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Thursday 26 June 03
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Al Murray
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Al Murray gets his hands dirty at Bedford School in this film. You will need RealPlayer to view this file.
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Blandford Forum, Dorset
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The Background
Blandford Forum in Dorset was destroyed in 1731 by a fire that started on June 4 in a candlemakers shop. The small fire soon spread into a huge blaze which levelled the town and completely burnt all of the records held at that time. Almost all duplicate records which were held in the administrative centre of Bristol were also destroyed by the bombing of WWII.
Though the town was quickly rebuilt by the industrious Georgians, details about the fire were just as quickly reverted to folk law.
David Parry moved from Zambia to Blandford Forum a few years ago. He quickly became fascinated by the story of the great fire and is hoping that the Big Dig will give him the chance to find out if his house was built on top of an earlier building which was destroyed in the disaster: 'According to the few old maps predating the Blandford fire,' says David, 'there were several terraces of houses and other buildings somewhere around where my house is today.'
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David and Archaeology
'I've always been into archaeology.' says David, 'Ever since I was a child living in South Africa. Nowadays I'm a member of my local society called EDAS (East Dorset Antiquarian Society) and I've been involved with volunteer digging on archaeological sites for about the last three years.'
David's also keen on promoting archaeology to others: 'It's one of the great things that Time Team does. I think it's so important for people to understand about their history and the past. This whole Big Dig project will teach people how to identify archaeology and hopefully mean that less gets destroyed by accident.'
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Fire Traces and Pocket Change
Nearing the end of the excavation and still no signs of the great fire. 'One of the things with this location is that it could actually be outside the scope of the original disaster.' says Francis Pryor, 'If I compare a map from the year of the fire which actually shows this road before this house was built, and then overlay a nineteenth century map with this house on it, you can see that the old field boundaries indicate that this house could well be just outside the original town.'
Brigid says that the archaeology matches Francis's theory. 'We've definitely got more charcoal down in the lower layers,' she says, 'but nothing that I would call a definite indication of the great fire. Most of the finds are also fairly modern. However, this does tell us something. It indicates that the archaeology is matching the maps.'
Later in the afternoon, a George I penny popped up from the bottom layer, suggesting that David had excavated to a level below the date of the fire. Finding the penny in the bottom layer doesn't in itself prove that this layer pre-dates the fire as the penny could have been dropped there later. But, with the absence of any evidence for a fire in David's test pit, it adds to the likelihood that his house was outside the area of the 1731 disaster.
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Moniaive, Dumfriesshire and Galloway
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The background
Farmers Brian and Graeme Geddes have an archaeological wonderland in their own back yard at Moniaive, a remote farming community in the hills of Dumfriesshire and Galloway, South West Scotland. From prehistoric cairns to the fortified farmsteads of the post-medieval period, their land boasts archaeology that spans millennia - the material remains of the lives of hardworking people of the land, farmers just like them.
But their neck of the woods is also famous for slightly less attractive characters. They live in the area of Dumfriesshire and Galloway famous for the 'Border Reivers' - the notorious marauding gangs that terrorized farmers from medieval times to the 18th century.
"The landscape has a story to tell," says Brian, the history buff of the two, "whenever I'm up here I can almost hear the cries of the folk as they ran for cover."
Graeme and Brian have been investigating a building that bears all the hallmarks of an early chapel site - it is an east-west oriented rectangular building within a circular enclosure - however, the early maps depict no such buildings on the site. Is this a long lost early Christian chapel? A testpit was dug in the East of the structure and a post hole was discovered which indicates that there was an earlier structure there, but nothing to indicate what kind of structure it was.
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Immingham, Lincolnshire
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The Background
On the outskirts of this industrial town in North East Lincolnshire, 3 generations of the Wilson family have been bitten by the Time Team bug. They are now doing their own dig and detective work to answer questions which have been baffling them for over 20 years. Jake, aged 81, is a keen gardener and was thrilled to recently discover an early medieval bone-handled knife in his flowerbed. He's also been finding bits of medieval green glazed pottery in the garden for years. Local experts have identified this as Teesdale ware, which dates from the 11th and 12th centuries and is associated with the area. But no historical maps show any evidence of settlement on the site; in fact it's has been ploughed land since records began. Why has he also been finding enormous cobbles in his garden? How relevant is the old footpath, which ran through his garden for hundreds of years?
Jake's daughter Pam lives near the remains of a medieval nunnery where the same green glazed pottery has turned up. Helping them with the hard graft and using his keen young brain is 18 year-old grandson Chris, who has been brought up on a staple diet of Time Team!
When Time Team started the test pit this morning they thought that the pottery was perhaps from peasants who had put it on their fields as part of their composting, but as the pit got deeper they started to wonder if it was actually a floor they were uncovering. Find out what their conclusions were tonight. |
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