Skip Channel4 main Navigation
3.30pm 27th August 2006
You can't miss Time Team geophysics supremo Chris Gaffney at Windsor. He's the man with the Cheshire Cat smile, who knows that he's come up with the goods. So how did his 'geophys' surveying manage to locate the Round Table building that had apparently disappeared without a trace despite all the contemporary documentation to show that it did once exist here?
'I have to admit that I was really worried that the geophysics results would turn out right because so much depended on them,' says Chris. 'There is a lot of historical documentation about the building but none of it told us exactly where it might be, so the geophysics was really all the archaeologists had to go on.'
Getting it exactly right was even more important than usual because, like all the royal palaces, Windsor is a protected site and any excavation had to be approved in advance by English Heritage. Four trenches were agreed on in the Upper Ward, all of them located on the basis of the geophysics, and if these didn't turn up the Round Table building there would be no possibility of adding others later.
'Unusually for Time Team, we did the surveying back in June because of the need for English Heritage approval,' says Chris. 'They wouldn't have allowed us to dig random test pits on the Queen's lawn.'
The surveys – resistivity, magnetronomy and ground penetrating radar – were carried out to a higher intensity than normal for the best results. Even then it was extremely difficult to interpret the results. 'There are a multitude of other things on this site,' says Chris, 'with building rubble being dumped here every time they carried out any work on other parts of the castle. There are also pipes and brick culverts all over the place – the site has been messed about all over the place.'
'We were looking for a very subtle response to identify the Round Table building,' says Chris, 'and even when we found that curving anomaly in the ground penetrating radar survey, at the back of my mind I was still worrying whether it might be a pipe or culvert.' Both of these would give a strong magnetic signal, however, and because magnetronomy didn't reveal anything this made Chris more confident that what he was looking at had to be a wall of non-fired stone or a ditch. 'In fact, it turned out to be something in between – a robbed-out foundation backfilled with stone rubble.'
Chris's calculations suggest that the perimeter wall of the Round Table building would have been 198 feet around – which almost exactly matches with the contemporary accounts of a 200-feet circumference building. Some of the people on site are hoping that he turns out to be at least a few inches out or he might become too smug to be bearable.
Watch the video of the ground penetrating radar results. The animation shows the survey results at different levels in the ground, starting at ground level and getting deeper as it goes on. The 'lovely curved anomaly' that has now been positively identified as the line of the Round Table building appears about half way through.
2.00pm 27th August 2006
That's one of the questions that has been exercising the minds of diggers in the Lower Ward since excavations started here. So far the record is five (see photo) – six, if you count the disused gas pipe that was removed yesterday.
The archaeology here is complicated, with various cuts and layers representing different structures from different periods. Nevertheless, Tim Tatton-Brown is confident that we are getting nearer to identifying the original floor plan of Henry II's Great Hall – it will just take some time sorting out (and recording) all the later archaeology.
There are no finds here yet from the period of the Great Hall, but some more recent curiosities have turned up in the spoil. These include a silver thimble ('made for a woman with very big fingers', according to metal detectorist Bill Meads, who made the find while searching the spoil); two copper alloy 17th-century rose farthings; and a couple of lead pistol balls, one of which is squashed, showing that it had been fired (see photo gallery).
