appreciate that it's a valuable piece of archaeological evidence but anyway time for lunch and i'm keen to get the discussion back to palaces and the idea that literature like the toy can be useful to archaeology the tales really give you a hint of the culture the philosophy and the life that lies behind the archaeology which again the archaeology can never do i think it's difficult to treat this material you know as a documentary source you know it's certainly not history it's it's not pretending to be no but no we're looking for a settlement because it says there's a of king's palace in that book at that point i think i think that's very dangerous to try and constrain the archaeology into finding what we're specifically looking for we've just got to look at what's there and try and understand it with against with against whatever evidence we have for making sense of it yeah but nevertheless in homer when he described the ancient palace site of mycenae something like that did turn up and yeah but the problem the problem with that sort of thing is that then conditions to go and just dig up what was in homer and he smashes through all sorts of other material that he's not interested in to try and relate the the stories to the archaeology it would have been better to do the archaeology independently at the navan center which is our base for the weekend the public can see an interpretation of the archaeology discovered here so far in particular the complicated sequence of occupation which has been discovered under the mound at navan fort here you can see the evidence for a whole series of large round houses which were built one after the other these houses had large enclosures attached to the northern sides and they were approached by palisaded droveways and they seem to have extended from about 350 bc down to 94 bc could these bronze age and iron age houses have been the palaces of the kings of alster well certainly some of the fines suggest that this was an important place during this time that's the skull of a barbary ape which seems to have been brought to the site in the iron age and it must have come from the mediterranean and proves that the occupants of the site at that time were such high press stays that they were getting gifts in fact fit for a king being brought from as far away as the mediterranean lands so all of these things were excavated from here and we're digging just across this hill here at creve road phil this is ted loughran as a local farmer hey anxious to meet you i wanted to see how you're getting on really because having seen the axe i haven't been here since this morning right so well things are looking pretty good now uh see we got these noise linear features running right the way across the site that's the thing that they picked up on the jeep visit and they the fills we got two different fills we've got this nice stone-free material running along this side and then on that side of the the ditch we got quite stony phil yeah so it's that that one is resolving itself quite nicely what sort of fines have come out of this not a lot at the minute i mean we're still plenty high enough yeah and this looks lovely soil to me it's a very productive size yeah i mean this is what limestone is done yes like yeah you'll get a lot of that in this area country it's just peppered with limestone yeah it's almost as if they've gone for this area because it's got no question they would have chosen this area deliberately because of the the productive quality of the soil yeah and then originally like it would have been in the church hands and the ground that was in church hands was always well knocked off [Laughter] any road yeah come and have a look at the it's very similar actually yeah in both of our trenches here we've found evidence of what appear to be parallel ditches but at this stage it's too early to say what they might be curiously though this second trench has started producing fines associated with metal working see that's the bottom of the furnace oh what are these blooms that's good isn't it indeed but we've got no idea knowing the data it's a low except presumably it's not recent is it it's not going to be in the last couple hundred years or no i shouldn't have also yeah no in this bit with nobles so the mystery continues in our two trenches at creve row while at hoffe's fort which is the field on top of the hill in the distance we now have a new excavation underway it's to test our geophysics results these show what might be the remains of a gateway linking the fort with another contemporary monument in this landscape a bronze age sacrificial pool rather strangely named the king's stables have you got anything out of this yet you chaps anything coming out at the moment no no flints or anything like that no we have one piece of flint but it's a natural flint at the moment has come out right right so we've obviously got to go we've got it down there yeah the geophysics team have moved on and are now busy surveying the site at bali do that was spotted by stuart and they hope to have some results for us tomorrow from the air it's easy to see the c-shaped field hedge that seems to continue as an earthwork forming a possible enclosure like this is this our third palace settlement well hopefully we'll find out tomorrow but having chosen to work here as well it does mean that we're now stretched between balidou and navin over a mile away it's the end of day one and as you can see there's this vast amount of things which we could possibly do everyone seems really exhausted and a bit dispirited quite honestly i think it's something to do with the fact this is a massive site it's by far the biggest thing that time teams ever had to tackle just getting from over here to over there seems to take half the day and so it's very difficult to know what everyone else is doing and there's all these little bits of evidence which are like bits of a jigsaw that don't fit together i think i'm going to suggest pretty soon that we have a bit of a breather and think about it tomorrow morning there's this great bit in the toil that says the men of ulster were with connor in evan marco one time drinking from a big vat it could hold a hundred measures of cold black drink enough to fill all the men for the whole evening at one sitting i think i'm going to suggest that we try a bit of that cold black drink see you after the break day two and the first excitement of the day comes from our new site at bali do where the geophysics team have found clear evidence of a ditch which is following the line of the earth work first spotted by stewart so in fact basically our results are fitting in with the crop mark evidence and also completing the the circuit we think as well and and this stuff here well that's the favorite is that this mountain it is the smell you see there's quite an obvious lump there yeah as well you see the end here yeah yeah it almost looks like a plowed out barrel or something like that you know i mean i thought that was natural when we came in the field well it might be it may well be but the thing is it is situated right in the enclosure i think you see that the possibility with this is that it might be the third site in this line uh my third palace well it could be i mean even if it isn't it's another part of this complex landscape uh you know it might be contemporary navan i mean it could be it could be another fort it could be another enclosure of some sort but this looks too important to just walk away from there well it's completely unexpected i think where would we dig the trench i mean as a punter i must say i would want to have a look and see what was on that little number but you see in terms of dating it we might be better somewhere in the ditch where there's going to be stratified stuff down below and that will give us the date it was built if we could get a trench somewhere that combined the two yeah that's a possibility yeah but in a way we need the resistance done first so that we can see you know how that fits in hang on i've got one as well so if if if this turned out that this could turn out to be the the the third hill couldn't it try this so oh that's far too complicated for me oh well it's nice and colored though there's there's nothing yeah there's creve road we're digging up there's hockey's fort yeah and there's this one so maybe this is nothing and he's just called red branch because someone at some later date thought that it might be the red branch hill and those three that would actually be the hill that's the possibility there's nothing else quite like this round here you know it's not with that we've picked one of a selection the next the next sort of things are miles away so what we need now is permission the arrangement so far is just for geophysics here but how will the farmer feel about us digging a large hole in his field we've just uh geo-fizzed the field or rather chris has and as you can see we found this strange-looking ditch thing around it and also evidence of something under that little lump just behind you there and we wanted to ask you a big favor which is if we could dig an exploratory ditch somewhere that's okay no problem okay that was easy wasn't it by using a different geophysical technique called resistivity targeted on just one strip of the field the geophysics team hoped to quickly produce a more detailed picture of the archaeology underground which will help us put our trench in the best possible place robin meanwhile has gone to the archbishop's library in arma and is hoping to find the origins of some of the place names we're investigating this weekend well i see yes it's got this site of of navan basically this is 1819 isn't it yeah oh yes the ruins of uh our major were visible in noflaheti's day was spoken of by colgan and by camden who corrupts the name there is a town land near the navan hill which is yet denominated krievrow that's the earliest reference i found to it being named as such which in english letters expresses the very sound designated in the irish characters the red branch and then he goes on there is an adjoining town and called trey now that is what i think we're we're looking at uh as far as hockey's fought is concerned uh a mound which in form resembles this figure and is universally denominated the king's stables well that's interesting so they're referring to the mound as the king's stables rather than the artificial pond which we're also looking at well i suppose it is possible that a mistake could have been made by someone while drawing up a new map of this area and it would certainly explain how the sacrificial pool called the king's stables got such a peculiar name there are in fact two ritual pools in this landscape the second being loch nashard which is located here and is associated with navan fort amazingly it still survives despite the quarrying around it and it was here that four bronze horns were found in the 1790s this is a replica of one of them and although it dates to the iron age it clearly shows how sophisticated bronze working had become as you can see it's beautifully made two tapering cylinders of bronze carefully riveted together with a beautiful semi-circular curve and then this great um end piece decorated in the uh sort of celtic lot 10 style also welded onto the end of the of the of the horn which is you feel it wafer thin thin in it so it's all been beaten out into a very very thin sheet of bronze and then this beautiful pattern eaten into it using the same primitive technology we thought it would be interesting to put on a demonstration to show the kind of effort and skill that would have gone into making something like this however cormac our bronze smith has complicated matters somewhat by deciding that he'll only speak in gaelic so basically then we're making we're making this bit uh-huh so how big is this going to be yeah i'm touching so we're going to come oh it's got to be beating out quite a lot yet then yeah a lot of work a lot of work and that's been put in the in the furnace yeah what just lay it in do you work it down in amongst the embers just stick it down in amongst the ends yeah well i assume you're just saying something would that take long to heat back up again no no no no no no pretty immediate is that yeah maybe hey so there's a stopper you can stop and oh you can stop you're a local chap do you understand what he says not quite not all the time well i'm glad i'm not the only one who's in the dark about it that's for sure any road let's see you beat out a bit more of it then cormac will spend the rest of today beating the metal to the right thickness and size ready for the decoration to be added tomorrow at our original site at creve row life is not only quieter but progress is faster trench one has nearly uncovered the bottom of the ditch and has started to produce important finds i mean there's bone remains coming out we're also getting i mean very most interesting of all is this piece of pottery yeah it's it's a club rim um coarse handmade um what sort of date do you reckon well i mean conventionally we would probably put this at lead bronze edge um this is domestics well this looks like domestic debris that that's found its way into the picture yeah so i mean the material has found its way in from a settlement close by this is a reconstruction of that bit of pottery it comes from a late bronze age cooking pot but it's very different to the finds coming out of our second trench at creve road there's another piece of pottery it's just come out of this other one um that's a very thin slightly better yeah it's it's substantially later than that one unfortunately i would probably mean it well i mean it it could be averted rimworld which would mean that it's it's early medieval this bit of medieval pottery would probably have come from a pot that looked like this but it means that we now have two pots coming from parallel ditches which come from periods almost 2 000 years apart so even though we started work here first we still have a mystery on our hands at creve row however the geophysics team have extended their survey and have a theory about what might be happening this is where you're digging now these black marks are where the high readings came up and we put the trenches across there but they reckon there might be an enclosure which comes round like that and they're particularly interesting this circular structure here which is about 12 meters across and could be well either a ring ditch of a burial mound or a hot circle we could perhaps put a trench across that see if it's really there see what it is well so if um if that's necessary i'll leave you with the geophysics plot okay we can't afford scissors the workload for the geophysics team this weekend is immense while half of them have been concentrating on creve ro the rest have been hurrying to give us some resistance data for bali do we've survived the same area with the resistance and i mean the really exciting thing we seem to be getting a second ditch inside it's even clearer than yes i mean it is very clear on that so i mean if we have got two ditches that that will be really good so they've decided to put the trench at right angles to both of them so we should get both ditches well i hope they will so with more geophysics information to guide us our first trench gets underway at our new site bali do hopefully this excavation will discover not only the ditches but also dating evidence to prove that this could have been a bronze age or iron age palace site meanwhile on the next hill along at horiz fort our excavation has achieved everything it set out to do not only has it found evidence of the gateway linking of his fort with the king's stables but we've also started to find bits of late bronze age pottery this is our first [ __ ] then is it yes there's three space there oh wow that party is getting too but a thousand eleven here in bc that's the typical ship of course from here this piece comes from the rim of a pot which would have looked like this and confirms that the gateway is late bronze age in date and contemporary with hoffa's fort here we have this sort of uh coarse metal surface yeah some sort of walkway that's what we were saying earlier on and yeah i mean that looks very very good now doesn't it yes uh-huh and this with the ditch starting to terminate here and we are picking up something else in the corner here until that is removed and you got natural again on the other side yes with the possible elements of a small stakeholder post-soaking up and we haven't fully excavated there but we'll see that this year's delineating the walkway itself in the trench that's brilliant this will be great news for chris because the discovery of a gateway here in the middle ditch of his fort strengthens the idea of a connection with the sacrificial pool at the king's stables so you reckon there would have been people standing around here and lobbing stuff yeah well i think if you're going to make an offering you want to make a bit of a splash and call attention to the fact that this is what you're doing how do we know this is bronze age though chris well we know because um 20 years ago we had an opportunity to do a little trial trench just in the edge of it right and um we found bronze age sword molds uh fragments of red deer antlers masses of chopped twigs the facial part of a human skull and the four quarters of a dog which had definitely been thrown in intact and you melissa this is a little trench which is only really uh about one percent of the of the whole area of the monument uh we also got um charcoal from a little cross section through the bank around the edge of the thing all right and um that again dated to about a thousand bc so you know everything tied up very very neatly indeed it suggests the whole and the bank are being built around about and you get the same conjunction of water and fire that's right that you get at navan yeah and if uh if we're right and we've got a little exit to for his fort here leading down to this pool it really ties the fort in so now not only can victor recreate a picture of how this sacrificial pool might have looked around 1100 bc but he can also add a reconstruction of how one of the gateways could have looked to the people in the bronze age as they passed through it on their way from hoffe's fort to the king's stables at the bottom of the hill meanwhile at our new site bali do stuart is excited about a discovery he's made while surveying the existing field boundary it gets narrower at the bottom is this all stuff the farmers hiked out of the house isn't it this is really what i want you to look at before i get any further have you seen seeing on this boulder here oh cranky we've seen this very right sweeping curve coming to a right angle yeah it's mirrored by this one here and it's been broken off here it has yes how do you think about it as prehistoric rock art i mean it it is a carved stone cast isn't it i mean that's that is incredible i think i mean you're happy with it oh yes yes there's no doubt that it is a good symbol of any description you know at first glance no it doesn't remind me of anything at all that's incredible significant though chris or what does it what do we do it must be significant but um um i mean are when are we looking at a stone which is directly associated with the site yeah or is it an older stone which the builders of this happen to incorporate in it can i give you okay you see all this stone that we're standing on just here yeah it just occurs here in a suede yeah and i wondered if it's been plowed and farmers got rid of it because he's been plowing this field he's powering he's into something up here yeah something's just over there some one stone monument like a stone monument or a cave a burial mound perhaps he's just dumped it in the ditch it's a silly question stu i presume you've looked through the rest have you well this was the first thing i got to and i got so so excited about it i mean really this is the location of stuart stone and it's an indication that this could be a really ancient site but as the end of the day approaches we've yet further developments as a piece of metal is discovered in our trench here at ballydew that might be the stone wall or stone riveting isn't it i mean it looks if this might be a stone wall of a clay bank at the moment it's curved you see that yeah yeah yeah i think you can even sort of you know it goes in like that yeah can you clean that up a bit more so we can say yeah and you don't want to take anything out i want to be very very careful is that a bit more of it this is clearly a job which will have to be left till tomorrow all we have time to do now is to take a look at the latest refined geophysics results for bali do which seem to show evidence of buildings here when there seems to be almost a hexagonal shaped feature there yeah we need to do some more processing i've sort of highlighted on there for those that don't believe what we're pointing out this hexagonal shape indicates that what we're unearthing here might be a later settlement and if that's the case then i've got to hope that tomorrow we can find an iron age palace underneath a lot of features and if we were talking earlier about some sort of ecclesiastical or religious complex perhaps early christian then you know that sort of noise would probably fit with monastic enclosure or something like that actually a massive activity around even buildings changing sites things overlapping and ditches paved areas graves anything yeah i mean it's an it's another high status site in a landscape full of high status sites of different dates so yeah rather fills in this the story doesn't need to be convinced big hills i was going to save her afterwards but he does show you the irish loves finding bumps and doing things on top of them so end of day two and the finish of what's been a fantastic day still a lot to do tomorrow but everybody seems really up and only too keen to join tommy mccree for a kaylee at his house to celebrate progress so far [Music] i think we're going to be here for a few hours yet see you after the break [Music] slasher day three and while cormac prepares his furnace for a final day's bronze working out at our original site creave row they've been a few developments to catch up on firstly the news that both of the ditches are now thought to be at the same date this ditch is essentially bronze age or earlier like the one parallel to it but we got confused at one time and thought it was medieval because we were pulling out medieval fines when the dig got down to about here and the reason is because of all this black stuff what happened was that the medieval people dug a little pit or whatever and appeared to have chucked their waist stuff in here which was why we were getting medieval finds out but when we dug lower we found the bottom edge of this medieval pit and then the old ditch continued so the ditch itself is very very old and we were just confused by this little black curve here so that's that mystery solved but it now seems we have a new problem which stems from the fact that we have two sets of geophysics results one which shows two so-called linear ditches continuing to the bottom of this field and another which shows one ditch curving off around a possible settlement area a decision has to be made quickly to work out how many trenches we need to dig here to sort this out but we have disagreement in the camp i take john's point but i suppose on on a broader scale if if i was going to sort of dig this area i'd say you know you put one over with the core settlement and maybe put one over well when we know that the ditch is clearly on the machine this is descent in the gym we don't really often go what we're trying to do is save the archaeologists work one trench here on this putative settlement will solve the question the geophysics is clear we've got two ditches running across the field the only difference is the fill of the ditch at this point is different we think it's different because you've got settlement at this point yeah so why put a trench down there chris can we borrow you for a minute well if we carry on like this we won't have time to dig any trenches at all what does chris well lin i'm happy that it's the same ditches yeah and i mean there's no doubt it'll be the same up there just to get a trench across there to confirm that they were the same ditches but it's clear on the geophysics me well are you happy with that yes i'm again it's the logistics of the of the last day so at last our third trench at creve road gets underway to investigate the area geophysics believe might contain evidence of a settlement meanwhile at our new site bali do work has started to excavate the mystery metal object [Music] what's what is it what's going on some sort of a metal plate yes not sure what we got to do is we've got to clear away all the spoil around it okay and we want to see whether or not it's actually sitting on top of the stones if it's sitting on top of the stones it could be quite recent and just moved its way down but if it's actually buried in the stones that's a lot more significant for the kid then there's something quite dangerous oh wow yeah it's slow delicate work which means we'll have to wait a while before we know what this item is but meanwhile we have another find in this trench interesting yep very interesting oh wow yeah what is it do you know it looks like leg night late night yep what's uh what's league night when i sit on we don't get that round where i come from well it's a sort of a halfway house um it's almost a cold type yeah stone yeah it was used quite a bit in the early christian period yeah in ireland for bracelets and rings and that type of thing it would appear that this is and you gotta i mean it it occurs naturally round here does it uh yes right does this stuff need conserving or does it um no it says it's perfectly robust on its own yes it's okay that's good back at the navin center cormac is making good progress too he's thinned out the bronze to the right size and can now prepare to add the latent design [Music] the discovery of our broken lignite bracelet in a good stratified context means that we can now date our settlement at bali do this is a bracelet which we know would have been worn around 800 to 1200 a.d so this changes everything it looks like we've got an early christian site at balladu but i don't mind giving up the idea of a palace here if what we're finding is equally as exciting and it is because apparently it's very rare to find an early christian settlement outside of arma and even rarer to find one we can excavate because it doesn't have a church or graveyard on top of it so we must press on here and learn more about it and hurry with our second trench which is targeted at investigating the hexagonal feature discovered by geophysics meanwhile at creve row our original site we may have a bronze age settlement after all that's a bit unclear it's quite a nice line coming down because yeah we've still got the edge of this feature coming back here yeah so we've got a line coming along sort of like that a possible post pole i wonder if that might be another one another postcard in that case where the edge wave is a bit there so once again last minute excitement and a race against the clock on the final day but baka bali do our early christian site the metal object has been revealed and it's a horse spur and dates to the medieval period about 1500 to 1600 a.d it doesn't help with the dating of this site but it's nonetheless a nice find that makes a change from the usual bits of pot meanwhile our second trench of bali do is progressing nicely despite the occasional interruption a little bracelet down in the other trench um is this anything there than i before well that's what we thought that's why we came here to dig and then all of a sudden it's it's a litter side it's a it's an early christian side my friend wants to be an archaeologist and from kiera yeah could you have any ideas for the giver just to make sure you like moch look [ __ ] worms if you if you can if you can stand the worms you're okay well we could certainly do with some help because there's still lots to do phil's in a hurry to help with the recovery of the rock art because he thinks he's got to go and help carrenza with the excavation of the post holes but the latest news from creve rowe isn't good um well we have this sort of this is supposed to be where this hot circle was we have this no sign of the hot circle at all um we have this long linear feature coming through that we reckon it's a lazy bed that's where they would dig in for their taters in it yes we haven't even found any potatoes um the post holes that you were sent over to help us with as you can see they only go down an inch but what do you reckon we're a stone's riptide i think so yes yeah right and we've had no finds out apart from the well this is terrible news no palace at creve row either but on a more positive note cormac has just about finished the decorative disc it's taken two days solid hard work just to make one piece of the iron age horn so considering the time and effort that would have gone into making the complete bronze instrument it seems hard to believe that people could then have thrown it into a pond as a sacrifice [Music] this disc once it's polished up will go on display here at the center but as the end of the day approaches it's time to review the archaeology discovered this weekend beginning with our original site at creve road so all that massive debate this morning about where we should dig the trenches i think we took the wrong option we have five options and the one we took has taken us really no further forward we haven't proved there was any settlement the pottery that came the domestic potter we had that came out of that trench has come from sort of one small feature in the trench that's later than the ditch and remind me again what was in the one trench that we dug today potato trench potato it's great [Laughter] my sort of archaeology because this was one trench we had to dig it could have been evidence for connor's palace and we do have a real success here at creve row in trench one it's given us the dating evidence which tells us that these ditches are contemporary with the other major monuments in this ritual landscape and it's what you said see that dark patch just there so it was already beginning to silt up yeah it was silted up at least here and possibly because it's this lens shape it looks as if it may have been cut into the ditch when it's silted up to perhaps that sort of level and then cut into that but we got no no pottery at all out of any of the rest of this which is the same in fact as that ditch where we've had no bronze age pottery out of it so they're looking very similar except in the history of what happened to them after they were dug but i this is great for us because um this this double ditch feature could have been relatively modern yeah until until just yesterday and today yeah so keep hearing these words double ditch feature can we be a bit braver about what that might mean i mean are we talking about a road with a ditch on each side or a fortification or what i i think more likely um a sort of so-called linear earth work yeah going across the landscape and probably enclosing an area maybe separating off navin from this part of the landscape maybe going around this bogey area where king stables is it's some sort of a big feature designed to mark up divide up the landscape or enclose it or maybe even keep people out of bits of it that that's what we mean by it and it's a double ditch feature because it's got two ditches thanks to the geophysics work here we know that these double ditches stretched across this field and beyond although more work will be needed to find out where they stop this is victor's reconstruction of the double ditches based on the few other examples of this type of earth work in northern ireland originally it would have had a slight bank in between but it's likely that at creve road this has been plowed away at our second site hobby's fort the work here today has revealed more post holes which run in a line alongside the metal walkway but our work here this weekend has been an evaluation exercise and now that the gateway has been discovered a longer and fuller excavation will be planned for later in the year but what can we say about our early christian site at balidoo well our first trench here discovered the evidence for the bank and ditch which would have enclosed the settlement it also produced nice finds like this medieval spur which once would have looked like this and of course our dating evidence our lignite bracelet came from this excavation too but what about the other trench dug here today why didn't we dig this middle bit well because the gfiz boys they saw something else so we thought we'd home in on that yeah and it appeared to be a hexagonal sort of building and what we did was we just put a trench across and we've got part of the wall here but the interesting feature of this is that there's a lot of occupation soil um just on the on the outside of it and from this we got a blue glass bead this this this the bead it's not wonderful it kind of beats things like little bits of pottery doesn't it you suddenly get an impression of a real human being wearing something that's locally made again is it again six well 600 deer and about 900 thereabouts ties in well with the lignite so how would you describe what we've found well i i think you found um what seems to be the the edge of a very large and very significant uh early christian period running into the medieval period site i mean it's 110 meters in diameter and i mean that is absolutely enormous compared to the uh the usual ring force of the period which are sort of 30 to 40 meters so i mean it is a site of of um you know immense prestige so it could be a palace but it certainly doesn't belong to connor you know certainly no it doesn't belong to conor although i'm sure that tales about conor were current and were told in a place like this whether it was ecclesiastical or secular at this time the settlement we found evidence for could of course be secular but given its position in an area of religious significance we feel it's more likely to have been a monastic enclosure this then is victor's reconstruction based on the archaeology and geophysical evidence informed by a knowledge of other sites of this date of course there's still masses of work to be done here as there is all across this huge ritual landscape i for one would love to know what's under the mound in this field and i'm sure stuart and victor would like to know where the rock carving originated from victor's tried to make some sense of it by interpreting it as a deer and mix made the point the future work here may still reveal a prehistoric site under the christian one so all right maybe we haven't found one of connor's palaces but you never know maybe some 11th century monk when he was writing his part of the toin saw navin mound and saw off his fort and saw some ruins here and that was the inspiration that led him to write the part of the story that said that connor had three palaces you never know

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 128,623

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, time team, tony robinson, absolute history, archaeology, celtic, celts, the celts, british history

Id: m223mTZvsGo

Length: 50min 2sec (3002 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020