These islands we call home have a rich and varied history
stretching back thousands of years.
But hidden under the ground and underwater
are some amazing treasures just waiting to be found.
Wow!
So, each year, all across the country,
archaeologists dig, dive
and explore their way down...
Oh, this is brilliant.
...searching for fresh discoveries.
And it is completely intact.
Revealing traces of ancient cultures...
- The shoe is 2,803 years old. - Oh, wow.
...and unearthing fascinating artefacts.
Oh, that's a nice thing. What is it?
I've never seen anything quite like it in my career.
Every dig adds new pieces
to the ever-growing archaeological jigsaw...
That's so cool, isn't it?
...That is the epic story of our islands.
This year, I visit digs in some extraordinary locations.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
And I call on the help of a trio of expert investigators...
It's quite difficult to find any other evidence
of things that just don't leave a mark in the archaeology.
This is a really powerful document
because we're getting to hear the voices that we don't usually hear.
...Who delve deeper to answer the questions raised by the finds.
Is all of this already recorded in books?
There was none of this in a book anywhere.
Finally, the archaeologists bring their most amazing discoveries
into our tent...
Astonishing!
...for up-close analysis.
Genuinely rewriting history.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
In this episode, I'll be exploring the best archaeological digs
in southern England.
On a building site in Kent,
archaeologists discover one of the oldest finds
we've ever seen on Digging For Britain.
So what's your ballpark figure at the moment?
Our ballpark figure at the moment is probably about
300,000 to 350,000 years old.
On the White Cliffs of Dover,
a top-secret military installation...
It's a constant 12 degrees down here.
Feels colder than that.
...is opened up to archaeologists.
We have done a fingertip search.
Technology was still confidential then,
- so all of the equipment was smashed into small pieces down here. - Mm.
And, for the first time, archaeologists unearth
a medieval mud dock, building warships
for one of England's greatest warrior kings...
We're going through the entrance to the dock.
...With finds popping up everywhere.
We've got tens of thousands of these things
scattered along the whole foreshore for more than a quarter of a mile.
The South of England - gateway to the Continent.
It's been a centre of human activity for thousands of years,
providing rich pickings for archaeologists.
But not all evidence of human life is found in trenches.
Sometimes you just need to follow the tides.
Our first discovery was made not on an archaeological dig,
but on the edge of the Thames Estuary, in the North Kent Marshes.
It's a favourite haunt for archaeologist Steve Tomlinson,
who's also a mud larker.
He looks for finds lying on the surface of the mud of the estuary.
No trowel or spade is needed here,
just a keen eye and the ability to pick out finds
of real archaeological significance.
Yeah, just having a look on the mud,
see if there's finds, anything unusual
or any pot sherds of any kind.
Just anything that has basically been washed up by the tide.
It may seem a bit haphazard,
but mud larking has led Steve to make some intriguing discoveries.
I've been mud larking for roughly about seven years now.
Every day is different.
You can get really good days and really quiet days.
You just don't know what's going to turn up.
No. Don't care about that one.
It's the thrill of going out there to say,
"What is out there today? What can I get? What can I find?"
Quite interesting.
Looks like we've got a piece of Roman pottery here.
Possibly... second century.
So we call that a combing design inside, which is quite nice.
That's probably going to be a small storage jar.
Yeah, just washed in on the tides after nearly 2,000 years,
so that's very nice.
Some finds are easy to identify.
Others can kick-start a detective trail
involving colleagues, universities and the British Museum.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, looks like some piece of dried skin.
So I'm going to take that,
because that could turn out to be something good,
which would be lovely.
In September 2022, Steve found a scrap of hide or leather like this,
and it's turned out to be something extraordinary.
I saw this flat piece of leather,
which looked like a shoe sole.
So... Thought it'd be interesting,
so I picked it up, just looked really old
and I think that's what really got my excitement going a bit.
Six months later, Steve found something else
which proved to be part of a leather bag.
Both finds have been sent for radiocarbon dating.
And we've also asked archaeological conservator
and Digging For Britain regular Dana Goodburn-Brown
to carry out a microscopic examination of these artefacts.
Steve's come to the tent to see what she's discovered.
Dana, it's lovely to see you again.
- I'm always excited when you turn up with your microscope... - Thank you.
...And this just looks like the most incredible find.
And, Steve, you found it.
Tell me what we've got here and how you found it.
I found these, both of these, mud larking.
- So you're looking along the foreshore. - Looking on the foreshore
and came across this shoe, which is absolutely incredible.
- Can I hold it? - Of course you can.
- Is that all right? - Yes, of course.
Oh, my goodness.
And I suppose being an archaeologist,
I kind of had an inkling it was quite good.
- Can I turn it over? - Yeah, of course you can.
So I sent it off to a carbon dating unit in Scotland.
Right.
And four weeks later, they came back with a date
of 888 to 781 BC.
- Wow! - Which is 2,803 years old.
It was the oldest shoe ever found within the British Isles.
So this places it late Bronze Age, early Iron Age.
- So it's late Bronze Age, yes, or early Iron Age. - Yeah.
- So, at that point, you found the earliest shoe in Britain. - Yes.
This shoe also went up to the British Museum.
- Yeah. - They got no other record.
This is the smallest Bronze Age shoe ever found in the world.
That's amazing.
I'm just imagining this little Bronze Age kid
- running along the banks of the river... - I know.
...And then they come back and their mum goes, "Where's your other shoe?"
- I know. - And it's gone.
And that's it, until Steve finds it.
- Yeah. - I love it. Yeah.
Again, it's opened up history.
You know, we make shoes for toddlers and babies,
and we never knew that actually existed in history.
- It's lovely, isn't it? - Which is amazing.
Cos we're right back in pre-history, there's nothing written down.
- Their mums were just the same. - They're so cute, those little shoes.
- Yeah. - So... - It's lovely.
Dana, what can you say about this leather, then?
- I see you've got your microscope. - I do.
What can you tell by magnifying them?
I mean, the first stop for a conservator
is to look at, record what's there.
And one thing about this shoe, it doesn't make sense, really,
quite what it is and how it can be used,
but most of it is lost edges.
So all around the edge here, so it's either worn away or torn.
Right.
So that means it is a bit of guesswork to figure out
- exactly what shape it started with. - Yeah.
I took it to X-ray because it looked like it was in two layers
and then it does seem to be, like, two layers.
So it's not two layers of the original leather?
It's actually two pieces of leather which have been applied together?
- Yeah, it seems to be. - Stuck together?
- And then what about this bit? - Yes. Well, this...
- You can hold this one, too. - It's still really supple, isn't it?
- It is. - Yeah. - We think it's half of a bag.
And so, once again, a mud larking find,
- 60 foot away from the late Bronze Age shoe. - Yeah.
And sent it off and it came back with a date
of 2578 to 2466 BC.
- Which is the late Neolithic period. - So it's even older.
So it's even older.
It's 1,700 years older than the late Bronze Age shoe.
So we now know we've got the oldest piece of leather
found in the British Isles and the second.
- Found by the same person. - By the same person, yes.
- Honestly, that is incredible. - Yeah.
We don't get organic remains being preserved very often.
And to have ended up finding these pieces of leather
- from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic... - Still in shock.
- ...It's just extraordinary. - Yes.
And do you think this interpretation of that piece of leather
is a potential bag? Does that make sense, looking at it?
Kind of. Again, that's not my speciality.
But the British Museum did think it might be part of a bag.
But I'm fascinated by this residue on the top.
Take a look down my screen here.
Looking at the bag found in the salty mud of the estuary,
Dana is drawn to a small waxy deposit.
What is that strange bit of brownish colour?
Well, it's so interesting.
And it gets even more intriguing.
I can't wait to show you.
This is what really excites me.
- Oh. - These are little diatoms,
- which are little single-celled creatures that live in water. - Yeah.
I think these are freshwater diatoms.
This is stuck on the surface of the oily, waxy thing.
Are they likely to have come from the mud?
- Well, no, because it was found in the estuary, in a salty area. - Right.
- And they're not in the leather. It's only in this deposit. - Right.
So I'm thinking, "Why is it on that?"
Maybe it was carrying fresh water
or while it was still fairly fresh and sticky enough,
it was lost somewhere in freshwater.
So, somewhere along the line, that bag has picked up
these freshwater organisms and it's ended up in an estuary.
- So it can't have come from the estuary. Yeah. - Yeah.
It's just amazing. It's like archaeology an absolutely...
- Micro... - ..microscopic scale, yeah.
And there are clearly more secrets to come
- from these pieces of leather. - I know.
We know how old they are,
we know they're Bronze Age and Neolithic.
- But there's still a lot more to find out about them. - Absolutely.
The scientific detective trail hasn't ended yet.
There's clearly more to be revealed.
But there's enough here already to work out
what the shoe might have looked like.
Professional leather worker Jess Connolly
has been trying to reconstruct its shape.
So when I looked at the leather,
you could see on the leather where the gaps were,
where it looked torn, the bit cut off at the back.
And to me, as a leather worker,
that indicated that those are where holes were
- that had been pulled wider or were degrading. - Yeah.
So I used a bit of poetic licence
and sort of thought, "Well, these will be holes all around here."
And so I started to form the varying sorts.
So...
- ...we have many different styles of the shoe. - Yeah.
- And what it potentially could be. - Yeah.
I believe they would have used veg-tanned leather,
whereby they would have punched the holes in
using what's called a piercer.
And then what I would do is, I actually pin it into place
so that you're able to form the essence of the shoe.
- So we can see now that this is a moccasin. - Yeah.
And then I get... I cut a scrap off to form the moccasin.
That's really lovely.
That's really great to get my head around, actually,
what this shoe could have looked like.
I did spend an awful lot of time looking through various books
to see the styles that are around in that period to give me a clue.
- But we haven't got much. - There's not.
I mean, this is the earliest shoe from Britain.
Yeah, the nearest thing is in Denmark,
the name that I can never pronounce,
something Torvigo with Margrethe Hald and her works.
So you've had a look at some other prehistoric shoes from Scandinavia
and come up with these different ideas?
I think it's very scientific because what you've done is,
rather than plumping for one, you've thought,
- "What are the possibilities here..." - Absolutely.
"..With the evidence that we've got?
- "How could this shoe have been formed?" - Yeah.
We've got all those, you know, high-tech scientific techniques
that we can throw at it,
but also this kind of practical experimentation
is absolutely essential.
- It is, it is. And it's good fun. - Yeah.
The discovery of Britain's oldest shoe from the Bronze Age
is something quite remarkable.
A familiar, everyday object from almost 3,000 years ago.
But the prehistory of Britain stretches back much, much further.
Archaeology focuses on those physical traces in the landscape
left by people who were here long before we were.
And it can complement written history,
but it can also push back even earlier
than anything was written down, back into pre-history,
where we find evidence that is thousands of years old,
even tens of thousands of years old,
and sometimes hundreds of thousands of years old.
Our next dig brings us to the Medway Valley in Kent,
two miles from the centre of Gillingham.
This dig was happening before the construction of a new school -
The Maritime Academy.
The dig was less than 20 miles from Swanscombe,
a place famous for the discovery of ancient Stone Age artefacts,
but also a 400,000-year-old skull from an archaic species of human.
There's always the possibility of finding more evidence
of early humans in these ancient layers of silt and gravel.
I think it's worth going down a bit more.
The excavation at the school site
dug down into gravels dating to 300,000 years ago.
Taking us back...
...into the Palaeolithic period.
Watching over the dig and ready to swoop on anything interesting
was a team led by geoarchaeologist Letty Ingrey.
When we excavate a site like this ahead of a construction project,
it's not possible to hand dig -
it would take years and years,
and there are a lot of kids waiting to start school.
So most of the digging we actually did by machine
and between each pull of the machine,
we had someone on the side of the trench
that would sift through all the deposits
looking for artefacts,
and an archaeologist would also enter the trench between each pull
and have a look at the deposits there
to see if there are any artefacts.
Hang on a sec. Just going to have a look.
It requires huge concentration and focus,
as Stone Age artefacts are extremely rare.
Letty had been working here nonstop for two months
and had found nothing significant
until, one day, something caught her eye.
Something that made all the hard work worthwhile.
I saw the tip first.
The long, kind of pointed tip.
It's something that's unmistakable when you see it.
It's so different from the other kind of pebbles and bits of gravel.
So obviously human-made.
It was the first glimpse of something very exciting.
Ancient stone tools known as hand axes,
and some were huge!
I spend a lot of time digging holes, looking for things,
and it's very rare to actually find them.
It's a big thing. It's what keeps you going.
Rare finds like this give archaeologists insights
into ancient technology...
...from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I've asked Letty to bring her finds to the tent
so I can get a closer look.
But, first, I also want to find out more about the site
where these remarkable hand axes were found.
- So have you got pictures of the site? - I do.
So what I've got, actually, is a photogrammetry model.
So this trench here is about 70 metres long.
- Oh, it's huge! OK. - And about four metres wide.
So, yeah, so it's quite big.
I mean, it doesn't look like there's much there.
I mean, this is the nature of Palaeolithic archaeology, isn't it,
is that very often it looks quite empty.
Yeah, a lot of the time you don't find anything,
but when you do it, it is amazing.
Letty, these are absolutely incredible.
I mean, this one in particular is massive.
So we think this is the third-biggest hand axe
- ever found in Britain so far. - Really?
Yeah, which is quite incredible.
- They're more like large knives as opposed to axes. - Yeah.
It's very sharp, it's very strong.
Would have been really good for things like cutting up meat,
probably other uses as well.
If I look at this one...
- It's, um... I mean, that's a hefty object. - It is.
This type of stone tool is fascinating, isn't it?
Because it goes way back into prehistory and, you know,
very early types of humans were making stone tools
which were actually quite similar to this.
Yeah, I think about 1.7 million, 1.8 million years ago,
- you get the first kind of hand axes in Africa. - Yeah.
And in Britain, I think about 600,000 years ago.
- Yeah, yeah. - That kind of thing.
It's quite extraordinary, isn't it, that you've got a technology
which kind of stays the same pretty much for, as you say,
- 1.7 million, 1.8 million years. - It really works. - Yeah.
I can't stop touching them.
They're so tactile and it's really lovely to see these
- so fresh out of the ground as well. Thank you so much. - No worries.
♪ Let's gather us up
♪ To the heavens above
♪ We can always
♪ Come back, my love... ♪
The South of England is well known for its megalithic architecture,
often built using Sarsen stones -
huge sandstone boulders.
Stonehenge in Wiltshire is a world-famous example.
In neighbouring Dorset, there's an equally rich ceremonial landscape.
For our next dig, we travelled to the windswept Tenants Hill
near Dorchester in South Dorset.
This collection of Sarsen stones
is called The Grey Mare and her Colts.
It's an odd name, but what we're looking at is a Neolithic tomb.
So this is where some of Britain's earliest farmers
would have buried their dead.
And the surrounding landscape in Dorset
is littered with ancient monuments like this.
This megalithic architecture dates back to the end of the Stone Age.
The Neolithic period.
Now, some of these monuments are less obvious than others.
And today I'm here to look at one which is so well hidden
it's only just been recognised.
A community dig is taking place up on this hill.
It's being led by archaeologist Anne Teather.
The team have found what they believe to be a Neolithic tomb,
but there are no huge stones this time,
and only the merest trace of a mound.
- Anne. - Hi. - Hi. - Nice to meet you. - Hello.
Now, you promised me a barrow.
I can't see a barrow. I can see you've got a trench open here.
But how did you find it? It looks so subtle.
So we completed some geophysics,
- and so we know that there is something here. - OK.
We're looking at what we think is a Neolithic oval barrow,
which is a type of mortuary monument
that was common between about 4000 and 3500 BC.
- And that's this whole kind of shape here? - Absolutely.
So we think this central area would have been the mortuary chamber.
And then we had a flint bank that was coming around the outside
- and both an inner ditch and an outer ditch. - OK.
The geophysics provides a rough map, but not much in the way of detail.
The team have dug a trench to try to understand
how this burial chamber was constructed.
So if we just start here, we've got a linear feature coming through.
Yeah. This edge here.
This edge, yes, which is rectangular.
We're just trying to see how far that extends.
But this may be part of the inner chamber.
The inner chamber would have formed the core of the burial mound.
And Anne's colleague, Jim Rylatt, has discovered a series of features
which point towards how this was built.
You've got stones poking out around the edge.
So that's classic post hole.
You dig a big hole, put your post in and then fill the spaces
in around the posts with stones to hold it in place.
And that's another one.
We've got another one there and another one over there.
- Is that potentially an another one? - Yeah, I think so, yes. - Yeah.
I want to clean that up. Have you got a spare trowel?
- You can have mine. - And can I? Can I have...? Thank you.
You may. Please help yourself.
Have a little look at this.
It looks suspiciously like another post hole, doesn't it?
I'm happier excavating skeletons, but, um...
So finding these post holes was really helpful
because it is beginning to give us an indication
- of how the barrow was built. - Yeah.
And that it's got this timber chamber in the centre of it,
and then presumably that flint bank's built up against that
- and then covered in earth? - And then covered an earth.
Yes.
As well as piecing together how the barrow was constructed,
the team are hoping to accurately date it,
and Jim has just uncovered something that could help.
- We've got this large deposit of charcoal. - Yeah.
But at the bottom of it is a big chunk of pottery,
which is good at one level,
because we should get a date for it from the charcoal.
Oh, amazing. If the charcoal's overlying it,
any date you get on the charcoal, you know the pottery predates that.
- Yep. - Yes. - Yeah.
Radiocarbon dating can only be carried out on organic material.
So finding charcoal is a stroke of luck.
But it also gives another clue about how the tomb was used.
The amount of charcoal there is really striking.
So it's likely that this was some cooking vessel.
Somebody's passed away, and they're gathering together to remember them.
And then the results of that feast go into the ditch.
As well as this hidden barrow,
the team are exploring the wider Neolithic landscape
on and around Tenants Hill,
including a circle of Sarsens
that's just a stone's throw away from the tomb.
This is a lovely stone circle.
So what do you think the relationship is
between this and your long barrow?
I mean, they're very close to each other.
They are very close to each other and I think that's quite unusual.
And these stones are just representing the last bit of Sarsen
in this landscape.
So we do wonder if perhaps they were once the facades
- to the long barrow. - Oh, right, yeah.
And had perhaps been moved at some later point
and made into a stone circle here.
And what about the stones themselves? Are they...?
Are they naturally occurring up here on the hill
or have they come from elsewhere?
They've definitely come from elsewhere.
They're not naturally occurring at this size, in this volume
on this landscape.
And there is another location where there are many, many stones,
and we think that they've been brought up from there.
- And how far away is it? - It's only about a kilometre that way. - Yeah?
- Shall we go and take a look? - Yeah. - Absolutely. - I'd love to.
Anne thinks these Sarsen stones were recycled,
taken from the tomb to create this stone circle.
But I want to see where they came from originally,
down in the Valley.
And there's some extraordinary archaeology here.
It's wonderful. It is like a river of Sarsen stones.
They have all fallen naturally in this space.
They would have been on top of the hill.
So out of all the stones here, this one's really special.
- What makes it special? - So this is a Neolithic polishing stone -
a polissoir.
And is that what we're looking at here, this smooth bit?
- Absolutely, yes. - Yeah. How has that happened?
- Somebody's been polishing something on there? - Yes.
So polished stone axes are really characteristic
- of the early Neolithic. - Yeah.
And they make hundreds, thousands of them
- and then polish them to a high lustre and surface. - Yeah.
That's incredible. So it's never been seen before?
- It's never been noted before? - It's never been noted before.
And there's only one other find in England that's similar near Avebury.
- Really? - Yeah.
So you know what was happening here,
that people were polishing these stone axes,
and Neolithic people were probably sitting
- just where we are, doing this? - Doing this. - Yeah. It's brilliant.
Song With No Name by Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane
♪ Sadness for the ones
♪ Who've walked before me... ♪
Some of the earliest traces of communities living in the south
lie hidden beneath our rolling hills and fields.
Others, though, are locked beneath the many layers
of archaeology under our modern, thriving cities.
Origin stories just waiting to be discovered.
There are dozens of beautiful historic cathedrals across the UK.
Most cities have one, some have two or even more,
and the earliest of them go back 1,000 years into the Middle Ages.
But we suspect that many of them are built on the site
of even earlier churches or other buildings.
But, of course, it's very rare
that archaeologists get a chance to test that out.
But they are getting that opportunity at our next dig,
in the grounds of Exeter Cathedral in South Devon.
There are plans to build a new cloister gallery here
to help tell the story of the cathedral's 12th Century origins.
Before construction can start, archaeologists are digging down
into medieval layers right next to the cathedral.
And, in fact, the archaeology being uncovered here
goes even deeper, right back to the foundation of the city
as Isca Dumnoniorum...
...in the Roman period.
The dig is being led by the cathedral's resident archaeologist,
John Allan.
We're standing on a very important archaeological site.
The centre of Exeter has buried Roman remains,
the earliest of which go back to the 1st Century,
to the foundation of Exeter as a legionary fortress
of the 1st Century AD.
And parts of the fortress are under our feet.
It's a significant find because occasions to get down so deeply
into the archaeology of the city arise fairly infrequently.
It's years since we've seen this kind of evidence emerge.
The fortress was originally the base for the Second Augustan Legion,
who arrived as part of the invading Roman army.
Project manager Simon Hughes has uncovered the very point
when Roman Exeter began.
What we're looking at here is the geology,
which is river terrace gravels.
This is prehistoric soil.
We know that because overlying it
is this thick band of reddish clay.
Now, this is important because this was the land surface
at the time when, in about 55 AD,
that the Roman Legionary Army arrived. And we know that
because this orange clay, this is what they laid down
as a levelling and through which they would have constructed
their barrack buildings.
During the height of the fortress,
you'd have had approximately 6,000 soldiers here.
Now, this horizon here between the two deposits
is a lovely point in time, because this was the layer
on which the soldiers would have walked about
when they first arrived in Exeter and set up their fortress.
The dig takes us back to the origins of the fortress.
But the archaeologists are also uncovering finds
that give us a glimpse into the Roman legionaries' lives.
What we have here is fragments from a Roman bowl.
This is what's called Samian ware and it dates from mid 1st Century.
It's got a nice motif of a bird on this one.
And this date is about sort of 40 to 85 AD,
so perhaps was brought over with the troops.
With this, we've got this lovely glass counter.
These would have been like your equivalent to your checkers today,
that sort of thing. So this is part of a gaming set.
So a nice little group of finds.
We know that the Second Augustan Legion was based here
for around 20 years before they moved to South Wales.
And the fortress at Exeter evolved into a civilian town.
Remarkably, Simon has found an intact corner
of a Roman civilian townhouse.
You can see Roman block work here.
And what's interesting is, elsewhere, Roman masonry
had been completely robbed out and reused for medieval buildings.
But this bit they've left in,
which is an absolutely fantastic piece of architecture.
This section here, we're looking at a Roman townhouse floor surface.
We've got the preparation layer,
which is this quite bright red clay,
and sat on top of it this lovely smooth surface here.
So we can really picture what the floor would have been like
within these buildings that the Roman inhabitants of Exeter
would have walked on.
Thanks to this rare opportunity to dig deep under Exeter's cathedral,
archaeologists have discovered new, tangible evidence
of life in the city during the Roman period.
Lost and Found by Johnny Flynn
♪ Just a lonely radio
♪ Just a makeshift show and tell
♪ Playing out the lives of the lost and found... ♪
For centuries, the coastline of the South of England
was where the bulk of our famous Navy was based and built.
By the mid-18th century, Britain had evolved into a naval superpower.
But the origins of the shipbuilding industry here in the South
go back a few hundred years before that.
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah... ♪
There are plenty of shipyards in the UK
where the tradition of shipbuilding goes back for centuries,
but redevelopment over the years
has obscured earlier phases of their history.
But our next site was abandoned,
so archaeologists have been able to peel back time
and reveal an intact medieval shipyard.
The abandoned shipyard is in Smallhythe in Kent.
Somewhat strangely, it's more than ten miles from the sea.
Archaeologists are trying to trace the first physical evidence
of the historic shipyard here.
- Oh! - Oh! Nice. - That's kind of lovely.
Oh, that is lovely.
It's really, really nice.
Smallhythe's shipbuilding story goes back to the 15th century...
...at the end of the Medieval period.
Henry V reigned for just nine years.
But his military victories against France,
including the Battle of Agincourt,
made him a celebrated warrior king, immortalised by Shakespeare.
There are written accounts telling us
that some of Henry V's ships were built here at Smallhythe,
but there's been very little physical trace
of that industry until now.
Where we once potentially had great big ships here,
certainly the lower parts of them, is now just fields.
- That's the inside. Again, something that's... - Yeah.
Nathalie Cohen from the National Trust
is in charge of investigating this 200 acre site.
So this is our site plan.
So we wanted to know more detail about how you would construct a ship
in a landscape that is so, so different to what we see now.
So where is the foreshore?
Where is the deep enough water to launch your vessels into?
So it's all those kind of details
that we wanted to pick up as part of this project.
Over the last two decades,
archaeologists have been trying to establish
the scale of the shipbuilding industry here.
They know that Smallhythe wasn't always
as cut-off from the coast as it looks today.
In 1332, the Knelle Dam was built across the River Rother,
which still flows through East Sussex and Kent.
The dam was built primarily as a flood defence,
but it changed the course of the river, creating a link
between Smallhythe and Winchelsea Beach,
on the coast ten miles away.
Smallhythe suddenly became the perfect place
to build seagoing vessels in large mud docks
dug into the earth on the banks of the river.
So I'm trying to peel back to where I think the real edge is.
Maritime archaeologist Elliott Wragg is trying to track down
those elusive mud docks.
In the medieval period, right now I'd be standing on the river bank
running probably almost along the line of those people in red,
all the way along there and running over across to the east as well.
This would have been a tidal environment.
So if it was low tide, I might be dry.
If it was high tide, I'd be wet.
And we're now walking up onto the river bank
and now we are into the shipbuilding dock proper
here behind the river bank.
The excavation has revealed how the mud docks at Smallhythe
were dug adjacent to the river bank below water level.
Ships were built inside the dock and, when they were ready,
the bank was removed, the dock flooded
and the ships could sail out into the river
and all the way to the sea.
This is dug as a hole. It's not built, it's dug.
And we've got a dark horizon here.
Lots of charcoal.
And this seems to be a horizon before the dock was dug.
And you can see here in the section running up here,
a series of up-cast deposits.
And this is the stuff they're digging out the dock.
They're chucking it up on the side just up here.
So we've had a couple of good bits of pottery just out of here
between this, which is before the dock was dug,
and this, which is the spoil coming out of the dock excavation.
So if we can date this by pottery,
then that will tell us when they start digging the dock.
The pottery is crucial evidence for the archaeologists
trying to understand the medieval origins of shipbuilding
here at Smallhythe.
But the size of the dock is also striking.
It's quite extraordinary, really,
because it's not ship-shaped at all.
The dock is 24 metres long and 22 metres wide.
So what it looks like is that this dock has been dug
for the construction of one ship.
History tells us that royal warships were built at Smallhythe
and it seems the archaeologists have now located the shipyard.
And they're also finding plenty of iron nails and roves, or rivets,
which would have been used to hold the ship's timbers together.
- What is it? - That's a rove.
They found thousands of them all over the site.
The excavations, together with surveys,
are providing evidence for extensive shipbuilding here
with several separate mud docks.
Even though there's a gale blowing outside the tent,
I can't wait to get a closer look at what Elliott and Nathalie have found
and what it tells us about the abandoned shipyard
that once built vessels for one of England's most famous warrior kings.
What we have here is a selection of roves, these diamond-shaped washers.
- Yeah. - Medieval shipbuilding is clinker-built.
- It's shell-built, so it's overlapping planks. - Yeah.
You drive a big nail through it, like this.
- This is a particularly huge example. - That's massive. - Yeah.
So this is from a big ship.
You drive that through the two planks,
you put one of them on the other side
and then you bend the nail back over
and that forces... forces your planks together.
So it's like a rivet.
- It's effectively a medieval rivet, yeah. - Yeah.
And so here we've got the whole range of roves.
They're initially built in strips here and you break them off.
- Oh. - And just use them in strips. - You'd have a strip of them.
I just love all this evidence of shipbuilding. That's fantastic.
- I mean, it must have been busy. - Really busy. - Really busy.
I think you've got to imagine something like a sort of
- mad shanty town with sort of 200 or 300 people. - Yeah.
- Basically living in shacks, kind of Wild West. - Mm.
And what about this coin?
The top of the dock, running behind it, parallel to the shore,
was a gravel road.
The earliest documentation of it is 1474.
And then the road itself seems to have fallen out of use
and collapsed across the top of the dock.
And this coin, which, I think, dates to the 1580s,
was in amongst that road collapse.
So that gives us sort of a nice sort of end point for the shipbuilding.
- So it's Elizabeth I half penny, I think it is. - I think so, yeah.
I can see a cross on that side.
There's a little crescent on it, which apparently helps to date
the penny within Elizabeth's period, which is nice as well,
because we have a 1594 map of the area
which shows the east-west road.
So it's quite a nice marrying up of documentary references,
cartographic references and a little bit of archaeology as well.
- Yeah, that's lovely, isn't it? - Very satisfying.
- Have a bit of absolute dating. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Nice. Yeah.
How many other mud docks have been archaeologically excavated
- in this way? - None. - So this... - To my knowledge.
- So this is a unique site? - I think so, yeah.
Whereas other places we know they're building medieval ships,
London, Portsmouth, Southampton, whatever,
- they keep building ships there. - The shipyard would have developed.
The docks get bigger.
All the early evidence just gets wiped out.
It's another one of these stories where, you know, the demise
of something ends up being an opportunity for the archaeologist.
- Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah.
- I mean, this is the biggest collection of roves... - By far.
- ...Anywhere. - Certainly in the UK, yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Oh, there you go.
The first archaeological evidence of a mud dock.
Yeah. Not bad!
Throughout history, the south coast of England has often acted
as a front line of defence against would-be invaders.
Our next dig takes us to Dover in Kent.
The majestic White Cliffs form a stunning backdrop
to the Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the English Channel.
And this place played an active role in Britain's defences...
...during World War II.
On a beautiful day like this, the coast of France is so clear
and there's a constant stream of ferries taking people on holiday.
Of course, in the Second World War, it was a completely different story.
That was German-occupied territory
and the entire coastline was bristling with firepower.
German forces invaded France in May 1940,
and the British mainland was then within their sights.
The answer to that threat was to build new gun emplacements
all along the White Cliffs of Dover.
But they've been invisible in the landscape until now,
when archaeologists are getting the chance
to excavate and reveal them.
In 2017, the National Trust acquired a huge stretch of land
along the top of the cliffs,
including some unique wartime defences.
The guns from the emplacements were removed in the 1950s
and these sites were demolished and covered over.
But now, for the first time,
archaeologists have been given the chance to investigate
these once-classified military installations.
Jon Barker from the National Trust is leading the investigation.
So what are we looking at here, then? Where are we?
So we're at a Fan Bay Battery on the White Cliffs,
and we've been carrying out an excavation
on Emplacement Three over here.
So when you started work here, could you see any of this above ground?
You couldn't see anything.
- Our aim's to understand how much of the emplacement survives. - Yeah.
And how it works in conjunction with a structure called
the Plotting Room, which is located further inland.
There were 38 artillery sites in and around Dover,
but most were mobile.
The only permanent sites were the defences
on top of the cliffs.
The stars of the show were two huge guns,
known as Clem and Jane.
With barrels weighing over 100 tonnes,
they were the largest and longest-range weapons
ever installed on the UK mainland.
This is one of the first gun batteries that you see anywhere
where it's not about defending the port.
- It's actually an offensive gun, it's for attacking shipping. - Right.
Yeah. Can we get down in there and have a look?
Yeah. Let's go.
Oh, yes, I can see paint on the wall here.
There are numbers which must be degrees.
That's right. Compass bearings.
This is all very flaky and delicate, isn't it?
So it's been a bit of a race against time, actually,
to record it properly before we lose some of it.
Gosh, it's been preserved all these years.
But now because it's been uncovered, it's vulnerable, isn't it?
Precisely how the guns were operated from an underground bunker
was top secret, and the records are patchy.
But the archaeologists are hoping to find clues to fill in the gaps.
- So can I open this door? - Go for it.
Although the emplacements were said to have been completely demolished,
it turns out there's plenty to see below ground.
Even including these tunnels, and the magazine
where the ammunition for the guns was stored.
Oh, how deep does this go?
So this is a 40-metre-long tunnel
with a spark-proof floor that leads to the magazines.
Oh, the temperature really drops, doesn't it, as you walk in here?
It's a constant 12 degrees down here.
Feels colder than that.
40 metres long.
And presumably that is just to keep it away from the gun?
- To protect from blast, that's right. - Yeah.
So this is the shell store,
where the shells have actually been kept safe, dry and protected.
Well, you say dry, but it looks very damp in here.
I mean, the ceiling is covered with drips.
It is now.
Before the site was demolished and covered over,
there would have been numerous ventilation shafts
going up to the surface.
- And that's these here, is it? - That's right.
Now home to a spider.
There's lots of spiders down here.
The emplacement, its tunnels and magazines
have lain here untouched for almost 80 years.
But now we can begin to understand what it was like
for the gun crew working here.
What are all these rectangular pieces of iron?
So these are ladder rungs which are from the emergency shaft.
And we actually found some original pieces of the winch
within the material at the bottom of the shaft.
So this is how the shells are delivered down into the magazine?
- That's right. - Yeah.
How many people would have been working here
on this gun emplacement?
Probably seven to ten.
- You had seven to a gun crew. - Yeah.
- And presumably it was manned 24/7. - That's right.
It had to be manned 24 hours a day.
The gun always had to be in a state of readiness to be fired if needed.
The gun crew was in charge of maintenance
and loading shells when needed,
but they weren't in control of aiming at targets.
That was all done remotely from the Plotting Room,
in a bunker half a mile inland.
Which is down here, I presume? OK.
- It is. We've got to go down this ladder. - All right, after you.
- Shall I go first? - Yeah.
The Plotting Room is part of a wider network of underground chambers
and bombproof tunnels, all dug into the chalk cliffs.
Oh, this is brilliant.
So this is it. This is the nerve centre.
Ah. "Unauthorised persons are forbidden
"to interfere with equipment."
So there was something right there.
And this is where admiralty fire control table was actually located.
So that was where they're actually controlling the guns from?
That's right.
So it was unique, originally designed to work on battleships.
- Yeah. - But this one had been retrofitted to work on land.
- Everything is hard-wired to here. - Yeah.
And you've got a whole host of different services
that are coming into this Plotting Room as well.
You've got range-finding location, battery observation posts,
spotter planes and, most importantly, radar.
And so that's all coming here to be considered
- before that information is sent out to the guns. - Yeah.
Well, this is incredible, isn't it?
The technology here remained classified
for many years after the war.
With so few records, every archaeological find is precious.
We have done a fingertip search.
These are some of the artefacts that we've discovered.
In the early 1950s, when the site was decommissioned,
actually, the technology was still confidential then,
so all of the equipment was smashed into small pieces down here.
Mm. Certainly looks as though it has been smashed up, doesn't it?
I've spotted somewhere else I'd like to explore.
- So what's through here? - There's this intriguing little feature here,
- the service tunnel that runs around the whole structure. - OK.
It's for drainage and it's for power and services and communication.
It's also got some really interesting graffiti,
- but it is an adventure. - Oh, OK.
- How deep is the graffiti in there? - It's quite a long way. - OK.
All right, I'm game.
Thank you.
The service tunnel is far too narrow for the camera crew,
so I've had to film by myself.
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
But the tunnel hides a very special connection
to the people who worked here during the war.
What have we got along here?
- Oh, wow. - So here... - OK.
So it says, "Heros of Fan Hole.
- "W Dodd" or "Dodds". - Yeah.
- And "Pettit." - Oh, yeah.
- Do you think that those go back to the war? - Almost certainly.
The reference to Fan Hole is interesting
because it was only called Fan Hole up until about 1942.
After that, it became known as Fan Bay Battery. So it's an early bit.
Look at that, "The heros of Fan Hole."
- Quite a long way back. - It is.
It's not often on Digging For Britain
that I get to be the one making the discoveries.
But, on the way back,
I spot something that the archaeologists have missed.
Oh, my goodness. I think I've got "Henry Ford...
"..1941" here.
- Oh, OK. I haven't seen that one before. - Is that when it was built?
So the Plotting Room was finished in the April of '41.
So that could have been somebody that was actually building it.
That's incredible.
Right, time to go out.
Among the paraphernalia of war shrouded in secrecy,
it's an astonishing link to an individual.
I found a new bit of graffiti down there,
going all the way back to 1941.
And we're not out yet.
- No, we've still got a bit further to go. - We're still underground.
There's so much more here than the archaeologists had hoped for.
Most of the underground architecture of these defences has survived.
And we can also make that connection to the Fan Hole "heros"
whose names are missing from the records
but who played such a vital part in Britain's World War II defences.
Back out into the 21st Century.
Next time on Digging For Britain,
an ancient Welsh home...
The oldest house in Cardiff.
...Throws up a treasure trove of finds.
- Find of a lifetime for me, that is. Right on my doorstep. - Yeah, yeah.
A forgotten fortress gives up its secrets.
Big chunky stone building. Super clear to see. Very satisfying.
And the surprising date of an uncovered mosaic...
- 5th to 6th century. - No, no, no, no, no.
...redefines Britain's past.
- This isn't right for a Roman villa. - Feel the electricity, can't you?
♪ Come and search for we who search
♪ And looking for a scarred land
♪ And dig for those whose stories lie
♪ With buried pasts and futures won
♪ And dig for us as we have done
♪ To lay the dead out in the sun
♪ To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪