Tottiford presented a unique challenge to the team not least because it was underneath a reservoir which had to be drained well in advance of Time Teams arrival. The muddy conditions were more than worth it as the site presented us with a chance to explore an extraordinary prehistoric landscape. The site boasted a stone circle, stone rows, burial cairns and a mysterious mound covered in ancient flint tools.
Time Team had been invited by Jane Marchand from the Dartmoor National Park Authority to investigate the Tottiford complex following its discovery by a member of the public. This had only been possible during a regular drain down of the reservoir for maintenance earlier in the year during which the tops of stones had appeared in the remaining water. Jane had asked us to find out when the monuments had been built and what they had been used for.
With no time to lose on such a logistically challenging site the team got stuck in& well, most of them. As you might imagine a muddy, wet valley is hardly an ideal location for a geophysical survey. Add to this the granite bedrock underlying the site (a problem for magnetic survey) and John was just about ready to go home. Despite this his team got stuck in with the ground penetrating radar in the hope it might show up buried stones or other features.
As the geophys team quietly sank into the mud Francis and Mick decided on another approach - put in a trench based on what we can see - namely the stone monuments. The team targeted one of the stone rows, and Matt got going by investigating a cairn. Mick hoped that we could confirm the prehistoric nature of the monuments and gain some dating evidence.
With excavation underway Helen and Stewart joined forces to look at the wider landscape of the site. Tottiford is rather unusual as the complex of monuments sits in the bottom of a valley meaning it remains hidden from wider view - not a typical setting for a prehistoric monument on Dartmoor.
Francis, a very happy man on a prehistoric site like this, continued excavation by opening another trench over the second stone row - this one leading to the mysterious mound. Could this be (dare we say it) a ritual pathway? Phil was also pretty chuffed as he had plenty of flint to play with scattered all over the mound. Our master knapper was convinced this material was even earlier than the monuments on site - from a time when the population of the Britain were hunter-gatherers.
The first results from our trenches began to come in. Matt had discovered that the 'burial cairns' were, in fact, simply the result of 19th century field clearance. News from other areas of the site was better. Francis was happy that both stone rows were prehistoric but also suspected that the site had been constructed in phases over a long period of time. However, apart from the remains of flint tools from the mound (probably Mesolithic) we still had no solid dating evidence for the rest of the site.
To address the issue of dates we needed to find further tool fragments, some pottery, or preferably both. Time to open more trenches. Francis got to work with a series of test pits on the mound to confirm its date and some trenches at the heart of the site - the stone circle. After a nail biting few hours the stone circle began to reveal its secrets - flint flakes and some hidden stones under the mud found by John and his team.
Our work over three days had shown that Tottiford had been occupied for millennia. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had camped at the site and made tools. Later, in the Neolithic and Bronze Age the site had been developed for ritual use seeing the construction of a stone processional way and a stone circle. Tottiford had certainly been a site to remember.
