Every year the Time Team filming schedule seems to get shorter. Each site we investigate presents unique challenges often involving the need to fit around the working lives of large organisations, landowners and farmers. Our site was located in the fields of a working farm and had been discovered through fieldwalking by a local group. Due to the tight schedule we didn't have the luxury of waiting until the crop had been removed. In negotiation with the farmer, the landowner and local archaeologists an agreement was reached whereby we would be able to remove a certain amount of the crop (in this case Oil Seed Rape) to allow our trenches to go in. Now we had the small issue of locating the best place to clear the crop in fields stretching over hundreds of acres - and we had to get it right first time.
With the help of the archaeologists involved in the original field walking almost a decade earlier we pored over plans and sketches that had been buried in archives. These showed the number of pottery sherds collected by the field walking team in ten metre by ten metre grids. This, with a bit of help from John Gaters survey team, allowed us to pin down areas where pottery concentrations were at their highest. Combining this information with the locations of brooch fragments and other finds recovered by metal detectorists we selected a location (or two) and the farmer got to work.
Sites like this are always a challenge to the team with moments of tension and lots of finger crossing. Indeed the first day or so of the dig were worrying with very little to show for our efforts - even John Gater had a difficult time locating features that could be Anglo Saxon in origin. However, our hard work paid off in the end... how? You'll just have to watch to find out.
