What they found

Unlike most Time Team digs, there was no shortage of maps, plans and other historic documents to guide the Team at Shorncliffe Redoubt. Indeed, the existence of one set of plans in particular posed something of a problem on this excavation. This was Colonel William Twiss's plans for the construction of the redoubt, which turned out to include a number of features that were never actually built.

Among these were a series of diamond-shaped buttresses on the outer wall, together with an underground munitions store situated outside the main walls for safety reasons and accessible via a tunnel from inside the redoubt. Time Team's diggers spent many long, cold hours over the first couple of days searching for these features before finally concluding that they didn't exist.

The search for Twiss's original structures inside the redoubt was also frustrating in many ways. A sequence of later buildings, dating from throughout the Victorian era up to the second world war, stood on the original foundations. These often reused earlier materials, making precise identification of the structures difficult. Little was left of the structures from Twiss's time other than their foundations and reused bricks, distinguishable from later bricks by the absence of a frog, or recess, on the larger face.

In combination with Stewart Ainsworth's map work, however, the excavations were able to determine which of Twiss's planned structures were completed. They also revealed the method of construction of the giant earthworks and ditches that made up this important fortification.

The site in general also turned up a wide range of military finds. Buttons, buckles, bullets, musket balls, even a second world war camp entertainment programme, all contributed to a rich haul of ephemera from the site where the British army began its transition into a modern fighting machine (see Rifles and black powder).

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