Hunstrete, Somerset
First screened 17 February 2008

What they found

Time Team came to Hunstrete in search of Francis Popham's country house – a mansion he planned on 'a most grand and magnificent scale'. Only five arches of the main portico remain above ground today, but because Georgian architecture is based on regular, fixed proportions that small remnant of Popham's mansion ought to have provided a good aid to working out the plan of the rest of the building.

But right from the beginning Time Team's buildings expert Jonathan Foyle felt that something didn't quite fit about the portico and the walls that were showing in past photos of cropmarks and the geophysics survey results. The design didn't correspond with the period of construction: the building seemed to have been out of date before it was even started. And as the dig progressed, the walls seemed to be in different places and built to different proportions than might have been predicted. Something didn't add up.

In fact, it turned out that Francis Popham's grand mansion was more of a makeover than a new development. A new façade had been bracketed onto an older building.

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