What they found

Er, not a lot actually.

Time Team dug some of its biggest trenches ever over the course of the three days at Warburton. Its mechanical diggers left great scars across the sandy surface of the north Cheshire landscape. Teams of fieldwalkers were set to work scouring the bean fields for evidence of past habitation. Metal detectorists set their machines a-buzzing in the hope that they would come up with something to match the finds that had brought Time Team here in the first place. Geophysics tried whatever tricks it could muster in entirely unpromising circumstances. Stewart Ainsworth sought out assistance from the lumps and bumps on the ground and old maps from the past.

All to no avail. Or was it?

Certainly there was no disguising the fact that in terms of actual finds this was the least productive dig that Time Team has ever been involved in. None of the trenches yielded more than a few scattered shards of pottery. And virtually everything that was turned up by the fieldwalking and metal detecting dated from relatively recent times and certainly not from the Roman period, which had been the focus of interest in the site before Time Team's arrival. Even the apparent features in the ground, which had led to speculation that this was once the site of a Roman fort, turned out to be natural rather than man-made.

Yet the archaeologists did not leave entirely empty-handed – or at least not in terms of their knowledge of the site. Phil Harding's keen eye and Francis Pryor's long experience in identifying evidence of past agriculture combined to discern the marks of strip lynchets, or agricultural terraces, perhaps dating from the Roman period. The finds made by metal detectorists in the past – including the silver snake's head bracelet that provided the inspiration for the reconstruction cameo in this programme – were all the result of chance losses in what had always been an agricultural landscape.

So why were finds so scarce when metal detectorists and fieldwalkers had enjoyed such a rich yield in the past? The answer, quite simply, was that a decade of their searches in these fields had stripped them bare of artefacts. There was little left for anyone else to find.

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