Scargill Castle, County Durham
First screened 11 January 2009

What they found

An archaeological romance
It's not often that Time Team has a modern-day love story to thank for one of its programmes. But when that love story involves two county archaeologists for neighbouring English counties and a ruined medieval castle where Edward II is reputed to have stayed in the 1320s, the invitation to investigate further almost inevitably proved irresistible.

Our archaeological romance came about with the wedding of Caroline Hardie, then the county archaeologist and head of conservation for Northumberland, and her bridegroom Niall Hammond, the holder of the same post for County Durham. As a wedding present, Niall gave Caroline the deeds to the ruined Scargill Castle, close to the village of Lartington, near Barnard Castle. The castle, which was on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register until Niall took it over, cost him a mere £100 – 'a bargain at any price,' he says – although its renovation was to cost many tens of thousands of pounds more, including a £47,000 grant from English Heritage.

Medieval landscape
Time Team was called in after the restoration work had been carried out to see what it could discover about the site, which is now part of a modern farm complex and includes various outbuildings, pens, walls, courtyards and ruined stone structures. It was known from documentary evidence that the castle – more accurately a fortified house – was built in the 13th century and partially rebuilt two centuries later. The remains include the renovated gatehouse, some four storeys high, at least two courtyards and the ruined walls of several ranges and other structures.

It was clear from the context of the site that the fortified building had been at the centre of a thriving medieval landscape. Evidence of a former ridge-and-furrow field system can be seen to the south and west of the building, while other earthworks to the west represent the remains of the former medieval village of Rutherford.

But it was not until late on the third day that Time Team found any significant evidence of medieval occupation on the site, which began to pose something of a conundrum for the Team. Virtually all of the finds that were coming out of the various trenches were Tudor or later in date. Phil Harding uncovered a magnificent Tudor fireplace, the centrepiece of a great Tudor hall with some of the big flagstones of its floor still in place. And various doors and walls representing different phases of construction and rebuilding during the Tudor and possibly later periods were also uncovered. But from the medieval period there was hardly anything at all.

Another Scargill
The story about Edward II having stayed at Scargill Castle also started to unravel as Time Team's experts pored over the records from the time. Edward's itinerary in 1323, when he was supposed to have visited the castle during his travels in the area, simply didn't correspond with such a visit. In fact, the Scargill referred to was an entirely different place, at Haverah Park, many miles further south. Tony Robinson began to worry about having to tell Caroline that her wedding present didn't have quite such a romantic history as had been supposed. Perhaps the surviving gatehouse wasn't even medieval at all?

As so often happens on Time Team digs, however, a rush of discoveries late on the third day enabled the Team to come up with a fuller picture. Having disentangled the jigsaw of overlapping walls and other structures from later phases of building on the site, the diggers were able to confirm that the gatehouse was part of the 15th-century medieval fortified house, which in turn replaced an earlier medieval building.

Stewart's 'barmkin'
Landscape archaeologist Stewart Ainsworth also introduced a new word to the Time Team lexicon with his identification of earthworks adjacent to the castle site as part of a medieval 'barmkin'. This is a word, possibly a corruption of barbican, used in Scotland and northern England to describe a defensive enclosure within which there would have been pens, sheds and ancillary buildings that could be used for protection during raids in this lawless border country.

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