Sussex ups and downs

One hot day in 1922, a young man called John Pull strolled across the Sussex downland at Blackpatch, just outside Worthing. He was the victim of a First World War gas attack and he had come there looking for fresh air and peace. What he discovered was one of the very few Stone-Age settlements in England.

John Pull wasn't an archaeologist or antiquarian but a 23-year-old gramophone salesman – which made him highly unpopular with the archaeological elite. His work was sneered at, his finds were lost, the site was bulldozed – and, in a tragic twist of fate, he was murdered in a bank robbery.

Eighty years after Pull first set foot on this hill, Time Team came to reassess his work. Was this really the site of a prehistoric village? And what about a mysterious second site, which Pull recorded but had since been lost? As usual, Time Team had three days to see what they could find out.

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