What they found

Unlike on some Time Team digs, there was never any danger of missing the target on this one. Although nothing remains of it above ground today, Queenborough Castle was a vast construction in its day, said to have had 40 rooms within the massive structure of its rotunda and surrounded by a circular moat and curtain wall.

Queenborough was the last royal new town of the Middle Ages – a planned settlement that was laid out at the same time as the castle, which was built in 1361. The original street plan is still clearly visible on maps and on the ground today.

Located at the end of the creek running from the river Swale, the castle held a strategic position near the entrance to the Thames. It was built by Edward III during the Hundred Years War with France to guard the passage to London – or perhaps, as some historians have suggested, to provide the king and his queen, Philippa (after whom Edward named the town), with a bolthole to which they could flee in the event of plague. The castle fell into disrepair in the following centuries, and was demolished after the Parliamentarians decided it was too expensive to refurbish after the English Civil War.

The Team was aided in its attempt to locate and provide a detailed picture of the castle by several old illustrations, including one drawn in the 1640s, and a detailed plan. Unfortunately, the pictures didn’t agree with each other; and the plan, on which great reliance had been placed, turned out not to be entirely accurate. Nor was there any indication of its orientation or scale. The fact that virtually all of the stone from the castle had been ‘robbed out’ and that the soil conditions were not conducive to good geophysics survey results also added to the difficulty.

All of this meant that it took a great deal of head-scratching before the pieces of the castle jigsaw being unearthed in the trenches could be pieced together. In Phil's trench, in particular, there were several occasions when the castle seemed to have disappeared altogether, not showing up in the excavation or in geophysics. In the end, Phil had to resort to the use of an auger to work out that there were the remains of the castle cellars underneath where he was digging.

Finally, the excavations allowed the Team to produce a well-informed reconstruction of what the castle would have looked like, its orientation and its vast scale. The rotunda at its heart, it was confirmed, must have been something like 40 metres in radius – certainly big enough for the 40 rooms and 407 windows it was said to contain.

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