What they found

'Yet again, Time Team has failed to find an Anglo-Saxon palace.' Tony Robinson's tongue-in-cheek comment at the end of this Time Team investigation was only partly tinged with disappointment. Because while there may have been no palace for the diggers to get their trowels into, Time Team's archaeologists and historians did find out enough about Anglo-Saxon Eastry to hazard a reasonable guess at where any Saxon palace would have been.

In the 7th century AD, two centuries after the first Saxons made their homes in the area, an Anglo-Saxon community would have thrived at Eastry. Near to a Roman road and the coast, it would have been an important and powerful centre for east Kent. It was known that a Saxon palace had once stood somewhere in this area, and high status finds on nearby Highborough Hill led the Team to think that it might have been located there. Excavations found no evidence of Anglo-Saxon structures or settlement on the site, however, and only limited finds. A ditch discovered towards the end of the dig, pursuing geophysics survey results, may have been Anglo-Saxon but could be dated only uncertainly by one piece of Saxon pottery.

The hill is 'a mystery wrapped in an enigma', Time Team's Helen Geake concluded at the end of the dig. The Team's experts felt that the site was most likely an Anglo-Saxon ritual centre, where valuable offerings were made. This would explain the piece of Anglo-Saxon brooch and other valuable finds made on the site by metal detectorists. A large number of detectorists were also called in for Time Team's investigation. One found a pretty red garnet brooch that had the experts hopeful for a while, but it turned out to be Victorian. Otherwise, finds on the hill were limited and inconclusive about possible Saxon uses of the site. Most of the discoveries were medieval.

Stewart Ainsworth's investigations of the local landscape, using old maps and other records, suggested another site for any Anglo-Saxon palace at Eastry. He was able to reveal that the hill at Eastry was on a network of ancient roads, linking it with an Anglo-Saxon centre at Eastry itself. At the heart of this centre was a rectangular enclosure that can still be identified in the landscape today, and which contains the modern-day village church, recreation ground and Eastry Court, whose owner was keen for Time Team to prove that any former palace once stood where he lives today.

The Team put in trenches at both Eastry Court and the recreation ground but found no signs of Anglo-Saxon settlement. That still left most of the rectangular enclosure at Eastry unexplored, however. Any palace could have stood under existing buildings on the site, as well as on land that the Team was unable to survey – which included the two thirds of the enclosure to which the owner would not grant access.

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