Time Team S12-E08 Wemyss,.Fife

deep in the gloom of these Scottish caves and messages from one of the most enigmatic people's ever to live in Britain this is just one of many symbols carved by the pits a people who so worried the Romans that they built Hadrian's Wall just to keep them out but that's just part of these caves colorful history over the centuries Jacobite aristocracy world war two refugees even Hermits have all sorts lter here but now they're under threat rising sea levels mean it's only a matter of time before they succumb to the dark cold Firth of Forth and that's why we're here to glean as much evidence as we can from these caves rich past before it's too late and we've got just three days to do it the term pics describes the people who lived in northern Scotland from the 4th to 9th century AD their name comes from the Latin pic T meaning painted people and they fascinated historians and artists for centuries despite leaving virtually no written history the pics real legacy is their art intriguing designs that have never been deciphered and there's an unusually high number of them here in the Weems caves on the very edge of the Pictish nation we got Stan here there's not a picture snow not as far as I know no no that's not a picnic but we do have some plastic Pictish symbols here this double disc symbol here the classic one what's this one well that's a salmon again that's probably original it's probably Pictish and it's probably dates from perhaps about the 7th or 8th century AD but this fish over here what this one down hey that one there it's quite different nature and character and that's probably 19th century indeed we've got 1500 years or more of carving straight in front of us here this wall is a chronicle of centuries of human activity here but we're going to concentrate on these mysterious symbols and the people who made them the carvings represent years of Pictish presence at Wiens and we want to discover if this cave was a communal art gallery or if the pics who left these marks actually lived here if they did we should find some evidence of occupation charcoal animal bones cereal grains and the like but first we need to find the 1500 year old surface on which they would have stood to carve these designs you'll get this modern disturbance office let's call it the party lab and then we'll get down onto some serious archaeology but we're going to have our work cut out the 1,500 years of human activity here have featured periods of later occupation industry and unfortunately vandalism including one case when a car was driven into this cave and set alight I thought don't you think the pigs my food well anyway with impossibly several meters to the bottom of the cave for it could be a long way down we will expect a great sandwich of occupation of different periods you know people come in there's been stuff washed in and probably soft dumped and then more people living on top of they get sandwich underneath this so it could be something yeah and we might find a Ford Escort at the bus like white the trench Phil's digging is in Jonathan's cave named after a nineteenth-century man who made it his home and is just one of several caves of wings that not only contain Pictish carvings but seem to encapsulate centuries even millennia of Scottish history but all the archaeology along this coastline is now seriously at risk from rising sea levels and unstoppable coastal erosion and that's why we've decided that this dig has to be a multi period excavation this is probably the last chance to record the heritage of the Weems caves and every one has its own story to tell our next target is the well cave which lies underneath the remains of the medieval McDuff's Castle as well as a rumor of a secret tunnel connecting the cave to the castle it's also believed that from the 10th to the 15th century this was home to Christian Hermits it's a big open area yes but 12 meters in diameter it's high - yeah yeah hello you got descriptions on that side well the different bow 1860 1861 these carvings may be more recent but they do have a special significance for the archaeologists on the dig they're from the mid 19th century when we became a popular Victorian attraction as antiquarians the forerunners of today's archaeologists began to uncover the caves rich history unfortunately some of the methods used in the investigations were far from ideal archaeology this this period wasn't really a science it it wasn't a subject that really come into existence these were learning gentlemen who are inquiring about Scotland's past and the qualifications was essentially to be a gentleman and to have the money to indulge the passion and interest do we have any idea if they found any finds in those digs well yes and no well the records from those early explorations show that a number of finds were made ceramics and a few other iron objects but the descriptions and so on they gave them they were relatively poor and these artifacts weren't actually collected the technology and methods being used today are a bit more sophisticated as part of an ongoing project implemented by five council the caves are now being digitally mapped you will get a scan of about five millimeter resolution here I stand a point every five millimeters yep the laser scanning will create a high definitey model of the cave hoarding them for posterity and once the weld cave has been scanned we're gonna put in a couple of trenches for our own investigation over in Jonathan's cave Phil and Raksha are finally through the lair of 20th century rubbish and appear to have found well some earlier rubbish and the sure thing you ever a party is it no no greatly we're sure man that could be which were somebody Kevin in there it looks like Phil has hit an occupation layer but unfortunately these finds are much too late to be Pictish so far the only evidence we have of these elusive people are the carvings who were these people who are doing the carving they were simply the descendants of the celtic tribes cooing the romans encountered when they marched into scotland in AD 79 and it's sometimes argued that it was the threat of the roman presence that made the small celtic tribes come together into a single Kingdom of the Picts in order to be stronger so although a lot of these drawings would have been post-roman actually there are echoes of really old times here yes they are and what's interesting about the caves is that it is the early forms of the symbols that you get as time goes on into the eighth ninth centuries you get really elaborate versions but these are dead simple the most beautiful examples of piktochart come from standing stones found elsewhere in scotland but they do have something in common with these roughly hewn symbols at Wemyss they've confounded academics for centuries do we know they mean no no we don't clearly they're a means of communication a passing pick would know what they meant but we don't because there are new documents and there's no equivalent of something like the rosetta stone where you have two languages saying the same thing well which we know one which we didn't so we can work out what the other one wins yes oh oh you know what oh yeah yeah it could be a long time before we reach any sort of Pictish archaeology it's a big ol now on Phil & Co are still trawling through an inordinate amount of iron work it's a cut Neil with emergence in 18th century perhaps even ever which thing that was used for then holding too big picture wood together yeah wonder without each big richer wood Oh everyone watch yourselves is really dark in here you guys alright filming through yeah cool oh but over up the well cage the laser scanning has finished and bridge and Matt can now start work on the medieval period of Wemyss history that is incredible our first trench in here will investigate the well that gave the cave its name and in particular bridge will be looking for any evidence of medieval occupation the period when Hermits are believed to have lived here this this is the well and over here ah yeah this is the well over here the first trench is going to be around this it's gonna come straight out here I guess about a meter extending from see the sit stones here yeah all the way around ceremi edge the other intriguing aspect of the well cave is this tunnel which according to folklore leads to the 15th century McDuff's Castle over 20 metres above our diggers but in its current state it doesn't look a particularly welcoming proposition it's now down to mat to try and find archaeological evidence of a medieval man-made passageway we're going to put a trench sort of against that wall there power weight into it and let's see what you did let's see we get some evidence that people made at home the historical period we're investigating may be vast some 1500 years or more but in geological terms the Wiens caves a young whippersnappers cut from sandstone in the last ten thousand years I was think of caves as being almost as old as the earth itself the idea that people were around when they were being created and moved in practically straight aways quite bizarre I mean ten thousand years ago this was at the water's edge or the sea was bashing against this is totally inhospitable as it were but about six now thousand years ago there's a change the ice sheet started to melt and as they melted the weight was reduced and the land started to rise out of the water lifting these up onto dry land you can see here the layers of rock these sandstone layers are very soft and as the sea pounds against it it breaks little bits off along these joints here every bit breaks off then bashes further against the rock and knocks another bit off so you get this like suc huge tumble dry of pebbles and rocks going round and round around and scouring into the rock if you look you see just up there on that shelf you see there's a whole lot of pebbles just there yeah yeah that that's almost just a remnant of that last process I see coming in here those pebbles are jammed into that rock givin it a few more years those pebbles would have brought down that ledge as they were swirled around the cave would have got bigger in Jonathan's cave Mick has decided to open up another trench in the search for Pictish evidence it would be nice if one of them gave us a result if only in Phil's trench the expected two meters of archaeology with a nice Pictish floor at the bottom has spectacularly failed to materialise doesn't actually sound to me like evidence of Pictish habitation it says to me look better on idea that's exactly what it is we've basically got two layers we've got a layer up to this dark line here you see that done yeah across there now we've actually got a piece of pot from around there which we think might actually seventeenth-century your item in other words that could be part of our jackaboy aristocracy aware that we know lived in here but above it we've got some right what's happening well actually this was cave was once used as a nail making I mean there is very very little stratigraphy so does that mean the picsou card these things were extremely small or lying down by maybe the only way the own way in which you could actually carve that is either to be extremely small or simply to get down here and work like yeah the second trench in Jonathan's cave has fared little better it would seem that the pics who created these designs came carved and left again there's no evidence that they lived here it's a disappointing end for a cave that promised so much but at least we still have the well cave clean this is extraordinary I mind your head tone oh well it's like a mini Cathedral antastic ILI's [ __ ] a proper game should be how you get home alright we've got a couple of things going on here but just over there look bridge boy have you got well it looks like we're inside the well here umm it Thoms following round the curving edge inside it looks to be redeposited rubble really and we're finding chris packets and painten's but he has just said that he's come down onto a new layer which does have some archaeological promise how about you Matt well then when he finds is yet but just below the surface the edge of the cave is dead straight and drops down completely vertically that looks like it could be man-made we're going to follow that round and see if it joins up with the tunnel there Nick it does seem as though we've been working all day and we're still just scratching away okay floors yeah there's been awful lot of rubble and soiled instructorship I think we're in a position to get down into the archaeology we weren't too much in Jonathan's cave right we're almost finished there but here there's everything to go for so we hit this hard I think so yeah and in addition we've been looking in a third cave where there seem to be many more layers below the floor service and most importantly one of our archaeologists has discovered some ancient kind of engraving which no one's ever seen before so we're gonna get the specialists in first thing tomorrow morning to see if we've got our first ever time team Pictish carving yesterday morning we came here to the five coasts to look at some caves which have been inhabited on and off for thousands of years the first one we looked at was Jonathan's cave with way back there and there's some great Pictish carvings on the walls but we put a couple of trenches in and we haven't found anything particularly exciting but one of our archaeologists was fooling around down this cave and came up with something which everyone thinks could be really exciting and obviously it had to be in another cave that's a bit of a squeeze to get into but tackling the appropriately named sloping cave is well worth the effort we think it's a serpent you can see kind of this head hole here and then the body curving round like this and we thought you know it's probably a Pictish carving how do we know it's picked well we've had an expert looking at it and a Richie yourself has actually seen it and said yeah there's no doubt but it is Pictish the beauty of it is look how low down in the cave it is so in fact there's no way that you could actually make that carving with a ground level at this at this point there must be quite a lot of buildup of actual deposits with possible Pictish material in it well we said that yesterday but maybe this time Phil will find an identifiable Pictish layer but the Pictish heritage of these caves is just part of a much bigger survey of this coastline which is now under serious threat from rising sea levels in the world cave underneath the castle bridge and Matt are in the midst of a medieval excavation uncovering the eponymous well that may have been used by Christian Hermits and investigating a mysterious passage that runs into the cave wall Hagen are pretty wary about this medieval tribe handle about thirteen points entry it's great and that came from the Lucinda ponds up here right next to the tunnel opening so that's pretty good for explaining a link between the castle up there and on this cave there may be shocking rubbish down here or there's something turning up a to you there but I still want to get camera down there if possible yeah but every single tunnel in the world people say goes there's an embarrassing castle or a priori or Church yeah maybe this one really does you can tell come over and have a look at what we just did oh you're certainly on a different layer than you were last night yeah not very far down still yet what we seem to be finding here is I'm interleaving layers of cobble and soil trampled that people would have bought into the cave on the bottom of these shoes left it and then you've also got evidence of people not being in the cave you've got some decayed stay and so that's been washed down by water in between the episodes and people coming in here can you take the well not yet we're going to have to keep digging and keep going down because we are on a nice organic layer that looks pretty understood there's clearly a lot more work to be done in here but that hasn't stopped our searching for new targets outside the caves no such power this plateau of land has been savagely eroded and a trench at the very edge of it has provided County archaeologist Douglas Spears with a Stratego fee of centuries of human activity including lots of rubbish from the castle just a few years ago this land surface went way out beyond us I mean this whole section of course is so unstable is currently eroding at several meters a year what would you expect to find in layers like this on the beach like this well I said what I think we're dealing here is with a medieval maiden when estimating you've dumped food remains it's the rubbish from the kitchen it's the old bones from the dinner table we could actually find just about anything in this mitten so we've got to come back when they've done a bit more clean and see what they've got them very much so we now want to find out what was happening out here and relate it to what was going on in the caves and that's all the more important because Phil has just uncovered even more evidence of the Picts habit of leaving messages in the sandstone this one is the original serpent yeah coming in there with actually got a brand spanking new one but it's coming down there and almost mirrors and curve on that one there I mean it they think it's just such amazing to me because I mean what you're looking at is one not only brand spanking new carvings but look at the condition of the rock face it's totally on whether that I'm sure is the way that the pigs would have seen it and when they actually read back she carved it's brilliant and there's no sign that you're living near that not a male know what's really interesting about these is that these carvings haven't been tampered with in recent times like most of the other carvings in the other case yeah but also when you look at that one it's smooth you know it's been pecked first and then it's been ground down nice and smooth so that's finished carving oh where is that double disc over the other side what the [ __ ] over here yes this one well sadly I never finished that woman well you can still see the packing on that they never round two smoothing it out purely in terms of Pictish archaeology this is a great find but in another sense it's a deeply frustrating discovery no one knows what is or any of the other Pictish symbols mean and the pics themselves are just as mysterious this is a picture of the Pictish man recreated by Victor and this is a picture of a Pictish woman from the early 16th century they demonstrate for me is this wide variety in images of how these people might be why don't we know more about them the problem is to Dayton in the past we've only had a few sources of information to to examine them or certainly that only a few have been exploited for example are very colorful but one-sided picture is given from the early historical their records we have from the Roman writers about the pict and this is likely to be a biased source of information we do have quite a good visual impression of them um we know what sort of things they ABS we know the names of their kings but it is it is that whole process of putting together you know an earlier people which archaeologists to have to do time and time again isn't it yeah you start with the standing remains the ruins you dig on the sites you find as you're saying evidence of diet and lots of stuff and then there's another stage you're thinking well yes but what were they actually like with a war like with a builders with a farmers I think it's likely that excavation or more excavation of Pictish sites is what's required because for example here in five the exception of the work we're doing now there's only really been one sizable excavation of a Pictish site actually in five so it seems actually almost bizarre that we have this group of people inhabiting Scotland or a large chunk of Scotland for so long and all we really know about them is they had a particularly distinctive artistic style but at the moment the symbols are the only thing we have to go on and they don't just appear on rocks because the pits are also famous for their jewelry there was a remarkable find in Fife about twelve kilometers away from the wings caves at a place called Nora's law so Wow oh it's a tragic tale because about 400 ounces of silver were found unfortunately the people didn't want them to fall into the hands of the crown treasure trove and they actually sold them to a peddler who then sold them to a jeweler in Cooper and he melted them down and made them into spoons well no such blasphemy from us but we are going to try and recreate one of these pendants using methods from the time and one of the original designs the objects themselves have left some clues so what they must have done is to start off by making an ingot of silver and then they would hammer that ingot flat and they would shape it into the leaf shape and we can tell that because he's a hammer marks on the back they would have flipped it over didn't give it a light polish and then engraved the decoration then they would have enameled it and then give it a final polish so there's actually quite a complicated number of stages in it absolutely requiring a great deal of skill as well in the sloping cave filled search for Pictish occupation is starting to uncover a lot of bone although it's too early to say what period it belongs to and something else has been discovered in this cave but this time it's not Pictish and for once we can translate it so what what is that sort of y-shaped fork shaped thing that we're looking at it's a very distinctive Norse or Viking room Oh crikey but I mean Ezz what you'd expect to find in a cave like this you expect to find anything and we know that there was no activity in this area well which letter is it it's the letter K it's a sixth letter in the alphabet and what's interesting is that the first six letters swirl forth up a sort of magical formula it's almost as if I were to say god bless you all praise be to Allah yeah something like that this is a timely reminder that these caves contain centuries of history and in the well cave Matt's trying to discover if he's got a tunnel leading to the medieval castle or if he's just busting a gut to debunk a local myth and he's now employed the very latest in technology cave cam which is basically a camcorder in a plastic tray strapped to a couple of fence posts I think you forget I think maybe err we should get another bit of wood and make it a little bit longer yeah I wasn't born to be a get the tape on the net there we go Oh lovely he's talked about a Richards the initial results from this cutting-edge technology aren't promising it would seem the tunnel story is literally coming to a dead end outside the well cave John's now finished his survey and he's established a couple of targets that might help tie together the different strands of our archaeological investigation what we have gotten the result it's an area of increased noise and that may be something or it may not so we're gonna put a trench in over that it's just gonna be a very very small trench basically probably any about a couple of bucket widths just to see what John's anomaly is whether it is actually anything or a load of pebbles the strategy is start there first yeah and then hopefully move close to the cave entrance start where first well actually down here we've marked out the trench this is where the noises on the geophysics yeah but we're quite a long way from the cave so really what we want to do is if rods happy is cut back some of the nettles get a bit closer to the entrance and maybe put something in there's right you said he's not shaking his head I'm thinking not I think it's okay if we don't take all the cover away from the cave mouth so you can get in quite a long way in and I hopefully tight this rigidity between the the cave area and now it outside lovely yeah it's an opportunity to work in the Sun so far this site has given us three distinct periods to investigate but this trench here on the plateau could present us with evidence stating right back to the formation of these caves thousands of years ago that's an awful lot of archaeology from the rather small trench with just a few hours of day two left this multi-period multi-site dig has taken on a life of its own its shell with each trench supplying different but vital information for the history of Weems caves and our attempt to recreate a Pictish pendant is also doing pretty well starting to look more like an object you'd recognize Alice that's right yes yeah and when they found there would be corroded but certainly shape wise and smoothness - yes it's more likely and it's that we know on the plateau the digger has gone through over 2 meters of Earth including a rather impressive midden layer of dumped organic material and it's now hitting sand just coming onto the beach see a sand castle will stop there though it's now down to environmental archaeologist dr. Erica Goodman to make sense of it so do you think that definitely is Beach yeah we've hit the beach deposit well immediately above that was where most of the midden type material was coming from do you think that Sam actually just washed in or do you think it's actual human activity oh there's definitely human activity I just found a bit of bone and there's some charcoal in there but above that midden type layer we've got this two and a half meters of soil I mean where's that come from well that's not natural that's got to have been built up artificially somehow um we need to find out when that started and when it finished I may need some dating evidence that's all being dumped then that's all been dumped and I think it may well have been dumped from the castle just up there back inside the well cave Matt's camera on a stick and some further excavation have exploded the myth of a secret tunnel follow the tunnel along this way particularly actually bends down it hasn't actually cut by humans at all so nobody is cleaned out this at any point so doesn't look like anyone's ever used it and looking at the rock in there as well there's no real evidence for people haven't shopped away at it at all so you're saying that that tunnel is entirely natural it looks that yeah and looking at the castle up outside above us it's a good 20 meters vertically I'd say from down there and this rock as you can see splits horizontally and so I really don't think there's gonna be any evidence at all for a food joint at the castle so that's one piece of folklore laid to rest but even as one trench shuts down a theory another one opens up a whole new set of possibilities an animal bone has been discovered at the bottom of the trench on the plateau and it bears all the marks of early human activity I can't actually see some fine knife cuts that probably been made with a metal knife so you're born has actually been butchered by a human being with a knife Oh excellent that's fantastic got it and that's not the only bone that's causing a stir films doggie determination in the sloping cave has revealed a layer that could be very significant we're getting so much bone and it's all from this level we're yeah the chances of that just being washed in I recognize God be do please attend to coins today yeah I think we could argue we've got a patient here good dude one of the most frustrating things about this site is how much of the archeology has been interfered with by the sea by rusty old nails by barbecue fires by graffiti by a blazing car in a cave but at last we're beginning to get down onto untouched early archeology like this piece of butchered bone both here and in Phil's cave are we beginning to get to the levels where some of the earliest inhabitants of these caves actually stood and if so what else might we find it's a cold steely start to day three and five and the trenches across this coastline are now producing evidence of centuries of human activity I've got a bit of bone in let's go but it's the sloping cave where we discovered unrecorded Pictish carvings that's attracting the most attention look at the quantity of bone and we're getting it from right down here right on the base of the trench and that bone is not the evidence of of somebody having a party here that is somebody live in here there's just too much bone and at the moment the only people that we can know use these caves are the pigs so are you saying that these bones could have been dropped by the actual people who did those carvings it's a strong consideration we've got to work to that idea to start with but what we got didn't prove it but sloping cave isn't the only place where we found bone on our side our first trench over on the plateau found similar looking evidence of occupation although that was at least two meters below the modern surface so to try and find out what was going on here we're now digging a new trench close to the entrance of the well cave it's really loose so it's probably fall yeah this is more than just rock fall these clean angular pieces of stone are debris from the construction of McDuff's Castle in the 15th century and that means anything directly below it will date to the same medieval period as the find being uncovered inside the well cave fridge yeah you're getting all puffy over there that I'm in we've got no pod we got the ominous bone but Alistair has got a little bit of pottery out there still from the 14th century so it's outside the well whether or not this is evidence of the Hermits who are meant to have lived here remains to be seen but what's more surprising is the bridge can't find any evidence of a water source for the well that gave this cave its name must be the natural back on the plateau the archaeological evidence is now suggesting we're looking at a human presence here that stretches back well before even the earliest days of the pigs if we begin at the beginning and we begin with the wave-cut platform here that's this smooth rock in front of us that's right that was cut by wave action and we know from the geologists that that was cut about from about six and a half thousand years ago so that's Mesolithic so that's one to gather a period when people are there not farming right no that's right that's before farming we've then got these midden deposits and they've been churned about by the sea we've got a lot of shell and sand sea sand in there but we've also got a lot of animal bone and some of this is domesticated animals so that's telling us that it's Neolithic so that's after hunter-gatherer place after hunter-gatherers so somewhere in this is a change from hunter-gatherer period to end people actually farming well yes and that's right over the wave-cut platform so if there was any Mesolithic it's all been mixed up and we can say that that lowest does deposit there is Neolithic or later it would seem that almost as soon as this land and these caves were carved by the receding waters of the forth people were using them for shelter and farming and Stuart is pretty sure where these people came from been having a look at all the aerial photographs and where things occur this there's big Iron Age Hill thoughts sort of over that area there's evidence of the picture settlement over here and beneath where we're standing on this hill here there looks to be evidence of a possible Bronze Age burial mound so all in all you've got a very active farmed intensively occupied landscape in fact it's no different then to what it is today this photograph shows it well you got settlement to be SUIM here around this valley and the coastline in people living here and coming up and carving the names on the caves it's no different to what was happening in the the Bronze Age the Iron Age and in the Pictish period it's just I like that continuity people are doing now what they did thousands and thousands of years ago okay the majority of people lived above the cliffs but that doesn't mean that some including pigs weren't living down in the caves we just need archeological evidence to prove it oh look at that and there's a little bit there look but that's that's a cracking piece look at that and in the sloping cave fills now wading through a mass of human detritus think there's any don't know that it's human occupation did you ever doubt it never was any - every day - there could be charcoal pot ready the charcoal from you even general small small mammals or a pin bone whatever this is the real the real answers are in irregularly seviche whether or not its occupation related to the caves Pictish carvings remains to be seen but at the minute these are the only proof that the pics visited here our own attempt to recreate one of these enigmatic symbols originally found as part of the Pictish hoard has been going well until now I forged it out as far as I can from being as I cast yesterday but I've come to stop now because cracks are forming around the edge and I can't get a bigger piece out of it it looks like sort of a pastry cracks when you roll it out but of course this you can't ball it back up against No so has the experiment convince you that the Pictish silver could have been made using this ingot and hammering technique oh yes no problem I just needed to cast a bigger ingot luckily we brought along a spare for just such an emergency but the last couple of stages of the FID least with some of the inscription barely more than a hair's breadth victim that looks incredibly difficult given the pencil and paper anytime and there's still no guarantee that the enamel inlay will properly fire on our makeshift Forge we've now only a few hours left of day three and on the plateau the diggers are almost through the thick layer of 15th century rock debris but in the sloping cave phil has stopped digging come on it 41 centimeters from the section right I mean densely around there's just too much archaeology in the trench and some of it has to be recorded before it's removed it's still got to be done precisely I'll push it I mean the fact is you see well what we've done we've got them onto this floor this where these stones are dad no no this black stuff right the bond that is the floor hey [ __ ] Oh big boulders and all of you that's just a beach deposit which is actually coming in that's actually protecting the floor I've always been marvelous but if you look at that level there that floor and you look at those chlorines on the wall yeah cast your mind back to Jonathan's cave and how low those ivories were to the floor so they could have been done by somebody sitting on that floor in fact exactly that could well be the Pictish floor all right it feels right this would be the first evidence of pics living in and not just visiting these caves he nearly finished gunfire we just got it but the history of the sloping cave is just part of a much larger complex timeline down on the eroded beach Douglas believes he's uncovered a relic from a different era of Wiens history this is a stone it's standing upright of any unnatural position for it to be in and it's actually contained within a large cut the obvious question is who did it and why did they do here well we don't have the exact answers to that no but one thing we do know that within the last few years we've had two skeletons come out from this area behind us there's no soil there now because the Seas eroded it all the way and we've had carbon dates for these so we know they're about 10th 11th century AD indeed so it's possible that this is a stone which marks a Christian Cemetery and they may very well be further Christian burials behind this stone but at the mention quite significant well it's very significant oK we've now managed to unpick medieval fat from fiction do we know how deep the well is well I'm not sure if I'd want to call it a well anymore I like the word pool a little bit yesterday we dismissed the myth of a tunnel running up to the medieval castle and now bridge has discovered that the well that gave the well cave its name isn't well oh well well suggest that you're actually tapping down into the ground to get water but there seems to be an area where there's a natural accumulation of water and somebody has come along at some point and cut a bigger area to catch that water if you can see here on the side quite sharp edges and if you had a naturally formed pool you'd have pebbles scouring round and round and round and round you'd have quite vertical edges and they'd be quite flat we don't have that here that definitely looks like someone has been manipulating changing the sides have we any idea who made it not at the moment but outside the well over there we do have a proliferation of 14th century pottery suggesting that the main time of activity here is 14th century and that is when the Hermit seemed to been in this area so we've got a hermit spool will it be very nice we've even got a stone just down here that sort of the morphology of it likes it look as if someone's been stepping in and created a footprint we're on it there's just one drawback to your theory there is absolutely no water in there well if you look down here there's a wee bit here and look at the glistening of this rock here this is where the water is seeping out and into it but it's not enough to wash a dirty hermit no it's not but it's gonna seep through seep through and of course you've had a change in the water table levels the amount of wear on the step and the effort that's gone into making this pool suggest this was a facility that was in use for a long time it's very possible that Hermits were the first people to take advantage of the rock face seeping water but the trench outside the well caves entrance points to other more practical people also living in this cave and you can actually see in the bottom of this this deposit ocean line got these very distinct marks these linear dark features these are close arcs which are going right didn't dare to hope that's what they were this need bit of stratigraphy shows how much the plateaus changed in the last 600 years at the top is a thick layer of Victorian landscaping below which are the rocks that were dumped here when the 15th century castle was built above the caves then there's this layer of soil which we now know is full of dumped organic material it's a bone charcoal shellfish and the plow marks at the bottom of the trench show that the people who lived here were putting that waste to good use it shows us that this area of land is being cultivated with plows or ours in this area so the great dump of domestic debris and phosphorus food remains everything is fertile off actually plowing it to grow so the crops in the top that's exactly what they're doing what sort of date do you think that is then notice it's very difficult to ascribe an exact date what we can do in relation to other layers we can say that this material here is 15th century and so everything below this red layer has got to be pre 15th century so this is probably medieval it probably relates to the occupation of the caves and perhaps anywhere before the 10th to 15th century and it looks like the sort of level it might be in the cave so that it's sort of related perhaps to that strata coming that another really helpful thing about this layer because it's being plowed we can tell it was formerly a ground surface and if we relate an act to the levels of the keys we can see it was actually formerly quite a level clatter almost coming out from this grassy area into the caves they did well spot that did they're the bottom of that hole that's a very good piece of excavation indeed it would have been very easy to to travel through there and this means that this whole part of the coastline would have once looked very different 600 years ago the entrance to the well cave would have been a much more welcoming prospect and as well as providing refuge to Hermits it may also have once been home to the people who farmed the plateau throughout the Middle Ages it would also suggest that the sloping cave where Phil's been working probably wouldn't have required a degree in potholing to enter it what we were looking at that brown stuff with all the black charcoal yeah was actually trampled lying on the top of this floor and you can see that quite clearly in a scenario it's probably about that thick and the stone floor itself well you can see it's a bit equity piggledy but it starts here which is part of the natural boulders right and that's part of it there that natural boulder there but the interesting thing is when you get to here you actually get stones that are laid in there deliberately you can see it is a nice level survive sort of leveled it up to go with a spoken-- do you think it's Pictish I'd love to say it was it really would I mean it is still a good height for our car of it yeah but realistically I can't actually tell you I think the truth is we're gonna have to fall back on science and get a radiocarbon date and Phil now has his proof subsequent radiocarbon analysis of barley grains lifted from the occupation layer dated it to between 240 and 400 AD which covers the late Scottish Iron Age and the beginning of the Pictish period so really we've got to leave what's underneath for somebody else I'm aware that's too good to disturb we're beginning to get an idea of just by looking in the cracks of what's underneath and it looks like it is good clean deposit so I mean there may be other occupation levels underneath but this is as far as we're going that's nice I like that the discovery of this floor is a first for these caves proof that people lived here during the era of the pics the most mysterious people in British history are people who left no written records of their nation just enigmatic and stunning artistry there we are that it finished yes it's finished it is absolutely beautiful well done you please yes thank you is coming very well I'm very pleased by that the thing that really comes across to me is that contrast when the really high professional craftsmanship that's gone into making this is so different to the sort of graffiti level of the same designs carved on the caves here but even these crude carvings are personal declarations of the Pictish identity and our new evidence shows they not only visited these caves but some actually lived here it's now only a matter of time before the Weems caves disappear but at least we've helped to protect their legacy cutting-edge technology has digitally preserved the carved interiors while the archaeology we've uncovered has told the story of a coastline that's had a brief but very eventful history living by the sea in a beautiful spot with a good roof over your head has always had its appeal and we found evidence of people using these caves since the earliest times when they first rose out of the water and that evidence seems all the more important because now seems to be the time when they're about to return to the city you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 392,855

Rating: 4.8585153 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: rp_TLZwKVtc

Length: 48min 14sec (2894 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2013