Villas out of Molehills (Withington, Gloucestershire) | S13E02 | Time Team

this is whittington in the cotswolds an area of outstanding beauty with a lot of rich farmland and some very classy houses in roman times it seems to have been pretty much the same because 200 years ago plowman somewhere around here discovered a huge villa excavations revealed some exquisite mosaics but no one was able to date the villa and there's no record of exactly where it was but that's just the beginning of our story 200 meters below the villa field is this lovely little spring and guess what roman mosaic and roman tile have been found here and in this field over here no one's dug here but the two sides are too close together not to be connected could the big villa over there have had a huge complex of buildings down here could it be a bath house or given the proximity of this water could it even be something sacred like a temple we've got just three days to find out the cop's walls are in the very heart of england two thousand years ago this was the bread basket of roman britain and by the middle of the second century siren sester had become the second most important town after london we were invited to whittington just a few miles from siren sester by local archaeologist roger box who's given us a couple of juicy leads before raj you've already located one fantastic villa for us when you found turk dean a few years ago why are you so excited about this site well i don't know but all i do know is every year the moles that are in this field and there are a lot of moles in this field keep pushing up these small tesserae cubes literally by the hundred we've got a villa just a few yards up there yeah so could we have another villa here i think it could but i'm more interested actually in the spring which is under the bush over there this is called whittington by the wall well which rather suggests it was you know perhaps named in the saxon period and we know that romans when they come in they often take over pre-existing sites like springs which are religious interest and put temples and turn them into their own religious sites temple well maybe this is a very unusual location it's very wet down here there's a lot of water about it's going to flood i think it's much more likely that main villa is further up the slope but perhaps this is the predecessor the early villa which would then replace the later villa further up the slope david what about these bits of mosaic do they give us a clue well this could belong to an early villa um but i think it's more likely a bath house so we could have elaborate bath house associated with with a villa either down here or up there or and perhaps we could have a swimming pool associated with an early bird the the the important thing which i keep going back to is what is the relationship between what is happening down here and the really big villa up there all right if you were all gambling men which i know that none of you are what are you going to say this is a temple i'd like a temple early villa villa to all bath house [Music] our site is on the slopes of the valley of the river coal which flows right past this lower field [Music] besides mosaics in the mole hills it's full of mysterious lumps and bumps as you can see there's huge anticipation as henry and giofiz do what they have to do by 10 o'clock we've got a massive target i mean i see a place there that's crying out for a trench and it's got to go just in there can you locate us on that then of course i can come on can you dig it so our first trench goes in near the river no sooner has phil got the turf off the mosaic pieces start appearing got our first one look oh nice teshra start the topsoil yeah wouldn't matter it proves roger wasn't planting them oh look there's another one popping out all over the place yeah so we're off to a flying start in our first trench we still don't know of course whether there are buildings down here but we're optimistic because we do know that there was a roman villa just across the slope in the upper field it was discovered in 1810 just five years after the battle of trafalgar and some fabulous mosaics were unearthed which are now preserved in the british museum this site is protected by english heritage but bizarrely they don't exactly know where the villa is we've offered to find it more fool us the villa was excavated by an eminent antiquarian called samuel license and that's the problem really because he seems to be more interested in chasing mosaics than he was in working out the extent of the villa so our first job's gonna have to be to find it but john we've got these zonking great pylons here aren't they going to get in your way this shouldn't be too much of a problem if we're actually close to the metal pylons themselves maybe but um the overhead wires shouldn't be these instruments are designed to filter out that sort of noise better get going than you right so look at this is this a big villa well i don't think it is tangling because if you look at the scale you know it's only about 120 130 feet across which you know is not that big really it's i've orientated it more or less as we think it is do we know if he excavated the whole thing no we don't know that we've got his plan on the walls here and we've got a nice uh watercolor he did himself of the excavation which is quite nice it's typical early 19th century they followed the walls and they've opened up areas where the mosaics are but you can see here that they've actually left the areas of soil in the rooms i haven't actually dug those so you know we don't know whether he dug the whole thing we don't know whether he dug everything even in the areas that he did dig so realistically we could end up digging something that someone's already dug yeah but i don't think that's a problem you see because archaeologist moved on in the last 200 years there's lots of things we would want to know that he wasn't interested in he doesn't for example seem to have kept any of the fines any of the pottery any of the coins wasn't interested in that whereas if we could find those in the backfill when you know over the site that would at least give us some broad date ranges of you know when the thing was occupied we don't know that at all there's already a race on between stuart and geo fizz to find license villa stewart's armed only with licensed watercolour it doesn't seem much to go on it was painted 200 years ago jiffys have been out searching for two and a half hours already with two different sorts of equipment and still not much is showing up the pylons could be their problem curiously it looks as if stuart's using the pylons to his advantage have you done i think we have a multicultural success actually i'm pretty confident this has been drawn from anywhere between where that pylon is there and where we're standing now looking up this slope so if it's where the pylon is then it's on the other side of the road in the next field yeah you've got to remember though when licensed drew this this road hadn't been built there so it wouldn't appear in this drawing but look you've got a very very strong correlation between these trees up here on this ridge those are those trees up there you've got the hill to the right that's where the the pylons go over drops down comes up a notch here you can see over there and this band of trees is that far band of trees on the ridge over there and in between you've got this crest line which is the top of the slope showing the thing has been drawn somewhere on this slope up above us but one of the things i was always taught about roman villas is that they have a spectacular view you wouldn't really call that view spectacular well depends how you find spectacular of course because if you turn around what this villa does is looks towards the south and a lot of roman villas do face the south because you get the sun all the year round there are so many tesserai or pieces of mosaic coming out in the lower field that phil's put the machine away to avoid any damage to the archaeology in front of your spade that one yeah another one there nice one that's loads you found loads and all i've done is the top soil from there to there found about 10. yeah but what we want is to get them in a floor remover in the lunch hour roger's got some volunteers together to search the stream near the spring this is where he's previously found roman roof tile oh here we go these are bits of sandstone and they're not cotswold natural stone they probably come from the forester dean or something so this is sort of a typical roof tile which seems to be predominant going up through here we've barely been going five hours phil says he's found something to bring me out in goose pimples what you got oh look this is what we got we got a mosaic look there it is isn't that absolutely incredible and look it goes right the way across there it's still going there look it's still going look there it goes and you can see so there it is let's have a go certainly go on see there it is slimy o'reilly it's still here two square meters already wow i know and of course it's going back in through there and the further it goes back in there the better protected i think it's going to be because i think here we're right on the edge of where it's been taken away by the plowing when we say a roman mosaic this is just white with the occasional bit of redding isn't it it's not it's not pretty oh come on tony what do you mean it's not pretty look it's a roman mosaic how often do you find a roman mosaic just like that on day one very very rarely did you think that there might be a floor as close to the well this is where the mosaic's been coming from yeah you know this is where the mole's been pushing it up and it's a bang on cue well that's a good start isn't it incredible absolutely incredible all right show us the rest of it gfis have got their first results from the upper field there's occupation here but it's not all roman look the first thing to note is the polymers have had a very minor effect at the top but don't worry about that what we appear to have is a series of curving ditches i mean i'm sure that's probably prehistoric but we do have an area of noise and that's what we're hoping we might see that would go with the roman brick and tile and then beyond that a series of rectilinear regular sort of ditch systems well i think yeah we could be pretty clear you found the villa haven't you john i mean that's you know there's your rectangular range it's about the right size of what license found and then look and we've got the courtyard out in front so it's a classic romano british villa with a main range and a front courtyard as well but that is very very noisy looking splodges you can't see any clearly defined walls there no but it has been partially excavated hasn't it so we could be seeing the backfill of the excavations as well as the roman material so at four o'clock we open up the first trench to be dug in this field for nearly 200 years we're expecting to find roman walls but we might only find rubbish from licensed spoil heap oh yes okay one time there we go well that fits in nicely with the other finds that we're getting a lot of tile bits of brick and things like that i mean really this is just what you would expect the victorians to be thrown back into the hole really because you know they didn't they just weren't interested in this kind of stuff so you know we are just digging through a spoiled heap effectively in the lower field the archaeology is just getting better and better phil's uncovered loads more of the tessellated pavement i was scraping earlier at the other end of the trench matt's beginning to find the walls of a structure in amongst a lot of rubble look at it there it is geofiz who've split into two teams have a hunch there's also a villa down here by the river their first magnetic results told us where to dig now by using resistance they should be able to pinpoint the walls and the outline of any building that may be here our first trench in the upper field has delivered good archaeology but we can't begin any evaluation work on the scheduled villa until we're sure that we found it rich where are we we're on a roman wall you can see it's completely running off in that direction and we've got two faces one running up here and one on this side here it's meeting about 50 centimeters across but the problem is what's going on on either side of it we've got this really dense material here we've got various things coming out of it compacted material look we've got here tesserae coming up we've also got a few bits of this greyware roman pottery oh look even licenses beer brothel i don't think that's roman yeah i mean it's very striking isn't it this is very hard and compact and that's very brown and soily i mean i would lay some good money that's licenses trench there yeah this is intact roman demolition on this side but i guess the key is we're gonna find out if we extend the trench exactly the ideal thing would be to try and define at least one room [Music] by the end of our first day we found more archaeology than we often see in three days there's even a second mosaic at the other end of phil's trench the problem as always is understanding what's going on phil you see this side of the mosaic here well earlier on you were saying you thought it was plowed damage but isn't it an edge well it is an edge and and the thing is that it is not caused by plow damage i admit that now but now we've got the whole trench open i really can tell you what's going on what we've actually got at this end of the trench i think we're outside the building and you can see we've got the collapsed roof which has come sliding down out here here's the main uh back wall or front wall of the building this we now know is a corridor going through so your stray edge becomes part of the next wall which has been robbed out and now inside here we've got the main rooms of the building with a collapsed mosaic where's the mosaic mat we've got one piece there that bit there and that long piece going across there so it's quite extensive isn't it so what are we going to do here tomorrow well we've got john's new geophysics this has got the resistance on it isn't it yeah and i think what's exciting about the results is when we only got the magnetic we thought we might have just a simple maybe three roomed villa now we've got the resistance it clearly shows that the rooms extend in this direction it's much bigger and more complex than we thought so we're going to do a bit more with this area tomorrow and then target a trench somewhere in the middle here probably a 10 10 something like that and what about our villa up there well the big news tony is we've actually found licenses villa but the problem is you actually know where we are in it so we're gonna get a trench across it tomorrow let's work out where we are on his plane and i've been looking at the spring over here which is very fishy we need to look at that again tomorrow so we've got a fishy spring and we've got a roman building that no one ever heard of before that's not bad for day one is it but how does this building link to our villa up there let's hope we find out tomorrow beginning of day two and yesterday we found two roman mosaics in that trench there where we didn't expect to find any but over on that hill where we hoped we might find a mosaic we still haven't found one but more immediate interest to me is this spring here last thing yesterday evening meg come out over there a second mick said to me that he thought this spring was fishy well i've been poking around it all morning mick and i haven't found even one stickleback yet so what do you mean well when i came down here yesterday evening i cleared all these nettles and grass away yeah i expected to see the water oozing out of the ground you know as you do in the spring and instead of that i found this big stone basin yeah here look and these couple of stone channels you see why that's been cut through the middle there yeah is this roman stuff well i think it could be but rather more interesting is that the water doesn't ooze out of the ground here it actually comes out of a stone-built channel look so it's not a spring at all well the spring must be somewhere back up that way and it's been channeled to this point here hang on a minute we thought that there was a spring here and that there would probably be a building a temple or something that respected it and it might be that building there yeah well it obviously can't be it's too far away from the spring now so does that imply there might be another building we haven't found yet over there somewhere there could be somewhere back up where this is coming from so i think we need to jeopards in this field and see if we've got any structures up there now excellent so beginning of day two and we've got yet another target not a bad start [Music] the romans were renowned for their water engineering but if this is a roman culvert it seems odd to go to such trouble to bring fresh running water down to these buildings from a spring further up the valley when the river was so close [Music] henry is marking out the grid so that geophys can begin searching for the spring head where there might be a temple structure in the lower field our roman experts might have the answer they've been looking at the fines from this trench and they're now convinced that the building was a bath house a basic roman bath house had three rooms a warm room a hot room to sweat out your dirt and a cold plunge pool to cool off they think we're digging in the hot room oh come on how can you tell that from one trench because it's got distinctive types of tile including this one which is a verswile which is the one of these box tiles forming the vault in the ceiling so you literally get a tube of correct of boxes going around allowing the hot air to circulate up the walls and around the ceiling so this this sort of odd shape is deliberate oh yes that is incredible so that's it and we've even got a bit of the vault this is a chufa nice light limestone so you can get the whole of the stone vault for half the weight so you get a really good stone vault instead of a wooden roof which would rot in a hot steamy room so is this the vaulted sort of roof that has caused narrow mosset to collapse in highly likely yeah and presumably it all belongs to the fourth century that's what the coins are saying anyway that does it because i've got a piece of box tile here from the from a wall box tile which is which has roller stamp decoration and is almost certainly first or second century implying therefore that we may have an earlier bath house on the site so this decoration is literally put on with a roller coaster piece of clay and you as opposed to as opposed to a comb decoration freehand comb decoration hey this is really good really because it looks as though we've got not one bath house but two bath houses yes i need to get my head around this david and richard are saying that we've got two phases of bath house here 300 years apart and as this might be a hot room could there possibly be a hyper coast an underfloor heating system right here under the rubble the floor certainly looks hollow at this stage we don't know if these are air pockets caused by the collapse or if there is something more engineered like a hyper cost running back under our mosaic pavement [Music] our search in the upper field was supposed to be the easier task the 19th century antiquarian samuel license excavated an important villa here during the summers of 1811 and 1812. this is his own record of the walls and mosaics he discovered but we're still searching for licensed trenches and because this is a scheduled site we can only dig an area of 100 square meters each trench has to deliver important information [Music] in the lower field john deere fizz has just got the latest magnetic results for the area around the bath house are they impressive or is it just the color scheme crikey john that's good what have you got that's really good isn't it that is your trench phil right the mosaic coming through this way and this is the stream following this edge here so clearly we've got this sort of big room extending in this direction so is that edge there the same as this breaker slope behind us here yes yes we've got a day and a half left well i think if we go across this edge and find the limit yeah yeah what do you actually think that is john well i'd like to think it might be a plunge pool really good a plunge pool well at least john's theory fits in perfectly with the plan we'll see if this is a runner once phil's got through the topsoil we're almost halfway through day two and i'm beginning to get really frustrated about this so-called villa which is up on this hill because we still haven't been able to find it and quite frankly you two are just flashing around i'm a little perplexed tony um this should be our roman villa can you see here very clearly there's a rectangular structure with a courtyard out in front on the basis of that we put our test pit in there problem is i can't really find a test pit to what lyson says we should be finding we should be in here but you've got a wall in the trench yeah but it doesn't look like license has been there before us it's untouched it's virgin ground and thirdly i can't relate any of it to the landscape setting but i talked to you yesterday and you said there's no problem i know where the villa is because i've worked it out on the picture i still don't see any problem i'm not as perplexed as neely's here because we've got lots of other evidence as well as licensed stuff we've got the stone it looks behind you we've got we've got stones sticking out the ground oh wow yeah yeah there's there's a lot more further down there tonight oh it goes on isn't it yes it's not the only one by any means so this isn't just sort of circle the scatter no no i think this is you know this would turn out to be part the villa and say it's not the only one there's more down there yeah other evidence we've got this slope down here in the ground so we're on top of a terrace and look at the we've talked yesterday about the view perfectly oriented towards that view the courtyard that neil showed you on there that's that low area it's actually cut out of the slope well this is quite interesting i've got a good stew at this because there is this noise on the geophysics so perhaps license excavation took place here not there might we possibly be able to put another trench in and check this i think a test put in here say two by two because you know if we can find licenses dig it means we've got one building and the second one he's never seen before so neil gets a new test pit underway right on top of stewart's anomaly in the lower field john's getting excited about his plunge pool phil's being very patient i'd like to think you've got a wall somewhere there and a wall somewhere here we've got a definite change there they're outside of the room here yeah that's the definitely the edge of it but this is there's well there is a lot more look at that yeah you push your trowel right in there you can't appear well i reckon between those two walls we'll have the plunge pool well i think we can clean a lot of this more off with a digger we'll find your walls and then we'll see what you're right oh i'll come back when you've done it shall we makazi i do sense a slight reluctance on phil's part to share in john's enthusiasm but the simple fact is that we've got great archaeology here which can't be said for the upper field bridge has extended our first trench here but after nearly a full day's digging it looks like we're still clutching at straws where are we then bridge you're in a trench where it's a bit of a confused state of affairs right so we know we've got a roman wall here behind me but either side of it we've got this demolition rubble it's throwing up loads of late 4th century pottery so we know it's good but it's looking very undisturbed at the moment so this hasn't been dug through by a license as far as you can see then so we're not in the area of his excavations in fact i think that's clearly in situ isn't it that's undisturbed by licence is there any point in doing any more here in fact well not really because all we've got is demolition rubble and the scheduling of it means that we can't actually go into that so we can't generate any more information we don't want to disturb this do it because it isn't the area that we were looking at was disturbed before yeah so what we shut this down i think the key is to record this yeah shut it down i think we should get john back for some detail resistivity let's just see if we can get a clearer plan of the villa which then relates to licence and then they'll say okay that's where we're gonna put a trench right okay well let's do that and and then props put some trenches across the sort of new area of survey yeah yeah okay sadly stewart's anomaly turned out to be a modern field drain so we'll continue to search for licensed trenches tomorrow with the help of gfiz one of the questions we asked ourselves yesterday was how did licensed villa relate to the buildings in the lower field we still don't know what's more phil's hit his first hurdle well roger we resolved john's geophysical anomaly oh yeah it's not as good as we would hope one thing it is not right it is definitely not a plunge pool okay what it is right is an infield quarry this is all made up ground blue stone i think what they've done is they've dug a slot into the side of the hill to take the stone away yeah and that's what john was seeing on the geophysics the thing of it is it's not all doom and gloom because we do actually have some preserved roman archaeology in here then we've got in there look got it and animal bone so i think what's happened is that literally this quarry has chopped away all the roman archaeology janja fizz is not going to be happy his ambitions for a plunge pool have just been reduced to a pile of old stones but there's plenty more to be getting on with we should know if we've found a temple or a spring head by the end of the day there may be a sense of euphoria at the coal face because our fines have been so spectacular but on site with so much going on i'm worried that we're spreading ourselves too thin we've got a cracking couple of days they really have i mean the quality of the archaeology is absolutely sighted not only that we've got a new mosaic too absolutely we're the one that's broken down in absolute cracking new mosaic yeah well we could all pat ourselves on the back on the other hand we could say we came here to find a villa we've got a responsibility to find a villa and we haven't found it at all and on the lower side we still don't know what the thing is we have no idea what we do we do one day we do know what it is it is a bath house we know how big it is we know how well preserved it is we've done we do good days work the top side is still a problem you know because we we haven't really dropped on that yet have we and not only that but that was the reason that we came here now we want half of the reason we were given specific permission to come here we had a special piece of paper from someone on high that said that we evaluate that top site in order to find where licensed villa was and have we found it we haven't got anywhere near finally we've got a strategy we might get there yet you know we've done it yes we've got another day left what we really need to see is john's resistivity results what have we got on the gfis uh not a lot i'm confident that we've got the villain based on the magnetics but we haven't got a clear wall plan based on the resistance but if you take us as you've done to where we where we think it is then we put some big trenches in there you've got the meat ridge too you ever have yeah we have we've done 35 of the area we're allowed we may have plenty of meterage but we haven't got plenty of labor we have because if we pull most people off the bottom having done the evaluation here we can put most people on the top we know what the lower site's all about then we can you can dig what a couple of trenches i think two trenches each long enough to get the whole whip for the villa i'm confident i am confident but by tomorrow night we will have found licenses planned as you were at the beginning of day one john all that begs the question the third potential site the middle field yeah possible spring head now you've gif is that we certainly have and well uh oh it's a team yeah come on man yeah bottom field mosaics yeah that's where the well is yeah look at that oh my god crikey it's just an amazing series of responses you'll presumably finish that bit tomorrow won't you yeah but i mean look at this for the moment that mix just just said that all the labor's got to go to the top field when you're gone i think the key is we must get our trenches open first thing tomorrow morning labour in there let's make some progress and then we can freeze them later for there effectively we're beginning to think of closing that site down because i think we've answered what we can so do i complacent archaeologists or archaeologists doing their job properly i'll leave it entirely to you but tomorrow we're going to find the light and hopefully we'll get a temple too cheers to you [Laughter] beginning of day three on our roman dig site here in the cotswolds and the big challenge today is to find the lost roman villa only problem is where to dig and how it's a big field and not many hours left well that's the problem we need to hit as many of these walls as possible on the license plan to know that we're in the right place where the villa is i mean here's the villa on the geophysics you know very clear it's about the same length as license but you know did license dig here or did you hear yeah i think we've got to go somewhere across that noisy area something like that yeah and i'd say a 20 meter long trench that gives us the full width here so we get as many walls as possible and then we can say okay now we know where we are the trouble with a narrow trench bucket with is you won't know which walls you've got on this plan i'd like to see this open a bigger area up so we can try and understand this yeah but if we open a bigger area up to start with and we're in the wrong place then we've used our allowance i mean i'm fairly confident mick that if we open one trench one and a half meters wide we'll know if we're in disturbed area or not we know where the license has been there yeah and if he hasn't we've still got enough allowance for another trench to go somewhere else yeah okay well let's let's start with that yeah and and then if if we think we're in the right ear we can open a bigger area up to see more of it that would be the best way to do it reluctant agreement and fresher [Laughter] [Music] considering all the extraordinary and unlikely things that time teams discovered over the years you'd think we'd be able to find a scheduled roman villa it comes down to a battle between technology and instinct john stung by seeing his plunge pool idea reduced to a pile of rubble says the upper feels too dry to get really crisp resistance results which would help us see walls clearly so we're having to use magnetometry i don't know what john thinks but i can't see any walls in there stewart's always been tantalized by licensed watercolor his instinct tells that the villa should have been built in a rather different place but for now we're following the geophys and it remains to be seen who's right it looks like we might be having the a bit of a wall camera spread here this all looks disturbed round here to me i think i feel much happier yep definitely has a feeling that someone's been here before us yeah what's the giveaway is his stuff just comes off so easily doesn't it it just literally peels off onto this level almost as if someone's dug this out before and then just loosely put the earth back on top last night we wanted to close down the lower field we've solved roger's mole hill mystery we're convinced it's a roman bath house complete with collapsed mosaic floors but every trench seems to be producing more and more stuff last night phil did open another trench to check out the pile of rubble but was shocked to find lots more walls this has made him think again about john gator's plunge pool idea and as the rubble comes out see that that blue clay i would have thought that could be a lining or something like that sheet [Music] i tell you what if it is clay lined and then it carries on raining like this it really will be a swimming pool cheers fell plunge pool or not the experts are already planning the room layout of course you know he's not going to let me forget about this don't you yeah gator i think i'd better prepare me defense now i think you'd better have it what did john say yesterday he said if it was a plunge pool he'd like to see walls at either end you got the other side there then well i ain't sure but i don't want to risk taking it out if it is now we can see how the rooms of the roman bath house related to each other in this lower field next door to the plunge pool matt's beginning to uncover what we suspected all along david there was a hyper course here an underfloor heating system so this must be the hot room in situ bit of the bath house down there look at this oh definitely that's there the peely for the for the floor this stack here still in situ stacks of tiles called pili supported the mosaic floor allowing hot air to circulate underneath and through flues in the walls we've got some what one two three four five six five yeah and they're still going down as well at least yep getting down there and there's is all over the place you may find another stack somewhere here so close yeah well then sometimes separated by roughly 30 centimeters that's good thanks at last it's coming good in the upper field after all the hours of geophys and collective head scratching they've stumbled on the remains of a mosaic and alongside is the decisive clue a mosaic has been lifted from here and who else would have done that other than our old friend samuel license [Music] it's great to see this at long last but we still don't know where we are on the license plan okay it's 12 o'clock and the hunts on for the temple in the middle field we should have started this trench much earlier but there's a great feeling that we've probably left the best till last jon's chasing one of the biggest responses we've ever seen we all laughed at him when he first identified the plunge pool but he was right and his stock has never been higher john believes these lines are some sort of watercourse that might somehow be connected to the conduit mick discovered yesterday do you think that buildings associated with this wellhead i'm sure right yeah you can see it there on the beds all right yeah meanwhile in the lower field max uncovered more of the peely stack an essential part of the hypercoast [Music] in another part of the trench we can see how the mosaic floor has collapsed into the hypercoast due almost certainly to the roof falling down on top of it stuart's convinced that our three sites make up a classic villa landscape if that is the bath house for our villa it's a heck of a long way away isn't it i don't think it is actually tony because what we're dealing here with is is a concept of views and connection with the earth you've got the villa here halfway up the slope you've got a spring where there's a shrine and going to the bathhouse is part of a journey you probably go down to the shrine pay a bit of homage there then down to the bath house and the same on the way back and it's all within that one view down there and you'd always have the god in your view wouldn't you you would the romans believed that the gods gave them the fruits of the earth they gave them water this this is your domain and within it you've got shrines bath houses you believe the gods are with you on this site whether the gods are with john and kerry remains to be seen as the search goes on in the middle field so far there's nothing but cotswold brash the local stoney soil there's no sign of that spring head nor any of the features that john shaw must be water channels with responses like this john is baffled i'm baffled back in his plunge pool phil's eating humble pie you've dug out your quarry then well yeah except me it's not a quarry what is it john was right it is the plunge pool you're kidding no i'm not can i come here now yeah in fact if you come another under that step there yeah i reckon that that is just about the level of which the roman would have walked across the floor down a series of steps to get into the pool wow this is a roman step yeah so what's that on the other side well that's the other side of the pool it's a lovely substantial war and then the actual floor of the thing is this clay look just a sealant really and then the floor itself for these rather nice red tiles turned out pretty well this digging it's absolutely incredible [Music] just alongside the plunge pool in our hot room trench david is trying to sort out the dating by identifying the different mosaics he believes this one the finest in the building was made in the second century but was put on top of an earlier floor presumably when the owner had saved up enough money [Music] nearly 200 years ago in the upper field samuel license excavated a roman villa and discovered some exquisite mosaics in our dreams we were hoping to find mosaics similar to the fabulous orpheus mosaic which can now be seen in the british museum so are we anywhere near sorting this trench out yeah you can see there's lots of walls running across it and we now know where it is in relation to the villa that licence found oh wow look at this david tell me all about this mosaic well we've got a series of intersecting circles so you can see the semicircle here and here and this is the actual edge of the panel the corner you can see is just about here it's just here and the opposite corner would be roughly in this position it's been plowed out so you can imagine that to be a square panel so when you say a square the pattern is in here with this great big area all the way around called big chess right though yeah quite coarse and we're looking at a mosaic i would say from around about eight ad360 probably made by a local man possibly based somewhere around simon chester and that fits the dates the coins in the trench we've had coins of the three 40s 50s 60s and 70s we've actually got quite a tight dating now okay so we've got the dating but have we managed to work out what this trench means in relation to what lyson found at long last yes this is the mosaic you mean this is this that's right the problem we've had for two days is that we've been chasing license whilst his rooms running in this direction or they're going in that direction so where would the orpheus mosaic have been that would have been under the grass at the far end of the trench in that direction well it's been a struggle yes thank goodness i was able to cheer you on otherwise we might never have worked it out it's all down to you it's disappointing that we didn't find more of the licensed villa that we assumed would be easy to locate the quality of these mosaics alone tells us that this was an impressive 4th century villa occupied most probably by wealthy yeoman farmers the early ancestors of england's medieval knights yesterday back in the lower field the experts thought that there were two bath houses on the site one earlier than the other and today matt found the concrete evidence we've got a huge chunk of open signing concrete but as you can see it's got this lovely kind of curve you know which part oh yeah so i know exactly what this is this is the first floor of this room and it's part of the same phase as the concrete that you've got on the concrete floor that pre-dates the mosaic right so it's the earliest phase and and in this phase i suspect the room was used being used very much as part of the bath house for the use of the bath house as a hot room and the that when the mosaic was put down possibly the use of the room had changed somewhat that there would have formed the base the floor of the bath and here is here's the edge along there that's the quarter round molding yes this has been totally waterproof and at the bottom of the bar um no this is not in situ this has been this has been ripped out yeah and and just dumped but this this isn't quite as fancy as the mosaic there is there so version but yes but it's waterproof so it's vital yeah undeterred by failing to find a spring head john's at it again 25 past five and still the jeopardy worth waiting for though look at this we've got the whole landscape now magnetically here's the scheduled villa a series of prehistoric enclosures surrounding it then we've got this avenue that we saw yesterday now it appears to connect the two fields with the possible shrine down here we still don't really know yeah and then in this field sort of bath house feels as we've been calling it look at the resistance results there's the stream there's the stream just to orientate there's the plunge pool there's the trench with the mosaic look we've got a whole new range corridors rooms absolutely fantastic and basically it extends up the hillside there and even more exciting look at the scale it's actually larger than the scheduled villa up there so is it another villa it looks like it doesn't it it's gotta be two thousand years ago there would have been many more people living in this landscape based on our fines it looks as if a modest range of farm buildings including a bath house was in use by the river just after the roman occupation in 43 a.d this settlement grew into a larger and more affluent complex with its own piped running water but it would have been vulnerable to flooding so perhaps it was the same family that built the villa that licence discovered further up the hill on the site of some other prehistoric farm buildings this later villa almost eluded us but no one could have predicted the quality and the significance of the other discoveries we made we came here because of a handful of tesserai in this field but we found this amazing bath house once romans would have sat among these beautiful mosaics sweating then they would have sprinted over to phil's plunge pool to cool off and exchange the gossip of the day but this being time team in the last few minutes we've been handed this it's geophys of yet another villa up on this slope here it's bigger than lyson's original discovery and part of a huge roman complex because we haven't got time to answer all the questions it raises did it once look out onto this stream was there a temple in that field there did all the buildings in all three fields exist at the same time these will have to remain some of whittington's many secrets [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 387,489

Rating: 4.9105511 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Gloucestershire, Molehills, Roman History, Withington, Roman Villas

Id: CocVcfGJ_Lk

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021