Time Team S03-E05 Palace of the Irish Kings (Navan, Co Armagh)

according to the ancient tales of Ulster King Connor had three palaces and a place called oh and Makkah well this is o and Makkah a 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 Conor's third palace you started them Phil just debate Tony one of the main reasons for excavating here is that this area features in a famous collection of Irish store is called the toy may I found this this bit in the toy and that says Conor'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 griever all the red bronze yeah so are we gonna find a palace here well we got a tray and have a good good look for one there are marks on the air pictures here not there REO she's why we've decided to go for this I mean there's a couple of parallel lines yep which oak archaeology could I do and they seem to be part of some big landscape feature that splits the whole Navin area north south for distance of maybe half a kilometre yeah so 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 still 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 will 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 the slopes are too steep on either side yeah but the area of Cree bro extends beyond the hill itself into this that land who are working this is a much better platform here isn't it worth through this where we're opening the trench up now where as soon as we get there 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 7th or 8th centuries ad do you think it's a coincidence that this place is called red ranch and that they've got the red ranch in the time well it's obviously not coincidence so there's some connection there's some connection put how far back it would go I wouldn't I wouldn't think this is what we have 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 branch was so we'll call it the red branch I think it's I think it's very possible how field a Creve row is situated here in the middle of a massive late bronze age early iron age landscape at Navin just outside our Mar in Northern Ireland and the discovery of the two big hilltop settlements saw his fort and Navin fort which date from 1100 BC to 94 BC have prompted speculation that these could be two of the palaces featured in the Toyne so according to these stories there was this ancient kingship place called Owen marker it was ruled over by King Connor who had this hero called kakuhen yes and ruled all of what is now Ulster basically and Colin went around killing virtually everybody could yes this collection of stories the Toyne demonstrates that the kind of cultural background of the people that lived here it's the story of a gigantic cat from Connaught and by the followers of Queen Maeve she's 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 so all this area round here is the the territory of Owen Makkah 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 something quite interested showing up on these there's nothin yes it shows up on there quite well there's hockey's fort but further west can you see that circular field pattern there reason just there with a dark line coming out which might be a continuation of a circular enclosure a bit like pakka start life than that I was looking at this other photograph the same area that's a lower level it is yeah it's a lot clearer look you see quite dramatic to that yes and you can see that it's you can see the shadows cast by 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 was really rather promising actually doesn't it though there is this reference to three help three hills in the toy so maybe yes everyone sort of thinking that the third one's Creve Road mid 11 maybe it's further out there so they reproduced 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 row they've been asked by chris linn to do some work around javis fort in the hope that we can learn more about some possible ditches which is showing up as crop marks and appear to be part of the defences of the settlement landscape 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 sport the other side of hockey's fortis hockey's focus from navin so you've made the areas of twice as big as we were right do you know about that one well we know or does a safe but we haven't seen any such good our photographic evidence and certainly it's a site that in the research that's going on with queried story what is this yeah it's it's a place called Valley do there's a place name Lyrid which suggested might have a key a steagle connotations but it'll be very old yeah tendency sort of foot I mean creeper row is that a name that's like to have been given to this area bearing one fact that they're Knights the red branch turn up in the toy is it like super original name supporters well you would like to think that the name is a survival from the time when the tails a failure this magma over XO in moment over got a teeth bully or axe that hurts what a new lytic axe bad it's all Neolithic I told his oh-oh super we're just looking at each other air and and and Chris is just n super over is super oblique round 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 Connors palaces may have existed what's more the axe was only found in the topsoil 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 team still feel it's a significant find why we're able to sort of reinvest these monuments in each new age its new generation continue to recertify them and do their own thing inside them and it's only logical to presume that the sacred landscape palace origin in the Neolithic another time in Wessex you get these huge Neolithic sacred landscapes with everything we've got here so the story could have been Celtic people moving into an earlier drop ritual yeah and I don't think people necessarily move in I mean you've got if you see you've got a landscape that might be Neolithic and Bronze Age just goes on being used into the Iron Age goes on being used until then syntactic arrived and symmetrical eyes so make an arm are becomes the the Cathedral in it's just a logical ritual precious ceremonial sentía much so jealous if L always wanted to find a ground I know max 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 add the Navin 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 Navin 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 drove ways 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 ulster well certainly some of the finds suggest that this was an important place during this time that's the skull of a Barbary hip which seems to have them being brought to the site in the Iron Age and it must have come from the Mediterranean and proves that the occupants of the site of that time were of such high prestige 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 row this looks lovely soil to me it's very productive site yeah I mean this is what limestone Lange's own yes thank you you'll get a ladder out in country's just peppered with I enjoyed yeah it's almost as if they've gone for this area because yes good no aggression would have chosen this area deliberately because of the reproductive quality of the site yeah and then originally like it would have been in the church hands and the grinders in church hands was always well look good anyroad yeah come on have a look at the other very similar actually yeah in both of our trenches here we found evidence of what appear to be parallel ditches but at this stage is too early to say what they might be curiously though this second trench has started producing fines associated with metalworking they'd asked the bomb on the furnace oh no oh one of these blue yes but we've got no audio knowing the data solo except a zoom that's not recent is it it's not going to be in the last couple hundred years odd notion of also yeah misfit with Nobles so the mystery continues in our to trenches at Creve row while at hafiz port 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 late at the moment no no Flint's or anything like that no we have one piece of Flint butter sir natural Flint's at the moment is quite slice right so we've obviously got to go we've got bigger food bags on it around there yeah the geophysics team have moved on and are now busy surveying the site a ballad do that was spotted by Stewart 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 Bali do and Navin over a mile away the two trenches of creaver oh right it's a lot of work your main dinner but carry on here's you diggin air Oh fair enough 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 de spirited quite honestly I think it's something to do with the fact this is a massive site is 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 as this great bit in the toy that says the men of Ulster were with Conor in Evin Makkah 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 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 Bally do where the geophysics team have found clear evidence of a ditch which is following the line of the earth work first spotted by Stuart so in fact basically our results are fitting in with the crop mark evidence and also completing the circuit we think as well and under stuff here well that's the very first at this moment is this man is quite obvious monthly as well you see oh yeah yeah it almost looks like a player that barrel or something like that you know I mean I thought that was natural when we came in the fear well it might be may well be but the thing is it is situated right in the enclosure okay see that the possibility with this is that it might be the third site in this line my third palace well it could be I mean even if it isn't it's another part of this complex landscape you know it might be contemporary Navin 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 where would we dig the trench I mean as a punter I'm not saying I would want to have a look we'll see what was on that level no 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 and I've got one as well so if if if this turned out this could turn out to be the the third hill couldn't it Roger so all this far too complicated for me all right it's nice accommodation yes there's nothing yeah there's Creve row we were digging out this hockey sport 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 not actually be there 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 sort of things are miles away 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 Robyn meanwhile has gone to the Archbishop's library in our Mar and is hoping to find the origins of some of the place names we're investigating this weekend oh I see yes it's got the site of of Navarre basically this is 1819 isn't it yeah oh yes the ruins of our motto are visible in no Flaherty's day was spoken of by Colgan and by camden who corrupts the name there is a town land near the navin hill which is yet denominated Creve row 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 then he goes on there is an adjoining town and called Trey now that is what I think we're looking at as far as hockey's fort is concerned 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 locked in a shard which is located here and is associated with navin fort amazingly it still survives despite the quarrying around it and it was here that for 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 - tapering cylinders of bronze carefully riveted together with a beautiful semi circular curve and then this great end piece decorated in the Celtic Latin style they've also welded onto the end of the of the other horn I just feel it wafer thin thin in it so when it's all been beaten out into a very very thin sheet of bronze and then this beautiful pattern leading 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 Cormack our brawn smith has complicated matters somewhat by deciding that he'll only speak in gaelic and that's been huh both laughing both of our flesh and car sir what there hang on old sin cos or hammer aha they say okay you understand me but I don't seem to understand you rather what are we make in then it's a disc a disc yeah I gotta go stick a lock on the shader that's [ __ ] I'm saying so basically then we were making we're making dis bit uh-huh so how BIG's it's gonna be yeah a shuttle antosha so we're gonna come it's got to be being a quite a lot yeah and a lot of work a lot of work and that's been put in the inner furnace yeah tension sort of stuff so since the tender well just lay in do you work it down in amongst the embers just stick it down in amongst the EM there plumbers and aha well I assume you're just saying such as MC embers uh-huh and I will not take long to heat back up again no no no no pretty immediate is it yeah so maybe too much sure hey so there for supper you can sup and oh yeah yeah uh-huh just never ever know hey you're a local chap do you understand what he says it not right not not all the time ah well I'm glad I'm not the only one who's in the dark about it that's for sure anyroad let's say you beat out a bit more of it then Cormac will spend the rest of the day 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 fine yes I mean there's only men's come when I say it's we're also getting I mean very most interesting of all as this piece of worry yeah it's it's a club rim and course harm you sure well I mean conventionally we would probably put this at lead Bronze Age as domestics now this looks like domestic debris that that's fine it's way under sedation yeah so that mean the material is fine 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 fines coming out of our second trench at Greve row there's another piece of pottery it's just come out of this southern 100 very thin line you have to make peace the other bit yeah it's it's substantially later than that one unfortunately I was probably minute well I mean it could be averted remember which would mean that it's it's already met evil this bit of medieval pottery would probably have come from a pot that looks like this but it means that we now have two pots coming from parallel ditches which come from periods almost 2000 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 your digging now these black marks are where the high readings came up with for the trenches across there but they reckon the might been enclosure which comes round like that and I particularly interest in this circular structure here which is about 12 meters across and could be well either a ring ditch of a burial mound or a Hut circle we could perhaps put a trench across that see if it's really there see what it is also if that's necessary I'll leave you with the geophysics ok we can't afford scissors the workload for the geophysics team this weekend is immense while half of them have been concentrating on Creve row the rest have been hurrying to give us some resistance data for Bali do we've survived the same area with the resistance I mean the really exciting thing with that seem to 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 to do choose not that would be really good so I've decided to put the trench like light angles to both of them so we should get both ditches in below 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 how his fort our excavation has achieved everything it set out to do not only has it found evidence of the Gateway linking half his fort with the King stables but we've also started to find bits of Late Bronze Age pottery the sharper spit centers it yes there's a ice there oh wow that party is getting to but a thousand eleven here we see that's the temple - ship Coronado from here brilliant 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 hafiz fort here we have the foot of course metal surface yeah some sort of walkway that's what we were saying earlier on yeah something that looks very very good now you've done it yes sir and this with the ditch studying determinant here and we are picking up hopping else in the corner here until that'll remove and you got natural again on the other show yes with the possible albums of a small steak whole torso come up and we have not fully excavated there but I would see that the Sears delineating the walkway itself in the French that's brilliant this will be great news for Chris because the discovery of a gateway here in the middle ditch of Huff is fort strengthens the idea of a connection with the sacrificial pool at the Kings 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 twenty years ago with an opportunity to do a little trial trench just in the edge of it right and um we find Bronze Age sword moulds 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 the Melissa this is in little trench which is only really about one percent of the of the whole area of the monument we also got charcoal from a little cross-section through the bank round the edge of the thing light and that again did it to about a thousand BC so you know everything tied up very very neatly indeed suggest the hole and the bank of being built round about and you have the same conjunction of water and fire that's rare that you get it Navin yeah if if we're right we've got a little exit to or his fort here but yeah leading down to this pool it really ties the fort in under yeah your imagination so now not only convict to 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 hafiz fort to the King stables at the bottom of the hill meanwhile at our new site Bally do Stuart is excited about the discovery he's made while surveying the existing field boundary it gets narrower at the bottom is this all stuff the farmers quite care - that is precisely this is really what I want you to look at before I get any further you seen on this Boulder here Oh 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 even hers yes how do you think about it as prehistoric rock art I mean it is a carved stone carvers neat I mean that that is incredible I think I mean you're happy with it being a cop yes yes no dad is that is akin symbol of any description is it not not you know at first glance no it doesn't remind me of anything at all in Krita story isn't a scene that's incredibly significant though Chris aw gotta mean it must be significant but I mean are when are we looking at a stone which is directly associated with the site yeah or is an older stone which the builders of this happened to and incorporate in it well can I give you a right okay you see all these stone that we standing on just here yeah it just occurs here it had suede yeah and I wondered if it's been plowed farmers got rid of it because he's been plowing this field he's plowing into something up here yeah something's on some of them one stone one I'm holding like a stone monument or a cane a burial mound perhaps just dumped in the daytime it's a silly question first you presume you've looked through the rest of you well this is the first thing I got done I got 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 Bali do the sound of the stone wall or stone area it looks if this might be a stone wall of a play Bank at the moment scribe see that yeah yeah yeah I think you can even sign you know goes in like that yeah can you clean that up a bit more so he comes like yeah and you don't take anything out do you just I what I want to be very very hurtful I will is that a bit more of it there 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 refines geophysics results for Bali do which seem to show evidence of buildings here when this seems to be almost a hexagonal shaped feature there yeah we need to do some more protesting or sort of highlighted on there for those that don't believe what we're taking 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 a hope that tomorrow we can find an Iron Age palace underneath 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 in massive activity around even buildings choosing safety things overlapping and ditches paved areas Greaves anything yeah I mean it's a it's an it's another high status site in a landscape full of high status sites of different dates so di yeah rather fills in the story doesn't need convincing Hills yeah but you don't show you the Irish loves finding bumps and doing things on top of them doesn't it we go so the end of day two and the finish of what's been a fantastic day still a lot to do tomorrow but everybody seems really out and only too keen to join Tommy McCree for a Cayley at his house to celebrate progress so far haha Oh love-love we're gonna be here for a few hours yeah see after the break slider day three and while Cormac prepares his furnace for a final days Braun's working out at our original site Creve row there have been a few developments to catch up on firstly the news that both of the dishes are now thought to be of 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 finds 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 cut their waste 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 I was going to dig this area I'd say you know you put one over with the core settlement and maybe put one over when we know that the ditch is clearly honestly she's descent in the gym it is - yeah we don't really often know what we're trying to do is save the archaeologists work one trench here on this putative settlement will solve the 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 okay so I 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 Linn think Elsie yeah I'm happy that it's the same ditches yeah I mean there's nobody in Diablo well I just dig it a trench across there to confirm that they were the same [ __ ] it's clear on the geophysics me mmm well are you happy with that yes I'm happy but me again it's the logistics of the of the last day so at last our third trench at Creve row gets underway to investigate the area geophysics believed might contain evidence of a settlement meanwhile at our new site Bally do work has started to excavate the mystery metal object what is it the metal they aren't it now say yes I'm not sure it is actually written is what we got to do is we go 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 move its way down it isn't buried in the stones that's a lot more significant I didn't get into something quite engine oh 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 we got some interested yep very interesting Wow yeah what is it you know it looks like lignite lignite yep what's what's lignite when I said on we don't get that rain where we come from well it's a sort of a halfway house and it's almost a cold paper yeah stone yeah is used quite a bit than the early Christian Pierre and Ireland for bracelets rings that type of thing would appear this is and you gotta I mean it occurs naturally around here does it yes right does this stuff need conserving or does it no yes uzu is perfectly robust on its own yes yes it's okay that's good back at the Navin Center Cormac is making good progress - he's thinned out the bronze to the right size and can now prepare to add the loot end assign the discovery of our broken lignite bracelet in a good stratified context means that we can now date our settlement to Bali do this is a bracelet which we know would have been worn around 800 to 1200 AD so this changes everything it looks like we've got an early Christian site at Bali do 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 our Mar 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 a hurry with our second trench which is targeted and 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 I was quite a nice line coming down looks a bit house entirely doesn't it Casey yeah we still got the issue this feature coming back here yeah so we've got a line coming along sort of like that possible post hell yeah I wonder if that might be another post Tyler okay slowly edge way does a bit there so once again last minute excitement and a race against the clock on the final day but Becca Bally 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 ad it doesn't help with the dating of this site but it's nonetheless a nice find and makes a change from the usual bits of pot meanwhile our second trench at Bally do is progressing nicely despite the occasional interruption bracelet down in the other trench and there's this anything Dylan Ivan foot 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 site it's a it's an early Christian site my friend must be an archaeologist I'm sure from kid Murph I could do many ideas right give her just to make sure you like more look [ __ ] worm you safe yeah if you get 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 row isn't good well we had this sort of this especially where this Hut circa was we have this no sign of the hut circle at all we have this long linear feature coming through that we reckon it's a lazy bed that's where they were digging for their taters and it's yes remedy and finally potatoes the post holes that you were sent over to help us with as you can see they only go down an inch but well you're writing world of stones ripped I think so yes yeah we've had no fines out of pot from the office 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 this disk 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 archeology discovered this weekend beginning with our original site at Creve row so all that massive debate this morning about where we should dig the trenches I think we took the wrong option we had five options the one we took as they can just really no further forward we haven't proved there was any settlement the pottery that carried the domestic pottery 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 a potato it's great as my sort of awesome wasn't my life I shouldn't really have a go at carrenza because this was one trench we had to dig it could have been evidence for Connors 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 it's what is just there so it was already beginning to salt up yeah we sell them dabs Iceland here and possibly because it's this lens shape it looks as if it may have been cut into the dish when it's silted up to perhaps that sort of level so they cut it 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 mean this is this is great for us because this does double dutch 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 are we are we talking about a road with a ditch on each side or a fortification or what I think more likely sort of so-called linear earthwork going across the landscape in probably enclosing an area maybe separating off Navin from this part of the landscape maybe going around this boggy area where Kings 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 mean that that's what we mean by Lin it's a double ditch features 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 sight of his fort the work here today has revealed more host 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 a ballad do well our first trench here discovered the evidence for the bank and ditch which would have enclosed the settlement it also produced nice fines like this medieval spur which once would have looked like this and of course our dating evidence our lignite bracelet came from this excavation - but what about the other trench dug here today why didn't we dig this little bit well because the gfs boys they saw something else so we thought we'd homed in on that and it appeared to be a hexagonal sort of building and what we did was we just put a trench across that we've got part of the wall here but the interesting feature of this is that there's a lot of occupation soil and I'm just only on the outside of it and from this we got a blue glass bead this this is 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 a bit 900 of aira bytes ties in well with the lignite so that's at your peril so how would you describe what we found well I think you find what seems to be the edge of a very large and very significant early Christian period running into the medieval period site I mean it's a hundred and ten meters in diameter and may not notice absolutely enormous compared to the the usual ring force of the period which are sort of 30 to 40 meters so it mean it is a sight of you know immense prestige it's like could be a palace but it certainly doesn't belong to Conor and no certainly not doesn't belong to corner although I'm sure that tales about Connor we're current and were told in a place like this whether it was ecclesiastical or 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 Stewart and Victor would like to know where the rock carving originated from they just tried to make some sense of it by interpreting it as a deer and Mick's 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 Toyne saw navin mound and saw how his force 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 you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 396,117

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: -3aFozYOgG4

Length: 47min 47sec (2867 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I left a fork there

[u/GabhaNua]

Fascinating site

[u/CDfm]

It's not like the real Navan.