It's very difficult to believe we have made 200 of our three-day Time Team programmes and also difficult to believe we have been making them over an 18-year period. It seems very long ago when we started and as Tim (Taylor, the Series Producer) keeps reminding me, I said it would not take off and it would never last.
But it has been an amazing experience and three points stand out in my mind. Firstly we have had a really good team to work with, a variety of characters with a great range of skills. I feel we could tackle any project with the team of people we have. Secondly, we have had the chance to travel the length and breadth of the land, from Orkney and Shetland in the north, to Jersey in the Channel Islands in the south, not to mention trips abroad (France, Spain and the USA). I have over the last fifty years traveled extensively over Britain and I know some parts of it very well, but there have still been many places that I have had the chance to visit for the first time with Time Team. I like going west and north, to the West Country, Wales and Scotland and I really like going to islands. So the programmes we have made on Looe Island (Cornwall), Anglesey, the Isle of Man, the Western Isle of Scotland (Barra and Mull) and Orkney and Shetland I have particularly enjoyed.
Thirdly, of course, the variety of archaeological sites, from the internationally renowned like Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court and Hadrian's Wall, right across to people's own back gardens in villages and small towns, has been amazing. We have worked on sites of all periods from the earliest Stone Age sites at Elveden (Suffolk) and Stanton Harcourt (Oxon) through to World War II bomber crash sites. My favourites are usually sites in the Middle Ages (1066-1540) or even better, the post-Roman, 'Dark Age' and Anglo-Saxon sites, though it is usually very difficult to work on sites of this period.
It may be surprising to some but my all time favourite site of the 200 programmes was the Llygadwy site in Brecon (broadcast in January 2001). Viewers may remember this as a Celtic spring site which seemed to be spurious: it had a dodgy collection of material from the spring; and a spurious burial chamber and castle. We were really put on our mettle sorting that one out, but falling back on first principles, with a really good team of archaeologists and historians, we managed to prove that most of it was a Victorian theme park with a few later additions!
And so where does Tottiford fit into this? Dartmoor is one of my favourite landscapes. I visit it frequently, and I was really pleased that at last we were going to do a programme there. On many occasions I have gone for long walks over the moors to visit isolated stone rows, prehistoric enclosures, hut groups and reave systems. Around the edges of Dartmoor there are also extremely well-preserved medieval settlements, such as Hound Tor, and often the prehistoric and medieval are all mixed up together as later people reused the sites and structures of earlier communities.
Tottiford wasn't really like that though. It is not on Dartmoor proper, but on an isolated massif to the north-east and (to my surprise) there was little evidence for medieval farmers reusing the well-preserved prehistoric site in the landscape.
No matter, the archaeology was good and while I am usually a really cold fish about the 'ritual' and religious aspects which my friend Francis (Prior) loves and goes on about so much, this really does seem to be an important aspect with many Dartmoor sites and it was certainly the best explanation of the Tottiford complex of sites.
