Mick Aston's thoughts

Time Team regular Mick Aston summarised the Raunds dig for the website as the dig drew to a close:

There was a lovely crisis on this programme about half way through. We had dug a lot of holes but found absolutely nothing – and I mean nothing. From an archaeological point of view that's not a problem because you just record that fact as part of your investigation, but for television it's quite disastrous.

The production people started to get quite jittery. Tony was trying to wind me up, saying 'We're not going to find anything, Michael.' But I really didn't mind: that's real archaeology.

I thought, 'Okay, this is the programme where we're not going to find a thing', but then at about midday on day two Phil spotted a dark corner in a trench and before you knew it we had a grave cut. We ended up with the male burial that Pat and Morris [the residents of the house] found originally; a fantastic female burial in Phil's trench; another burial in Trench Two of a child; and even some additional slightly damaged remains on the other side of the hedge in the allotments next door. That all adds up to a fairly scattered Anglo-Saxon cemetery. All good Time Team stuff.

This has been a challenging programme with us trying to stick with our original research design and keep it small. I've just been talking to some of the people of Raunds about our work and that is nice 'icing on the cake' for me. The reason I got involved with this whole business in the first place was because I wanted to get more people interested. We've certainly fired a few imaginations and that's what it's all about. It's been a good one.

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