The picturesque village of Castor in Cambridgeshire promised the team a wealth of Roman discoveries. Close to the Roman town of Durobrivae and the major Roman road Ermine Street Castor has a long history of Roman discoveries including remnants of large Roman walls. We were attempting to solve a mystery first investigated by a local antiquarian, Edmund Tyrell Artis, over 150 years ago. Artis had discovered and excavated the remains of Roman structures, including mosaics, all over Castor and had come up with an intriguing hypothesis&
Before we could begin our investigations we had one small problem to overcome. With maps and plans from Artis we had good idea of where we might put some trenches& unfortunately one of the most beautiful churches in England and its graveyard just happened to be right on top of where we needed to dig.
Luckily, with the support of the William, Castor's vicar, we were able to identify an area without any graves. Geophys could get to work. It was close to this location that our site director, Ben Robinson had been lowered into a freshly dug grave several years before. Gravediggers had reported hitting Roman walls and floors - had they discovered the remains of one of the buildings recorded by Artis?
With a trench going in over Johns geophys Stewart and Henry had their own challenges. Edmund Artis had produced maps and plans of his discoveries that needed checking for accuracy and had to be locked onto our modern mapping. The two set to work recording Roman masonry visible in the village and remains known from modern excavations.
Our initial trench in the churchyard had begun to deliver evidence of Roman structures, but not the substantial remains Artis had described. Matt moved to the village Rectory on the hunt for further clues. Another trench went in revealing pottery, coins and Roman building material. But there was a problem - the trench seemed to contain backfill from Artis' earlier excavations - and it looked as if he'd cleared away almost all of the archaeology.
The team began to wonder whether anything was left of the Roman remains at Castor. With our search area widening and further trenches going in, the geophys team began work in a new area to the north of the church. Here, Artis had recorded a large room with beautiful geometric mosaics. He described this room as an entrance hall - to an enormous single building he termed a 'Praetorium', essentially a large, high-status administrative complex. Finding this 'entrance hall' within a cemetery provided a unique challenge. The team needed to avoid existing burials from the 18th and 19th centuries whilst attempting to determine whether Artis had correctly identified the building - was it a Praetorium?
The team began the process of pulling together evidence from Stewart and Henry's survey, the geophys plots, our trenches and Helens examination of records left by Artis. We hoped that we would be able to discover whether he had been right. With the team working through rain, wind and backfill the trenches began to give us the first real evidence that substantial structural remains were still preserved at Castor. Large walls discovered by Faye and Raksha appeared to match with Artis' descriptions. The final confirmation came with Phil and Jacqui's discovery of a mosaic in the northern graveyard. This was on the exact alignment shown by Artis on his original plans.
After three days of head-scratching and scepticism concerning the work of our hard-working antiquarian we had been able to show that his work had not only been accurate, but had identified one of the largest buildings in Roman Britain - and certainly the largest Roman structure ever excavated on Time Team.
