The Lost Viaduct | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

time team have come to blind in south wales to solve a very big mystery to try and find the world's first railway viaduct back in 1790 when the industrial revolution came to wales the iron masters of blind ivan started building on a massive scale those blast furnaces down there casting houses quarries coal mines and this a 10 arch railway viaduct crossing the valley over there to take the coal out of the hillside to fuel the furnaces down there what makes this viaduct even more interesting on what appeared to be workers houses people were actually living underneath the arches what's even stranger is that 25 years after it was built the blind of and via ducks disappeared off the face of the earth there's no record of it having been demolished so it must be here somewhere but where we've got just three days to find out [Music] we know that our lost viaducts crossed a valley but which one this part of south wales is full of them what we do know is that blind oven from the very beginning of the industrial revolution was both home and workplace for hundreds of coal miners iron workers and their families but in a few short years what was once a rural landscape was changed forever millions of tons of spoil from the mines and iron works completely covered the land and swallowed up all evidence of the workers lives and our viaduct i can understand how you might lose something like a roman coin yes but how do you lose a complete viaduct well i think the answer is that the whole landscape has been transformed there's nothing of the original landscape here and the whole thing is buried in tip material and waste material from the industries and so they fill the valley up and and buried the the viaduct in the bottom pete when we say that we've got a viaduct what kind of railway would it have been carrying well we're talking about a primitive railway um bearing in mind that britain was the home of the evolution of the railway and so in this instance we're talking about small wagons being pulled in trains by horses nothing to do with locomotives when this was built the locomotive hadn't even been thought of why did it only last 25 years that doesn't seem economically very sound well i suppose it's a reflection of the speed that things were moving in the industrial revolution it was a revolution things were moving so fast with the mines being developed the growing scale of the ironworks that they had plans for something that they needed to use initially but 25 years later they'd moved on to other areas should be quite a duddle to find shouldn't it's pretty big yeah we've got lots of problems though i mean we don't know where the valley is to start off with what do you mean well the whole landscape has changed so much we don't know where the valley sides are but we think the valley's near to the course there yeah so that's the starting point for us we need to look more deeply into the ground there's a radar job is it well we are going to use radar but also electrical imaging a variation of the resistance yeah to try and find the valley sides initially yeah once we found the valley sides then we can start looking for the viaduct but you know it's a different sort of problems than normal isn't it we've got to find the the environment yeah and only then can we start looking through then i suspect the excavation is going to be done with a huge machine if it's a big bigger structure as we think are you confident i wouldn't say confident but there's got to be something there hasn't there and it would be fantastic if we found it and john will find it for us no problem [Laughter] with the heavy artillery arriving on site in anticipation of a big excavation and geophys trying to find the valley sides it's left to the surveying team to gather any clues from what we know to be a completely man-made landscape their first target isn't the viaduct but the row of cottages alongside the salubriously named coal tar road pretty close to the other end of the row so that's where it uses it that's where coal tar cottages are a certain amount of confidence we think this is where they are yeah coal tar row is this one here isn't it that's right just where those two people stood is more or less where we're stood there by using different techniques through david's aero transcription and me working back through all maps here we've come to a planned position for where these cottages ought to be within two or three meters this is where they ought to be david why are we chasing late 18th century houses when what we're after is an enormous viaduct well it's it's these houses that really give us our only real fix to where the viaduct is because we know that the tram road uh which led to the viaduct was coming right right along the front face of this building so if we can find this corner we should be able to find the location for where the viaduct starts and then heads out in that direction over there so what does what they've done mean about where we should be digging well it is crucial that we do actually prove the accuracy of the surveying and i think what from the look of the buildings and how close the tramway is to the front of the building that we really could do it with quite a small trench i'm keen that we go this side that that will show us the houses on that side but we get as far this way as we can to see whether level of tramway does survive on this side so what sort of size you're thinking of phil well i reckon about i don't know probably about 10b5 if this guy's accuracy is is as good as they say it is yeah about a 10b5 with with a little bit of scope for an enlargement so what are we waiting for it's almost lunch time and trench one is finally underway even though we think we're in the right place we've no way of knowing how deep the cottages are buried it could be as little as two meters or it could be as much as five rubbishy old stuff in it that's concrete see when they put that down that could have done no art no no end of arm to a row of cottages couldn't it with geophys still looking for the valley in the gorse bushes carinda and her team of diggers have started trench two on a suspicious looking raised area on the other side of the field the possible site of the lime kiln manager's house so how far do you reckon we are from the main site about 200 meters from the viaduct i think what you got corinda well we we know we're outside the house here we can see we've got a drain at the front when you say we're outside the house was all this one house well we don't know that's what we're really wanting to try and find out here because there's some evidence suggests that this might have been the site of the lime kiln manager's house in which case we'd expect it to be bigger than the rest of the cottages maybe have different sorts of fines with it and that's what we're really trying to prove up here well it's another bit of the site which we need to understand but if this was the manager's house we'd expect the house and indeed the fines to be substantially different to those down there which are just back-to-back cottages as far as i could see ah you see the ironworks houses they're always represented as the sort of houses ordinary working people would have lived in but they're really a far higher standard uh it's the ordinary workers houses we know very little about the people who lived here from the beginning to the end were just ordinary working people brick workers lime kiln workers never would have earned a great deal of money but they had to work really hard for it so this isn't just archaeology this is a blow for the workers i like this [Music] it's mid-afternoon and gf's are still plotting and puzzling over the valley sides to add to the delay it looks like trench one is covered with a layer of 1950s concrete and to make matters worse over at trench two they've uncovered what appear to be a row of three small cottages not the lime kiln manager's house but at least they've come up with the first finds of the day and i think that's a roof slate isn't it that would look yeah so we've got a cottages with a slate roof and this is presumably all 19th 20th century yes started and this window glass which is enormously thick it's very coarse isn't it the irregularity of that yeah you've got much of a view through that do you know but keep the window out i'm not the doorknob that's fantastic and that's bakelite isn't it so presumably that's fairly old yes but all from the last phase of the cottages being lived in and we've obviously got two walls in the trench here they're part of our cottage presumably do we know how it was laid out i don't know that we do do we make no not yet we're not sure which way they're orientated we don't know which is the garden we really need to dig a bigger area right it'll be nice to find some real details of the house like the half and maybe the loo and the midden in the back garden or something it would be really nice here to actually end up with a plan of the whole site of all the rogue cottages all three cottages although these lime kiln cottages were contemporary with our late 18th century viaduct they were also lived in until the 1970s which explains the modern finds but doesn't give us a clue to the position of the manager's house but a visit from a couple of locals who once lived in what was called the big house may be able to shed some light on its location or maybe not where do you think your house was to our house would be from there wasn't there said gobby around here well so lotion over there over there you said you had a big garden out here yeah the big garden in the federation my garden was you can find me right there so it would come in a line like that and the ocean no it was this i would never mind i think the thing that shows is we really need to dig and try and find the foundations of this house we will try and find it for you over the next couple of days we've got to find it you make sure you come back [Music] over in trench one our diggers hit a major problem in the search for the cottages of coal tar row we've reached the six metre limit of the digger's arm which means we can't go down any further without considerably widening the excavation [Music] phil last time i was here you said we'll dig a tiny hole with your yeah we also wanted a big hole didn't you so we decided to to do what you wanted to there was a big slab of concrete on the top that went right the way across we've gone through that and then we went into this gray stuff and we we weren't sure whether or not it was natural but look what it's got in it fragments of drain pipes and so we think that that is all tip waste there is no demolition rubble from the cottages there are no land surfaces it all lies just it's just continuous and so there's every possibility that the cottages actually are still down there so what does that mean for our viaduct well the problem with this is that if i mean we've no reason to believe that we're not on the side of the cottage if we believe stewart and david's uh surveyed and we could be a meter to out but we're no reason to believe we're not on the site but so the site could still be down there in a way our only hope is to see whether you know jeffries have been working over there can amplify that i suppose well we've actually got a nice chunky anomaly over there mick right now we haven't found the valley sides which does concern me in view of that yeah but we've got something that's really good i mean it's in the imaging it's in the radar it's about four or five meters wide but it seems to be only a meter down but it's going down five meters below that can we have a look at that well i i think we need to look at that so the next obvious step is you know if you're going to stop here we'll give you a target there well what i'm concerned about is the safety of this hole i want to get it filled in yeah even though we haven't found the cottages what this trench has revealed is just how much rubbish and spoil have been dumped over the site which means that our viaduct wherever it is could be very deep indeed it's taken them all day but at least geofizz have finally got a target that could well be our lost viaduct here the imaging you can see that really clear an anomaly i mean that is about four or five meters wide and it just looks as though it's going down and then if we look at the radar here you can see all the patterns there in exactly the same place i'm confused though because if it's a viaduct we'd expect the opposite sort of results what would you expect from a viaduct we'd normally expect a stone viaduct to give high resistance results because of the stonework this is giving low now it could be that there's water between the walls right maybe a bit wishful thinking you mean less water than there is in the rubble around the rubble around we've got a little dig it to find out what it is where is it well it's actually by the brolly in the the ranging pole over here well i think we've got to get on and bring the machine in it's a crisis really isn't it we've already dug what i think must be the largest hole we've ever dug on day one in time team and found absolutely nothing if we don't find anything there then quite frankly i don't think any of them have got the slightest clue what we can do next so keep your fingers crossed so what do we do now well this is the chunky anomaly toner we want to put a trench right across it and extend from one end to the other so i think if i just spray the line then phil can actually kill the hole we'll bring the digger in okay phil yeah take that out of the way if it goes around that way go around that way so dig on this side and spoil on that oh get me broly yeah i could get used to this at last the search for the viaduct is finally underway but it looks like our mechanical digger may be working into the night to try and find john's chunky anomaly whatever that may be it's been a disappointing day all round not finding the cottages of coal tar row and finding lime kiln cottages when we were looking for a big house but now confusion is turning to real concern as the search for our lost viaduct uncovers even more modern rubbish look at that tackle there this is getting more like civil engineering than archaeology well it's the end of day one all we've found down here so far have been oil cans and bricks and black plastic bin liners but the viaduct's got to be down here somewhere when we find it tomorrow morning join us after the break and find out beginning of day two and we're still looking for this massive 10 arch late 18th century viaduct which we can't find hiding or hair of last night we were chasing a chunky anomaly which geoff is thinking somewhere down there but since then all this heavy machinery has been ordered up and everyone's having civil engineering type meetings with very very stony faces john where's the chunky anomaly well it's there tony it's a massive pile of bricks with a big rubbish tip cut into the side of it unfortunately it's not the viaduct so what do we do now well there's been a lot of midnight oil burnt last night and we've decided that what we need is a big hole to get down to the right level but before we do that we've got to be absolutely certain that stuart and dave know that we're in the right place so i've asked him again are we in the right place we've checked and we've double checked and we've even got hold of another map which is 1880 which has got some annotations on it which actually show the entrance to which the viaduct was going which are over there which are over there so it's conf it's got more confirmation that the line of viaduct came straight out from the line of cortaro which we've already established so essentially we're just going to dig a huge hole and hope that somewhere at the bottom of it we find our viaduct yeah that's right i mean we've got extra machinery already and we've got more machinery on the way i mean it will be a really big hole and i mean you reckon we can actually dig that sort of hole in this area oh absolutely no problem at all i mean with these sort of buried landscapes you're dealing with these enormously deep levels of dumping and things and we have to have a different mindset on archaeology this is industrial archaeology on an industrial scale but it can be done i know you're going to ask me how big is the hole going to be we've been doing a little bit of calculations and we reckon like if you had a 30 by 30 and we've already been down six meters so if we have to go down say 10 meters that could be 30 by 30 by 10 that's going to be 9 000 cubic meters at a cubic meter equals one ton we're looking at about 10 000 tons of dirt it's awesome really in it do you reckon we can do that in two days well i think so i mean they got on very well with these two holes yesterday didn't they i mean it got it didn't take them very long so i feel quite confident about that so we're going to put all our resources into shifting 10 000 tonnes of bin liner and bricks and earth in two days but even if we manage it we still might not get down far enough to hit the viaduct are you nervous yeah this is what they call a high risk [Music] strategy still all this old rubbish though with the arrival of another 25-ton digger and a huge dumper truck our new trench four is about to take on epic proportions in fact i think the word trench is about to become inadequate trenches one and three are quickly absorbed into the big hole yesterday trench two at the far end of our field uncovered a row of three small cottages when in fact we were looking for the lime kiln manager's house carrenza's met up with retired miner gleithin mapstone who remembers very clearly the three small cottages and the big house so griffin you used to live here did you when the cottages were still standing not actually just over there in a little room stable road but they had realities living here you had relatives that's the steps down into the garden what we're really looking for what we're really interested here is the house that would have belonged to the lime kiln manager looking for a house that might be a bit bigger ah that would be better i remember it was a house there it was homestead yeah a large one on its own yes with a nice big garden it was larger than these three small cottages right this was the impressive the museum lad yes so it was thought it was the big house can you can you remember exactly where it was you say i had a garden in front of it today he did a nice big garden remember the garden you remember the girls i remember the house because it was a bit impressive uh just a few yards in front of us see above by there the garden here roughly yeah i just remember the lovely i think it was roses an arch of roses come to come into the garden and how long ago was this oh let me see it would be 53 54 years ago years ago yeah he was toddler so do you think if we put in a trench opened up an archaeological trench and say ran it well from about here up towards that fence we'd probably find the front of the house probably so based on gluthan's memory of the big house trench fives opened up adjacent to the fence that borders our side before the lime kiln cottage's trench is finally closed down the pottery fines are carefully examined to see if we can get accurate dating evidence and find out more about the workers who lived here looks to be fairly um i'll say cheap way right which you you probably would associate with um people living here in the cottages can you tell because i mean we just found this willow path and you can buy this new in the shops today how can you tell that it's that old the colors of the wares do change and the shapes change slightly over time you can generally pinpoint them to within a few years first glance i think we've got stuff here which it's definitely the first half of the um 19th century i mean we're probably looking at eighteen twenties eighteen thirties eighteen twenties right back into our period our mechanical diggers are quickly making what can only be described as a great big mess of our field but our big hole has been planned with engineering precision the sides will be carefully angled to avoid landslides and the spoil heap positioned to avoid the civil engineering equivalent of painting yourself into a corner as we go ever deeper there seems to be some real concern as to how deep we may have to go to find the viaduct the only way to get an accurate idea of how deep it may be buried is for bernard to laboriously survey the relative heights of the land surfaces with the original entrance to the mine workings buried somewhere inside the hillside and our main site covered in modern tipping to an unknown depth it's extremely difficult to pinpoint any land surfaces that haven't changed height over the past 200 years i think the critical thing that we need to know is the difference in height between the the top of the the blast furnace is out there where they're bringing the trucks to to offload the the iron and so on and the middle of the field that we're going to dig the big hole in other words how far down have we got to go to the viaduct with the tramway on the top right from the existing ground surface just looking at the raw numbers there's 370 here in front of the coke covers 377 up at the top of the coke ovens which is what you're talking about yeah and then if we move up to that's the 377 that's going across that football field well that's all made ground i think yes yes this is now coming into our field this is where we wrapped in coal tar cottages was 381 nearly 382 so 377 to 382 we've got about five meters if you find it's any more than that don't tell anybody and give me a ring really i'll run for the hills okay thanks i'll see you later la navan iron works is an archaeological rarity an early industrial revolution landscape that hasn't been demolished or buried deep under an inner city the aim is to secure a world heritage site listing which will put blind avon on an archaeological path with stonehenge and hadrian's wall and preserve it forever time team are going to try and recreate albeit on a tiny scale what it must have been like to work here when the furnaces were quite literally at full blast well we're going to make some uh we're going to pour iron in this place yeah for i think the first time in a hundred years so how do we make the actual iron the iron is melted in this furnace here and this furnace is is a small down scaled-down version of the furnace back there so there would have been a massive furnace in where those arches are yes that's right it's sort of that goes right to the top of the hillside and the three ingredients are fed from the top and then the iron is tapped out of the bottom and they the iron then came into this shed what were the three ingredients and there's coke there's iron ore and there's limestone and they fed from the top and where did they get those from the the materials were here that's why this place started in this place because there's plenty of iron ore on top of the hillside there's coal that's converted into coke and then there's limestone quarries around the area so is there anything i can do to help yes we need some iron more from the hills off the hillside right okay i'll see you later okay harvey and his team of expert iron makers are very experienced in casting iron by re-melting old chunks of radiator but they've never tried smelting from blind oven iron stone so until they see the results of a test casting they'll not be happy it may well be a disaster if the iron ore is of too lower grade that's assuming i can find any mick and stuart have gone off to get a better idea of the scale of tipping that's destroyed the blind athen landscape it's quite difficult now when you get into the industrial valleys to to imagine what they were like even 200 years ago i suppose in the the late 18th century when the viaduct was running all you would see will be odd little cottages yeah lots of tramways there's very little of the original land surface here at all oh this is all done isn't it you can see it all these fingers of debris pushed down the hillside and down down there you see the valley that's coming down from the pond that's one of these races where the the einstein workers were actually deliberately scouring out the valley to expose the iron stone bound the scouring of the hillside races for ironstone started way back in the early 17th century but the evidence of their industry is still plain to see john hello tony is this the kind of landscape that people would have been finding iron ore in 200 years ago oh it certainly is they've found it all over the place here and who would have been doing the collecting many of the times young girls young women what's the device oh maybe 8 10 years of age up to about 18 20 years of age what kind of hours would they have been well you could be here from sun up in the morning four o'clock in the morning maybe 10 o'clock at night near where we're standing now in 1860s as a 13 year old girl here and elizabeth jones working she's working in a bank undercutting the iron and it just falls out it weighs about three tons she's so squashed they can't even take a clothes off her they have to take her brains home in a bonnet horrible story so is there any iron ore around here now oh lots of it tons and tons of it and tell it it's dark brown and you just try picking it up it's very heavy is that coal over there well they've been cold here as well they've collected that at the same time it's not brilliant but it'll burn must have been a heck of a job getting it back down to the bottom of the hill well you're going to find that out for yourself now aren't you ah thank you very much yes i will see you fly me i'll see you later cheerio i think i might chuck it down piece by piece for harvey's test casting he's decided to make a replica of the time team logo and he's enlisted victor to carve the wooden pattern [Music] my pitiful offering of blind have an iron stone is now pounded into furnace sized chunks our miniature blast furnace is then charged with a carefully weighed out mixture of iron stone coke and limestone teamwork's the key here to keep the fire fed and the temperature constant while at the same time preparing the molds for pouring it really is amazing in here and then you want to see nothing yet wait till that iron starts pouring out of there that's so many girls absolutely amazing i mean you put this furnace in here you put people in here you put molds in here the place comes alive is what it was built for big hole is now almost five meters deep and still no sign of the viaduct [Music] back at the incident room bernard's depth figures are being radically revised we're well down and it's still not showing up oh yeah so any change of ideas so if we go back to basic yeah the the minimum level that has to be achieved at this end is at the blast top of the blast furnace yeah it can't be any longer no that blast finish is there what level is that that's 370. and at the field at the far end of the site the field into which the mine went no it can't be higher than that that's the one with the edits in the bottom that's right the mine went under that hill and that's 390. that's 390 meters so we're talking about a maximum of 20 meters that's right right assuming the worst case scenario the level for the line coming across there we've got a 20 meter yeah yeah now the field surface 382 82 there so you're talking about a maximum of 12 meters anywhere 12 meters is the worst case scenario right to get down to the blast face furnace now the significance of that is we we've already dug down to five and six meters about that's not found anything no the importance of this is that we we mustn't give up this is what we're trying to say the lines are likely to go down need for a viaduct so don't give up if it doesn't turn up at six or seven or eight you've got to keep pushing them on in there too to not give up on it right if we get to 12 or 13 meters and there's nothing then it's a different then we'll start panicking different stuff i'll go ahead and have a word with me because i that's quite a long way down yet okay i'll see you later am i mysteriously thinking that i can see it so far so good the local iron stone seems to have yielded enough molten iron for the test casting of our time team logo the base of the furnace is now full of white hot liquid and phil's got to act quickly to lance the mouth of the furnace so that the molten iron can be collected and poured here it comes yep all right that's good in there yeah that's fine there's still no guarantee that the test has worked the iron could still develop a crack in the long cooling period over at lime kiln cottages carrenza has managed to borrow a mechanical digger so that the search for the manager's house can be widened and deepened the strategy immediately pays dividends is that part of the wall down there because that's on the same alignment isn't it we're gonna have a quick look okay looks pretty solid it sounded solid when the digger hit it is it mortared in yeah and there's the flawless oh that's the brick for coming through again butting up against it oh that's fantastic that's really nice we finally got structure this is what we've been looking for we finally got it do you think we should take the trench back a bit further now while we've got the jcb i think yeah if we've got a big wall coming up through there we want to see what's on the other side what's that thing just behind you that brick vertical brick thing in the water trench is that part of a wall do you think is that in situ it looks the same sort of alignment yeah there's timber here as well look you see yeah come on that's brilliant a standing wall as well got a lot more of the build is that a door frame it could be it could be yeah we've got a lot more of the building here than we've seen this is fantastic there's excavations of a kind over at the ironworks as well where our still red hot time team logo is prized from the steaming mold it's still touch and go whether the process has worked but phil's confident that his delicate touch will do the trick oh oh i think we might have split it that's annoying [Laughter] you really thought we'd screwed it up look at that it's an absolute cracker i don't believe it oh look at that end of day two in our search for the missing viaduct we've already shifted four and a half thousand tons of this muck which means there must have been something valley sized that needed to be filled in so we're pretty confident we've found the valley that we're looking for down there we've hit some kind of gray clay floor and tomorrow we're going to get the radar boys in to see if they can come up with some more information and when we've got their results we're gonna send the digger in join us tomorrow for our final throw it's gotta be down there somewhere but in part three gia fizz comes up with the target that surprises us all and pushes our diggers to the absolute limit beginning of day three and we're still digging the biggest hole we've ever dug on time team in our search for the last 18th century railway viaduct but meanwhile down here at lime kiln cottages we've got the first real archaeology that i've seen in the three days carrenza what is all this isn't that a fantastic sight to finally see a floor yep two floors of floor there stone brick floor there and we've got walls standing to about three or four feet high in the section which is really unusual on archaeological dig normally we only get foundations we feel like we're clearing up after the blitz to be quite honest except that all these fines look to be pretty modern well that's what i thought at first and i was worried about some of them obviously are like that but david reckons some of it is a lot older is that right david are you still sticking by that yeah yeah certainly i am um i think there's more than enough stuff here to take you back into the middle of the 19th century like what oh well that for example a piece of family's best tableware one of the printed dinner plates with no fines of any sort mick is definitely worried and phil's trying to be philosophical i seem very confident with the measurements and everything well i mean you we ain't gonna we i mean we ain't gonna dig another role somewhere else not today we'll be lucky we you know all the logic says it's here yeah and there's no good reason why it can't damn it we we've only just got the bottom of the modern disturbance yeah yeah take [Laughter] you can almost walk through the house we've got so much of it left going right up across here see all the cobbles laid up beautifully regularly where we've got a stone wall standing i said three feet high carrying on round here into the corner is this bit the same house well we don't know we need to get the sort of layout sorted out but certainly we've got another room there you can see the intersection of the walls there another one here and then here we're into yet another room you really get a feeling of of walking through it like this and it's just carrying on this whole metal here john ah now that is probably came out of your house i think it was probably used as a lintel but it's got a much longer history than that it's a piece of early rail and you can see on this early railway this upright here guided the wheel yes and you can see this this plane wheel is cut into the the car start that's where it is that's all there is so that's another clue that it's another clue this is something yeah i'll give you a date um 1796 sound all right brilliant that's fantastic well that takes our story back a bit isn't it back to the earliest days of the blind oven iron works when horse-drawn trams took coal and iron across our viaduct to the blast furnaces after yesterday's successful test casting harvey and phil are today going to attempt something far more ambitious to try and make a set of iron wheels for a late 18th century tram car [Music] using a rusty old wheel as a pattern it's first covered in a fine powder then placed in a sandbox the next step is to make the sand mold and it's here where the greatest skill is required the packing of the sand is critical to avoid any air bubbles and potential disaster when the molten iron is poured removing the wheel pattern from the sand mold is a bit like making sand castles on the beach you don't know it's worked until the very last minute but our first tram wheel has come out perfectly with the big hole taking up most of the field geophys have nowhere left to survey so they've hit the road looking for one last piece of confirmatory evidence with big hole now bottoming out at six meters it's time to introduce digger cam it's just too dangerous now for us to go down there so nick the dig is learning how to be a cameraman so that he and rob can descend into the abyss and supervise the excavation until the diggers stop and it's safe for us to go down mick and rob are going to be our eyes and ears what makes me optimistic about that is it shows a variation which if it was all the same yeah i feel it's a bit suspiciously modern the geophys survey of the road is almost complete and the results are once again looking good we've done a whole transect right along the road now for about 200 meters also yeah now look if i play the results back we can see it coming along we've just seen tarmac yeah very little else going on but look at this oh this massive anomaly coming in there where's that on the ground well we're getting burner to tie it in we're at the burner you're on our spot here are you yes this is the one you wanted to pick up these four little flags here are the four corners of coal tar cottages that we set out initially from the map evidence and that point up there is the projection for this side of the viaduct and the cross up there is where we are now plotted on a map this latest evidence is more confirmation that our big hole is right on the line of the viaduct that structure that john's got them might be the entrance to the mine and the platform they build out from it onto the hillside leading to the viaduct which goes through that direction i think it's great if you don't think it's your third it's great over six meters down at the bottom of the hole mick and rob have spotted that the digger has uncovered what looks like dress stone do you think it's building stone or do you think it's just um damp in the bottom of the trench they they should they're not from the same sort of deposit as these they're quite quite different geologically not much sign of mortar on them and they don't appear to be in situ with the diggers having a tea break it's time for geophys to have one last shot at giving us a hit using radar and imaging at six meters below gives them the opportunity of penetrating the earth to an even deeper level but the accumulated water in the ground could give rise to misleading results bad weather's closed down the excavation at the lime kiln manager's house but not before it answered our original question well what we wanted to know was whether this was the house that was lived in by the manager of the lime kilns and i think this floor here holds the clue but it's too poor a floor it's not a floor that would have been part of an inside building like a living room but it's very good quality it's been beautifully laid out and our best guess at the moment is it's something like a stable so it's an inside building beautifully made and if this house had stables with it i think that's the sort of house that the manager had been living in not one of the workers so now we know the layout of the manager's house and the three nearby cottages we can offer a graphic illustration of what they may have looked like when our viaduct was in full operation [Music] with the furnace firing at 1500 degrees it's time to pour the first tram wheel not some more yeah keep on that's it [Music] oh it's not beautiful [Music] oh that was something else wasn't it we've made a wheel yeah i know this is we're making another wheeler another one and another one back from lunch and back in the hole geoff's are still processing their results so we've got to press on without them we've now only got a few hours left to find the viaduct digging a hole within a hole is a tricky and dangerous business we can only excavate down a further six meters the length of the digger's arm if we don't find it now we're never going to find it to make matters worse it started to pour with rain are we down hearted no especially when john gives us the good news i've got the the rest of the results printed out now right if we have a look how bloody just look at that top plot yeah there's you the width of your big hole yeah this is high resistance oh and that suggests stone work ah i hope massive stonework a massive stone is divided well i think that's wishful thinking but it wouldn't be nice but a big mass of something anyway well i hope so yeah well we're nearly there we're nearly there look i mean it's got to be points all around if that is real and how far down is that from where we are well i think it's within the top five meters right i don't want to say any more than that like going down five meters so this really is our last chance the time and the weather that's going to be it yeah keep your fingers crossed i've got everything crossed still not certain whether the casting has worked the red hot wheel is carefully cleaned to remove the surplus sand well you are then you're the archaeologist i see i get to do the brush joy that successfully completed the furnace is finally closed down the fire-baked clay bottom is knocked out to remove the last remnants of slag and unburnt fuel good god alive um million dollar question is now will it fit well it better let's have a look let's be bold well look at this it's rolling perfectly well it's round phil and harvey's newly cast wheel fits the tram car perfectly good for several million miles and virtually indestructible that's almost as quick as a formula one racing car the hole's so deep now that mick has to relay information back to the surface by walkie-talkie so rob's taking charge of digger cam do you think that could be your anomaly i reckon that's exactly on the spot of the radar normally so that's good news yeah yeah the problem with it is it's actually just a different layer of tip it's a mining stone mine stone and stuff so i'm just going to dig through and keep on going down [Music] according to the map evidence okay that's fair enough then whoa whoa what's that oh it's a culvert it's a culver it's a tunnel something like that we've got something we've got to call it down here i think mike never look at it just be careful yeah yeah took it steady yeah yeah we've got here oh my god it's a big culvert yeah well it looks as if it's going like that which is right which which is the line of the viaduct yeah and it's the right sort of depth isn't it i mean how far down are we talking about here i'll plummet yeah right we'll go down we're eight meters down to this level six meters down to here and we predicted about 12 for the the sort of absolutely the absolute depth that you can see yeah so that so that that could be just about right well we'll see what he says very difficult to judge how deep things are from yeah yeah i would be tell me when i'm there a little bit more that's the top of it if you do it to that that's the top of the top of it's at about five meters below where we are now within six months well that's about right isn't it if we're six meters down and then five meters down to that whatever height it is that takes us to the absolute limit of the level that we worked out at almost six meters down it's just out of reach of the digger's arm and it's far too dangerous to send an archaeologist down but we can offer a graphical representation of what we've just begun to uncover the vaulted roof was probably added to prevent spoil falling down and blocking the rail track how far along the length of the viaduct it ran we've no way of knowing but it could very well have covered the whole thing but with one last trick up our sleeves the small hole in the culvert stonework is just too tempting to ignore so we fixed a remote camera to a pole and dropped it down inside [Music] so there it is the first glimpse of the viaduct tramway for almost 200 years resplendent with stalactites and stalagmites how do we know it's the viaduct well over there in the gloom you can just see two arches the original entrances to the mine workings we've thrown everything at this we've shifted thousands of tonnes of muck we've got our digger drivers to go deeper than we've ever gone before and it's paid off but what's really struck me is how these industrial-sized landscapes can cover up not just the houses of the people who worked here but enormous structures 40 meters long by 10 meters high which reluctantly we're going to have to leave to future archaeologists so that they can get the first glimpse of those tantalising arches so there we are after three days of glorious work by everyone involved one thing we can say is that the lost viaduct of blind often is lost no longer but of course lost viaducts aren't the only thing that this area is famous for take it away my throat [Music] foreign

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 168,668

Rating: 4.8811879 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Industrial Revolution, Wales, Welsh history, Pontypool, Gwent, Blaenavon Industrial Landscape, Blaenavon, Blaenafon, Thomas Hill, West Midlands, Thomas Hopkins, Benjamin Pratt, Blaenavon Coal And Iron Company

Id: dyKVa3qMohA

Length: 49min 31sec (2971 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020