The Roman Bath House Buried In The Weeds | 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 we've come to the black down hills in somerset and i'm standing in the grounds of white staunton manor and at the bottom of these sculpted gardens and the beautiful lawns lies this muddy overgrown area and predictably this is what we're interested in because underneath that greenery lies 125 year old mystery in 1882 a series of walls along with fragments of mosaic floor and pottery and coins were discovered here and this place was designated a roman villa but recently a young archaeology student has been doing some investigating here and she reckons the records are all wrong in fact so wrong that she thinks this isn't a villa at all is she right and if so what is this place as usual time team have got just three days to find out [Music] white stoneton manor has been in the possession of just four families in the last 800 years it was during the second family's habitation the elton's in the victorian period that the ruins at the bottom of the garden were first excavated and recorded as a roman villa 25 years ago the site was classed as a scheduled monument it would be quite a coup to overthrow such long-held archaeological beliefs but that's what ex-archaeology student freya bowles believes we can do why do you think this isn't a roman villa there's just so many things which don't add up especially the site's so small and restricted and it doesn't seem to fit any orthodox plan of the typical roman villa but mick there ought to be a roman villa here shouldn't there isn't this part of the great south west area where there are lots of villains yeah he's right on the edge of the great collection of villas that you get from the cotswolds right down through somerset but i think freya's right that the site doesn't look right really what's wrong with it well it is sort of restricted and boggy and all the rest of you i was going to build a villa around here and it's a nice place to live i'd build it up on the flat platform up at the back there so what would you put down here could be a detached bath house that's a possibility part of the villa restricted it could be a temple but whatever it is we're not going to know till we start digging absolutely yeah although we know the victorians excavated a roman building here we've no idea how much of it remains the site's covered with vegetation and there are layers of tree roots and nettles to cut away it's extremely water logged so we've dug out the stream beds to lower the water level to make matters worse the ruins are a protected ancient monument this means no mechanical diggers are allowed and there are limits to trench sizes we've got some lovely rolling lawns filled but actually we're pretty constrained about where we dig aren't we right we are tony i mean the site itself is very very small and within that we've got a very very restricted amount of meters that we can actually dig bob you're in charge of making those decisions what are we allowed to dig two small trenches four by two but then on top of that we can then negotiate a little bit around the edges so what percentage of the site would that be maybe ten percent that's not much is it that is an incredibly small area we haven't got any room to make mistakes this is the scheduled area and this is what 10 of it looks like it's pretty small but we can divide it however we like and because the site's been excavated before we're in the unusual position of having plans of the ruins to help us we've got this ordnance survey map from 1886 and a more recent plan done by freyja if they're accurate then deciding where to put our trenches should be a breeze [Music] to help us understand the function of the roman remains stewart's looking for clues in the grounds and surrounding landscape [Music] but before the ruins are even clearer of vegetation phil's hit something solid oh look at that that's fabulous nice wall in it first time i've ever excavated with a rake but never mind [Laughter] now these must be the roman wars missing you've got a wall coming along there sweeping along there and returning there if this is a sample of what we got to look forward to we're in business it's a relief to know the ruins haven't crumbled away and after just three hours we've revealed these walls they match our floor plans so we can get the first trench in we want to open up that area over there over there so how far do you want to go well almost as far as the wall i reckon so what from about here okay then it goes up this hollow up the middle look so it's going to come up here that's it as far as where bridgette is yeah we've got a wall that side and a wall outside so we want all that hollow area cleared out we're putting the first trench in the northeast corner of the site it'll include what we think is the outer wall of the building yeah it's gonna have to go on that angle trench one only takes up a third of our digging allowance so we've still got room for more excavations in the incident room guys investigating what kind of building the ruins could be guy can we actually knock on the head the original idea that this place was a villain well i've been looking at some plans and drawings of villas in this book and here comparing them with our white staunton site now if you look at here these two villas which are in the area they're actually quite small villas but you can see that white staunton is only a tiny part of that by the same scale so it can't be a complete roman villa so maybe there's another villain nearby or maybe it's associated with a villa some way off that we don't know about okay so if it's not a villain what is it well the other idea that has been that it could be a temple and i've been comparing it with some temple plans as well now this is the typical sort of romano british temple it's a concentric square based on this idea of the central cellar where you do the worshiping which is a sort of tower and an ambulatory around the outside but these two have got the same as has ours yeah but the problem is you can be misled by the plan that could be a kind of internal garden and we've got all these other niches and things around here that make it look far more like a bath house okay so it could be a villa but probably not could be a temple but probably not but it may be a bath house that's impossible our building is located in the south west an area of roman britain that experienced great prosperity in the third and fourth century influenced by classical roman buildings of the first century the elite poured their wealth into creating their own grand villas and countryside retreats i wonder how the romans who lived here would have seen the world around them quite frankly if they've been living down to the bottom of that valley i don't think they'll see them very much would it have been the back of beyond here what we're very much on the fringes of known roman britain here in many ways to the north west we've got bath and siren sister major roman centers but once you get to to weinstein you sort of literally on the edge of the known and the unknown bit of a frontier it is actually yeah you're right the main concentration of roman villas in the southwest of england is spread around the major roman roads the foss way but its closest tributary is still six kilometers from white staunton where would the nearest villas have been nearest we know about is just down here at wayford which is about three kilometers away from this site one long way to go to borrow a cup of honey [Music] to help us understand the site mix called in one of the leading villa experts in the country david neal so we've got an isolated building down there the nearest other villas three kilometers away and the nearest roman road six kilometers away this thing wouldn't have existed in isolation would it it definitely would have had would have been associated with a dwelling house of some kind so where's where that is of course that's what we want to find out but a possibility is in the area of the present house right you had to look around what do you what do you reckon yeah i mean certainly this is a possible candidate i can't disagree with that i'm slightly nervous if it's it's geography it's a very narrow little valley here but if you look up on those slopes up there there are some earthworks up there yeah and there are some slopes just to the north of where you dig in at the moment right which you've got some earth works on as well so i think we have to bear in mind there might be other possibilities but but here's a good place to start looking but we should wait for the gf is here but there's always a possibility we were standing on it in fact you'd be nice [Music] now we've got a villa to find our three days just got busier so john wastes no time getting geophysics started on the grounds around the manor house over the years the past owners of white staunton manor have collected a vast range of finds from the ruins and i'm hoping they'll tell us something about the building and the people who lived in it michael this is such a beautiful place how long have you been here i came here in 1946 my father bought it when he came out of the raf and i came here as a teenager and this is the stuff that your family found on the side i'm a little bit disappointed i have to say i was expecting to find brooches and stuff it's good roman stuff i mean there's a nice complete roman central heating flue tile some bits of several others and a roman roof tile we've also got some bits of local roman pottery and a nice piece of upper signing oh is that like the concrete that's right a good solid kitchen floor type material or also in bath houses we've also got this lovely roman column and that's an absolutely classic example of a roman column made of limestone from the cotswold area so i suppose perhaps our owner imported it down here this stuff is in much better nick isn't it this is the material from the original excavations it's now stored in the somerset county museum in taunton and yeah it's lovely big well-preserved shirts isn't it so what does it tell us about the people who lived here well it's a bit confusing really we've got material from all over we have pottery from france which we might expect to be imported but we also have a piece from well made near peterborough we have material made on the hampshire surrey borders wherein pool harbor endorse it as well as much more local ways would you expect to find such a wide variety of things on the site like this on a site in somerset no i wouldn't this is much closer to the material i would normally expect to find it's pretty monochrome isn't it it certainly is all coarse cooking ware vessels really so could this be someone who was pretty wealthy and so was able to import a lot of different things well that's one possible interpretation and certainly people could get pottery from all over at the place but to my mind it's a bit like a collection of representative shirts you know good choice ones and i was my eyes were immediately caught by this because it's made near where i live in the east midlands and it is fairly widespread but not all the way over here why would such a disparate range of pottery be used in one building it's baffling but things are getting even more confusing in the ruins in trench one phil's come down onto a floor but david doesn't think it's roman look you see this stuff here this i mean it looks like one it looks like sort of a concrete yeah this is concrete isn't it it's not the usual to operate what we call opposite iron so how do you know it's not over signaling them well it doesn't seem to be enough crosstalling it seems to be an aggregate of of um lime mortar sand and concrete very little tiny bits of brick because it's usually that sort of pinky color that's right this is very pinky as you can see it's much more you know like all right sandy concrete it's looking very wet david yes there seems to be a culvert or stream coming through the other side of this wall and we assume that it's running underneath at this point i find it difficult to imagine why the romans should build a bath suite over a stream like this this site's turning into a puzzle we know it's not a villa but it's not an obvious shape for anything else the finds come from all over the country and now it looks like the floor isn't even roman with such conflicting evidence we can't take anything at face value in fact the only reason we believed the building's roman is because of the records kept by charles isaac elton who owned the manor house when the ruins were excavated in 1882 in his account he describes finding beautiful mosaics columns and solid roman foundations there's no mention of any of the inconsistencies we've found is it possible he misinterpreted what he saw as digging continues it's looking more and more likely yeah that's right by the foundation and that ain't roman no that's not even roman glazed it is medieval it's a joke medieval pottery made 600 years after the romans left britain stuffed underneath it it's getting more and more perplexing isn't it it now seems it's not a villa it's not a temple phil doesn't think it's a bath house so what on earth is it well we look at the walls some of the stone looks good enough to be roman but it's not symmetrical it's all a bit wonky no broman would build a wall like that but it's still genuine romantic what's going on nick well there's roman material in it so clearly there must be a roman structure somewhere in this vicinity but it looks as if this is an enhanced structure or even worse it might be a folly just using roman materials so it's not roman at all he's beginning to look like that isn't it we've come all this way to dig a roman villa and it's just a folly or something it's just got roman material in it's been made into a garden feature how do we find out what's going on well i think we've got to carry on digging because the roman structure might be underneath here we've also got to look in the immediate vicinity for a likely other roman villa site that they might have pillaged so is part of this building fake is it all fake if it is how come we've got all these apparently authentic finds we've no idea let's hope we find out tomorrow yesterday morning we came to white staunton in somerset to investigate a scheduled roman villa excavated in 1882 yesterday afternoon we determined that the stones of the ruin were roman but the romans hadn't put them there it looked like we'd come all this way to discover the whole site was built by victorians as a garden folly but this morning underneath what we thought was victorian concrete there's yet another twist in the tail phil what have we got well we've got the whole trench and it's absolutely covered in the most enormous slabs of stone which we think actually might be roman hang on how can these slabs be roman david when yesterday afternoon you said that that pinkish stuff there wasn't roman but was probably modern i was wrong oh fair enough and i'm pretty certain that we are looking at the genuine roman floor the opposing line and floor with these huge blocks okay phil they may be roman blocks but how can we prove that the romans put them here the answer really lies down there tony that big pool of water if we can show that the layers carry on down then that's a fairly good bet that it's going to be roman if it just is a raft of big stones then it could still be victorian well while david and phil are trying to solve that little problem bridgette's open a vast trench over here bridgette that's a heck of a trench you're putting in here why have you upped it up we're we've opened it up to find any conclusive evidence that the romans were here and if they were here what were they doing here we've got phil's trench number one here in orange yeah we've now moved and put in a trench over this area here which is based on freya's plan frey are you getting your hands dirty i sure am were you a bit disappointed yesterday when you discover that we got a victorian folly i guess i was slightly disappointed but we've agreed with your theory that this isn't a roman pillar oh absolutely that was the main thing if you could dig anywhere on this site in the best of all possible worlds where would you do for me the important part would be this center here if we establish whether this is actually a bath or part of a room we might have further clues to the function of the actual building bridgette is there any reason why we shouldn't explore down there i think it's a pretty damn good idea that right open that in here because i certainly don't want to get in a boggy mess the boggy area is all yours great [Music] freya's muddy hole will have to wait because of our restricted digging allowance we're being extremely picky about where we put our trenches at the moment we're concentrating on trying to find roman foundations in phil's trench and getting started on bridget's trench that extends from the center of the site out towards its eastern edge taking in this semi-circular feature although we now think the floor is roman we still have to decipher what the victorians were doing building on top of it but whatever's going on we believe the ruins are associated with a nearby villa and geophysics spent yesterday hunting for it around the manor house to get quite a big area done around these gardens aren't you yeah well i mean we've done all the lawned areas now yeah um this side of the house and extending right beyond the other side and look there's a sort of an arrangement of things we could go for yeah um we've got this sort of anomaly here and that actually goes here it is with this patch mark well yeah i noticed this i just assumed it was a garden wall or something coming through i think we ought to dig it just to see but yeah look at this yeah there's a huge early water over there this big rectangular block what does that suggest to you that big area solid floor whether it's garden whether it's earlier structure but given its sort of rectilinear shape i think it's worth investigating as well but my best responses are actually on the far side the big terrorists at the back here i'd have said that's our best bet right to fill a walls presumably we're not talking about something very big to sort any of those out are we three by one in each case well let's let's do them all then because that's not a big job is it strip the turf off another look trenches three four and five go in on the lawns around the manor house back in the ruins the stream running underneath trench one is slowing down the excavation but at last phil and david can see through to the floor's foundations they're definitely roman and that's not all well i think we've got the bottom of the of this stone column hit this pier here at this point phil you've got a bottom on that shirt yes because look we've got that piece of yeah box tile actually uses packing underneath it well we've got the bottom of the of this slab on this side as well so we've got this so we've got this like a flue running through here haven't we well you so call it a flu does that mean to say you think it is a high five i think it is a shallow one very shallow one but bearing in mind the amount of water around perhaps that's all they felt they could cope with so what you're suggesting then is that wherever you get four slabs like this meeting together like there and there that's right you've actually got a stone pillar underneath some people separate in a series of floats absolutely so i'm quite happy to call it a hypercoarse extraordinary situation bearing in mind all this water but presumably the water management in those days was much much better so it's drier a hypercoast is an under floor heating system used widely by the romans the floor in trench one is resting on a series of pillars convection currents draw the warm air from a fire around these pillars and up through flues built into the walls of a room making it warm [Music] a hyper course wouldn't work with a stream running through it but stuart's convinced that although the area is wet and boggy today it was once dry stuart our roman building is in the lowest point of the whole site so it would always have been filling up with water surely well although it's the lowest point now it's not necessarily going to be in the lowest point during the roman period because of all the changes that have potentially taken place in this valley the garden landscaping the creation of the later ponds and so on in the roman period it's possible the springs were up here on this side and actually flowing that direction although we're looking now that the the position of the building exciting might have been influenced by the water we shouldn't think that way it might not have influenced the layout of that structure at all so it looks like the romans who built the ruins weren't barmy after all in fact roman engineering was very advanced and we've decided to put it to the test by making our own working model of the hypercoast what are we actually doing well we are going to it's a small scale model it's uh of a typical course but we're not we're not trying to replicate a roman structure because we're using modern materials that's right select the most appropriate materials the bricks the tiles and so on to suit but the principles are the same hot air flow and rising going through underneath the suspended floor heating the floor and then rising through the flues which would have been embedded in the walls hopefully this will show how we create heat how we use it and how we get a warm floor right that's the objective well he's a bold experiment but yeah so let's see how we get on too yes we've dug a meter deep hole under laying the bricks and tiles for the furnace and pillars a roman hypercourse could take months to build and in two days we don't have time to build a whole room so we're aiming for a hot floor the owner of the manor house has been incredibly relaxed as we've dug up chunks of his grounds and i've just found out why michael i hadn't realized that you were selling the property yes it's sad isn't it it's going to be a wrench isn't it yes i've been here about 60 years he's worked a number on you though hasn't he still he certainly has but what a number wonderful you bought what you thought was going to be a nice quiet place the lawns ripped up and what you thought was a roman villa turned out to have a victorian folly stuck on it it does and we were scared to death the first day thinking it might just be that and it turned out to be the most wonderful roman ruin so how do you feel about it now it's just it's really quite emotional imagine somebody decided seventeen hundred years ago that white staunton was the place to live and we've just made the same decision seventeen hundred years later it's a quite a long-term connection isn't it despite the owners generosity with their gardens we've drawn a blank on the front lawns we've abandoned trench three because the features geophysics identified turned out to be geological the parched mark in trench four turned up yet more victoriana this time a garden wall trench five is our last hope of turning up a villa in the grounds around the manor house but nothing roman's turned up yet we've been far more successful with our trenches in the ruins we've got terrific range of fines here but they really help us sort out what's going on on the site straight answer is no in anything they've complicated it hugely well we know we've got a genuine roman building there no doubt about that the trouble is that a lot of what we found above that and around it doesn't seem to go with it we've got all these lovely hyper cost heating tiles yeah but the problem straight away is if you see the keying on here for securing them to the walls yeah they're all different when you build a roman building you hire a tile manufacturer to come along he will build a kill fairly nearby and produce a batch of tiles so you get a uniform collection very similar sort of thing the fabrics are different as well so i don't believe these have all come from this one building so it's very odd we clearly there is a roman site there and some of this must relate to that and clearly there's been a later folly built and some of this relates to that but for the roman site itself it's still not making a lot of sense no no it's just got curiouser and curiouser [Music] to try to unravel all the contradictions guys teamed up with buildings historian jonathan foyle and together they're delving into the records of the 1882 excavation hi hi there what do we know about these 19th century excavations on the site we have got charles elton's original account of the excavations right now he does describe an atrium or inner court he says which was probably roofed in against the inclement weather of the land of clouds and rain seems to be precious little documentation an awful lot of character doesn't that personality coming out of this and he didn't even do the excavations oh who did then well i believe it was a fella called major davis ah the guy who cleared the baths at roman bath yeah he was a bit dodgy wasn't he well probably not by the standards of his day but he didn't seem to keep particular records and he doesn't seem to have kept any records at all of the excavation how much of elton's report is fact it's hard to say but we do know that authentic roman materials from all over the country have been used within the ruins to create romanesque building features so it seems likely that elton used finds from far and wide to dress up the ruins and slap the whole pick and mix together with telltale victorian concrete this is actually easy to sort out the victorian stuff that's going on here it's a problem but you just got to be aware of it you can't take anything at face value because these tiles they are real roman toils except in that they're stuck together with victorian mortar now we understand how to interpret the ruins we're clearing away the mud from the walls to find out which of them were laid down by victorians and which by romans [Music] throughout the afternoon bridget's trench has been coughing up lots of loose tesserai they're roman but we can't be sure who put them there but the good news is that with most of the mud gone the floor plan is really coming through and we should be getting closer to working out what the building is now if we could just find a villa matt how are you getting on here well all the fines from this trench so far i've been 18th to 19th century domestic stuff so you've only got about another 1500 years to go and you're yeah a while to go we do have this this flinch feature going across here though um you can see that compacted flint's there and then this side's just blank but no evidence for it being roman yeah so it looks like there are no roman features in the lawns around the manor house except of course for the hyper cost we've been building with the pillars in place the floor's going on so this is it not quite very close though just the business and then that's right that's where we light the fire can you see the pillars oh wow look oh that's exactly what we've been finding down the bottom that's right that is brilliant we've enjoyed making it so that stockholm would be enough to fire up one villa directly well or several rooms several rooms i'm sending up a smoke signal the romans would have taken days to heat a room from cold so to give us a chance of warming the 12 centimeter thick concrete floor we'll be stoking our hyper costs fire overnight before we can call it a day we need to find out if trench two has cleared up any of the confusion in the ruins david have we got any roman walls that go with those good roman floors over there oh definitely for example here here we've got the remains of a roma wall but of course these foundations have been used and all the victorian walls have been built directly on top but there's certainly a genuine wall running through it's running through here and then turning and what is more we've got the remains of a tesla depayment here the the tests right here and the remains suit running oh yeah i can see a little road that's right five of them there and these are examples of the test drive are cubes of the mosaic so we've got white blue and red ones in there and quite a fine mosaic they're quite small chestery okay we now know that it's genuinely roman but how do we find out what sort of building it is well i think the key lies in this area behind you we need to understand exactly what this is and to follow these walls that seem to be running through here yeah you can see the wall continuing through and how they relate to this morass behind you possibly with mosaic on the floor originally yes so the key to understanding this whole site tomorrow lies in here but are we going to be able to dig enough trenches to find out exactly what it is will we be able to stop the water coming in you can see the state i'm in already will the weather hold join us after the break beginning of day three here at white staunton in somerset and at last we've proved we've got a roman building here and this morning our archaeologists came up with some really intriguing finds what have you got david well we've got this wall running through but associated with that wall with large numbers of tests shy under this water which are running through underneath this mud we clearly these tesla are paving a fraud something at the high status and we need to establish exactly what it is okay we know it's high status and we're sure it's not a villa so what is it we've got about seven and a half hours left to find out [Music] the key to the ruins may be under the mud but the roman villa we believe it's associated with doesn't seem to be buried anywhere we've drawn a complete blank digging around the house and with less than a day left the pressure to come up with a new plan is mounting these are water pipes in the car park oh right so you've carried on looking in the areas around have you yeah i mean we've gone beyond the lawns now stewart's given us two or three fields to look at and to be honest we're not finding a lot no no i feel quite concerned about this because we seem to be looking for the context of this in the air around and not actually all we've done isn't it all we've i feel any roman villa if there was one would have been part of this structure connected to it or very close by that's my feeling we've done a lot of work in the scheduled area and we've done a lot of work in the surroundings looking for a contemporary building what we haven't done is look immediately adjacent outside the scheduled area yeah but there's not a lot we can do for you well i appreciate that john cause i mean there's a lot of trees all around this site and you won't be able to get under there will you yeah but there's no reason why we couldn't dig a trench and just see if wall's heading off in that direction no absolutely and that's the only way we're going to find out doesn't it to find out if our ruins are attached to a villa building we're putting in trench six adjacent to the ruins this ground falls outside the scheduled area so there are no restrictions to digging i've been doing some digging of my own i've got a surprise for mick i've got something for you yeah what's that do you remember a day 28 years ago when you were a young dark-haired mick aston county archaeologist for somerset and you wrote this letter to the ancient monuments inspectorate which says there's this site that i would like you to visit and examine as a matter of urgency in order to have it listed you were responsible for having this site listed you said you're just ancient monument yep really yeah do you not remember coming here uh i do remember coming here because i think i've got a slide at home which is very dark under the trees with lots of moss and so on so i know that i came here but no i mean i don't remember writing that do you think when you first came here you would have realized quite how complicated the archaeology was oh no no i mean i would have just assumed what we were looking at was roman so this whole site might have completely disappeared if it hadn't been for this man and this letter and he can't even remember it there's been a lot of wine flowed since then tone both david and freya believe we'll only understand what the building is if we excavate the square feature in the centre of the ruins so phil's leaving the hyper cost in trench one and starting trench seven over here we appear to be pretty much on the limit what we can't afford is a big area strip because of our limited digging allowance this is going to have to be our final trench within the ruins so the success of our entire excavation depends on us finding some answers under the mud this site has been completely transformed since we first got here and it's incredibly difficult to work in these duck boards are really really like ice and the actual mud is really claggy it's hard to see how you can find any archaeology at all in this kind of stuff if there's anything that would put you off working as an archaeologist it would be spending a few hours here even so phil you have managed to find a few things this morning we have actually eaten some very small things this is our real star find it actually tells us that the building had painted walls what is this it's a piece of painted wall plaster you can imagine just how vivid the building would have been with walls like that uh it isn't one of the biggest fights you've ever had though is it nobody is so informative and of course look we've got some more tesserae as well so this is a good sight it is absolutely a cracking sight tony phil's piece of wall plaster is even more informative than he realizes it's exactly the same color as the walls that charles elton reported finding in the 1882 excavation but how reliable is his account i've not seen either of you two on site this morning have you managed to get anywhere on the block and discover this place i found out quite a bit do you know what he looked like yeah tracked down this picture of him done it eight years no i did 1887 this was published just a few years after the place was excavated quite a fellow isn't he isn't he just what sort of blood was he well he was a lawyer he was an antiquary he was an mp would you have known much about archaeology definitely was certainly one of his major interests he knew his classical sources like the back of his hand he knew latin and greek he was an extraordinarily well-read man very highly educated but if he knew about classics and archaeology and stuff how come when he describes this ruin he got it all so awry well i've been going through his description carefully and it may yet match the site it doesn't seem to at first jonathan's drawn a floor plan based on elton's description he mentions there is an atrium he says that there are the remains of columns found in there there's an arch on the back of it as he sees it which leads into three rooms one of which has an apse that he thinks may be a sacrament a place of domestic worship he's much vaguer about the areas to the west that he says our kitchen and furnace and then the hot baths which are way over probably double the area of the present site we're on so we've got freya's plan here which is just this that's just the eastern half of the site we're digging here but jonathan believes that elton's describing rooms that extend over here if that's correct then our ruins could form part of a larger villa almost twice the size of our present site trench six has exposed yet more victorian garden features so with elton's account as our guide we open up trench eight to the west of the scheduled area [Music] within the ruins most of the mud's gone so it's the moment of truth for trench seven david time's really getting on now are we anywhere near working out what this building actually is well i'm absolutely certain it's a bath house why do you say it's a bath house well mainly because you've got the range of heated rooms over there and you've got a an ambulatory round here and what is really exciting is that this ambulatory is surrounding a very large plunge bath or swimming pool so where's the pool is it is does it start it's where this puddle is there these this is the corner yeah these are in fact the steps going down into it and the floor of the pool which is about nine by five meters um was testated but at last you can't see many of them they're still there there so that explains why all these tests are over on the floor absolutely and there's so many of them and what is more we can find that they are running they're running through and we're finding them running through here and here's some more of this opportunity here the test right here this is particularly unusual there are only about six examples of plunge bars of this size in britain it's very important building indeed it's really very exciting such a the swimming pool in our bath house is large measuring nine by five meters wide and an estimated half a metre deep the presence of mosaics running along its edge dated to the third or fourth century now we've got the central piece of the puzzle the rest of the sights falling into place the semi-circular feature bridget's been excavating in trench two is actually a cold plunge pool the romans would use it to cool off in after getting sweaty in the steam room heated by the hypercoast still eluding us is the location of the villa we believe the bath house is attached to rachel and stuart have found something in trench eight have you found the villa no i'm fine the villa we've got a modern pipe trench but we think we're probably on the uh on the victorian spoil heaps from the original excavations how do you know that well look phil we've got this lot bits of roman tile again opus signing concrete wall plaster and a victorian button off of a chap with no evidence of the buildings elton described is it possible that the bath house is a stand-alone structure well if it's a villa standard bath house then where's the villa well i don't think it's here we've looked all around this area and the places they could be a villa we found absolutely nothing at all there are instances of quite elaborate remote bath houses with no living accommodation attached like that place whitley grange in shropshire and there is no villa to go with that no one's ever found it no but you do have some fairly large uh rooms associated with that building yeah but there's still no house is there well no but that doesn't mean to say there isn't a house fairly close by the areas it can be close by are actually quite restricted here because it's it's a very steep valley and if you want access to it you've got to make it practical for yourself but there's another matter here as well david is the if you look in the landscape round about the records there's lots of evidence of iron working in this area there's an industry going on here in the roma period i would suggest that what you've got is a detached building here which services a wider community the number of villas and facilities of this state of this status which are associated with industrial activity in britain can be recorded on the fingers of one hand but i still maintain that associated with a building like this has to be a dwelling house has to be facilities for eating cooking but that's not necessarily a villa though is it well nevertheless just a facility on the site still need to find it but where is there left to look we've dug in the lawns behind the house and next to the house we've walked the surrounding hillsides and turned up nothing one place we haven't looked is the bumpy field next to the manor house both mick and stuart think it's full of garden terracing but john's determined to prove them wrong could it really contain the villa we don't have much time left to find out the clock's also ticking on our hyper-cost experiment it's been burning through the night and has just a few more hours to go before we test its floor what do you want then i know i've had to drag you out of the trenches but i promise you it's worth it you know that we were blaming charles isaac elton the chap who found this for turning it into a victorian folly this guy yes yeah he's not guilty after all he spent a fortune of money on books that was really all he was interested in the one thing he wasn't interested in was the house in its garden he let the whole thing get run down that really helps me because i've never been able to understand why this man who was a noted antiquarian would mess up the roman building absolutely and i've had that problem from the outset working through the family records what i find out is that when he died his half brother inherited the place found it all run down spent a fortune on the house and gardens but to do that he had to sell off most of the farmland to do it so he was busy pouring money into sorting the house out turning the garden into the nice dinky place it is today it must have been him who was responsible for making the folly so when do you think he did this between 1900 and about 1920. so it's not a victorian folly after all it's an edwardian one if guy's theory is correct and it was frederick elton who modified the ruins it's likely that along with the roman material he found on the site he used charles elton's extensive collection of roman artifacts to create the folly [Music] this would explain why such a strange assortment of finds has come out of the ruins it's quarter to four and just when i thought i'd got everything done and dusted down there suddenly there's this frenzy of activity up here john why are we digging about 70 meters away from where our bath is uh something to do with geophysics what to do with your physique look you know we're looking for the villa that goes with the bath house we'll look at these results could that be a massive roman building just on this slope here it's a fantastic position for a villa look at the view it's got the view that way it's close to the bathhouse swimming pool whatever they're calling it it could be a building we've got to go for it mick won't mind sure about that well i hope oh god having turned up three victorian garden walls in the last three days john's making a last attempt to redeem himself and over in the orchard it's finally time to test our roman hypocaust so has this worked bob oh yes yes you've got a nice hot floor there when you say hot ho hot cool i think we're about to find out give it a try that's the equivalent of dipping the toe in phil i don't want to burn myself have you been on hot towels before looking must be alright there's no smoke coming off your socks oh yeah that's good and it's just yeah it isn't it i want one for the winter okay it's really quite warm and it is it is have you actually learned anything from this if i was asked to do this again i'd have the confidence to to certainly make it bigger i think that that size furnace could do a hyper course probably four times the area there's possibly six it's such an effective form of heating that a fire the size of ours could warm a floor this big but things aren't so hot up on the hillside uh that's not looking very villa-like no no we've got the machine in six inches of the topsoil if that and straight down onto this this natural chair so uh yep it's all geological well we had to look at it yeah yeah i mean we couldn't ignore the possibility that it might have been a structure couldn't walk away absolutely it's time to walk away now though we believe there is a villa around here but it must be hidden somewhere we couldn't dig a possible location is under the manor house however even if it fitted entirely underneath it we'd expect to have discovered something roman in the trenches we opened in the grounds it could also be in the churchyard or under the garden pond or even in the woodland at the bottom of the garden we have solved the mystery of the ruins proving that the supposed roman villa is in fact a bath house right i want a bath what would i do well you have to get undressed in the room over there well this this one here go in there okay so i come off i come out of that's right yeah and then you come into the hot room with presumably water probably gushing out of cutting up that's okay the hot room is where that's further that's where the hypercourse is okay in here sweating when you cool down a bit into the tepid room back to here then you go into take a cold plunge bath where bridgette is right up there yeah and if you were feeling really brave yeah you'd come through towards where i'm standing yeah and have a swim in this cold hoop go down those steps but i'm not going to go down there i don't want to mess up the archaeology that's right and i could swim and you could swim here and you could then you could then come through and if you're feeling a bit tired right now and then if you're really tired after falling in the mud you could sit on a bench that ran along the wall there where kerry is now it's a lovely mosaic down there last we've got something in town very nice at test 80 pavement and that of course covered the whole floor good three days very good three days very exciting and most interesting site we estimate at least half of the ruins were built in the edwardian period from relocated roman stones this is how much of the roman structure is left underneath out here in the extreme southwest of roman britain our bath house would almost certainly have been associated with a villa on the fringes of civilization with beautifully painted walls fine fine-coloured mosaic floors and its large central swimming pool the bathhouse would have been a place of indulgence and comfort a welcome refuge from living on a frontier i don't think we've ever dug a site before where we've had genuine roman archaeology side by side with creative edwardian reconstruction but sorting out this little concoction has been the big challenge over the last three days no villa but i'm glad to say that the end result of our battle of the bog has been this one of only six in the country a genuine mosaic-lined roman bathing pool

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 197,501

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, tony robinson, time team, roman bath house, victorian architecture, victorian dig, british dig

Id: A3p_iJZlm3o

Length: 48min 47sec (2927 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021