Rooting For The Romans | Time Team (Roman Documentary) | Timeline

Welcome to Bedford Purley Woods in Cambridgeshire. It's the kind of place you'd think would be the enemy of archaeologists because you can't see anything because of all these trees. But take a look at this. This stunning aerial picture was taken by firing lasers between the trees. It shows all the lumps and bumps and you see this thing here. Could that be a building and another one there and there and there and there? So is this some kind of complex? Well back in the 1800s an antiquarian noted the remains of some Roman buildings in this wood and apparently some Roman statues nearby. So could this high-tech picture be showing us those remains and a lot more besides? Maybe some kind of extensive Roman settlement? Over the next three days time team are going to risk being bitten to death by midges and small spiders as they attempt to solve the Roman mystery in the woods. Bedford Purley Wood is in the Neen Valley in Cambridgeshire about 15 miles from Peterborough. 1,800 years ago this was one of the wealthiest areas of Roman Britain and our site would have been on the outskirts of Dura Breve, the main trading centre in the region. But while most Roman sites around here have been damaged by modern plowing it looks like whatever's hidden in these woods could be really well preserved. Our challenge is simple enough. What were the Romans doing here? But thanks to the trees finding out isn't going to be that easy. It's a nightmare for geophys. As you can see we've strimmed a lot of the open areas but we can't strim them all because the other problem is this is a National Nature Reserve and there's lots of protected plants here. John, you having a good day? Wonderful. For once though we don't have to wait for geophys because in some places we can actually see Roman walls on the surface. It's silly, you can't have archaeology just, it's sticking above the ground, it's not under the ground. No doubt this is why the site was first discovered by an antiquarian back in the early 1800s. And it's because the remains are close to the surface that they've also shown up so well on this LiDAR picture. The colours by the way represent height with green marking the low ground and white the highest. And we know that some of these buildings are Roman because a few test pits have been dug. But not enough to work out what was actually going on here so we're opening these two trenches to try and solve the mystery. This trench here is an extension of the test pit to see more of what's left of the Roman. So look at the condition of the Roman remains. This one is right at the other end of the site to see if it's the same type of structure down there. It's great to see the trenches started so soon especially for the local archaeologist who invited us here and is perplexed by this site. I mean the first thing is it appears to be huge from the LiDAR, I mean it's a massive site isn't it? But there's a fairly distinct range of what appear to be buildings running roughly north-south here and you can possibly spot individual rooms within them. And then there's a probable courtyard out here and then there's a whole load of pockmarked pits here, these quarry pits from the ironworking industry that we know was in this area. All right then, at first glance what do you reckon it might be? Is it a massive villa? Is it a massive industrial complex? Is it a military complex? Or all of those? Or all of them! And then there's the ironwork, as you said, all the pitting around it as well. Well if anyone can sort it out, my money's on Phil, who's now extending Ben's test pit and opening up a much bigger trench. This should give us a far better chance of working out what type of buildings we have here. We've also got this detailed plan of the earthworks drawn when the test pits were dug, but I'm not sure it's any help to us. There's a huge mismatch between the neatness of that map and what I can see on the ground, but look at that. Is that an earthwork or is it part of this root system or just a tumble of stones or something? I can't see any buildings here at all. Phil, are you sure we're digging in the right place? What do you mean we're digging in the right place? Well look at that. Lovely and neat. Look at that. Chaos. I don't actually regard that as extremely chaotic. Come and have a look. Sorry, there's a rather large archaeologist in my eyeline. Look, we've got a nice long straight row here. It's all built of stone. Look, we've even got one stone on top of another stone. Now then, what would you call that? It's a wall. Thank you. I eat my words. That's right. What do you reckon we've got here? Well, you see, this is the problem. You've got that plan which shows a series of earthworks. It is very, very easy to assume that all the upstanding bits are walls. Now, when they dug here a little earlier on, they know for a fact that sometimes where there are earthworks, there weren't walls. Sometimes there were walls and there weren't earthworks. It is not as clear-cut as that drawing suggests. We don't also know whether or not it's the same phase. So, there was some sense in my point. Just looking at this tumble doesn't necessarily mean that you can interpret where the buildings are. That is not your question. Your question was, are we digging in the right place? Yes, we're digging in the right place. All right, I was wrong. Get digging. Moving quickly on, over in our second trench, Matt is investigating an area that's never been dug before. Essentially, we need to know if this earthwork bank is part of the Roman settlement or is something else entirely. I think we've actually got a stone wall coming here. You can see there seems to be a face there. I haven't quite got the other side, but I imagine that it pretty much stops at this side just here. And it follows the bank. Ah, find. It's just a bit of tile, isn't it? It's just in the rubble. See the line of the wall there? I'd say it's a floor tile. Roman floor tile, yeah. Promising. So, Matt's wall is Roman, and I have to say it does look suspiciously like it belongs to the same range of structures that Phil's digging some 80 metres away. Guys have gone off for a tea break now, but I've got to admit, Phil was right. Have a look at this wall. So crisp, so well made, so well defined. It just goes on and on in that direction and maybe in that direction too, and all the archaeology is just below the surface. Who knows what we'll find? Mind you, the way Phil's going won't be long before we find out. I just have to be very careful how I ask him questions in future. Things I have to put out with. Welcome back to Bedford Purley Woods in Cambridgeshire, where thanks to laser technology, we've been able to see through the trees to reveal evidence of a large complex of Roman buildings. And so far, we've opened up two trenches to try and find out what type of settlement this was. It's early days yet, but in Phil's trench, we've got lots of Roman walls to puzzle over. While in our second trench, Matt's got his own Roman structure to make sense of. I, meanwhile, am off to find out more about the person who first discovered this site. Helen, who was the antiquarian who came across this site a couple of hundred years ago? He was a chap called Edmund Artis. We've got a photo of him, amazingly, and he was a kind of gentleman archaeologist antiquarian. He was actually interested in most things. He also was an expert on fossils and geology. And in 1828, he made this completely fantastic map of the area. And the bit we're interested in, our wood, is up here. Now, you can see we've got this lovely red horseshoe-shaped Roman building, and he's also put these brown dots on, which he codes as iron works. And I think these must be pits dug to remove iron ore. Did he actually do any digging? Well, I have been trying to find that out, and I can find no concrete evidence that he actually dug a hole. It may have been he just came past and saw earthworks, or even standing buildings. Stuart, how does his map relate to what we can see on the ground? Well, I like it, I do, because when I came up here this morning, as I walked through, I drew in my sketchbook a shape that looks exactly like that. This thing would have been visible when he drew it, it's still visible now. Isn't it a bit bizarre, though, that he's drawn this horseshoe building, bits of which seem to go under the road? Well, I mean, it's possible that when he came here that you can still see remains of bumps going under the surface of the road, as it were. But whether they carried on into this field, we'll never know, because if you look over there, it's been quarried out and now it's been used as landfill, so we'll never know whether these ranges actually extended into that area. Unfortunately, Edmund Artis never published his written reports, so I guess we'll be finishing the job for him over the next three days. And it looks like Geophys may be able to help. They've managed to survey this clearing and have picked up strong signals to the edge of it, but annoyingly they can't go any further because of the trees. It's really frustrating. I mean, we're actually getting some good results. You can see really strong responses. I think they're probably actually metalworking, ironworking sort of responses, but they're just... I can't get that bigger picture. But noise is good. Well, ironworking suggests some sort of industrial activity, possibly a nearby furnace. It could also help explain all these pits dotted around the site. So using a different technique, John's going to pinpoint the source of this potential metalworking. 2,200. Now, let's get this right. This is telling you that there's increased magnetism in the ground caused by human activity? That's right. If there's a Roman furnace here, this is the only way to find out. Why, is that your anomaly? Hold on here. Is that what you were detecting? Ah, clearly geophys have more to worry about than just trees. I think I'll give up my job. You wouldn't believe that, would you? But at least we've got our high-tech picture of the lumps and bumps to guide us, and Stuart's insisting that the only way to look at it properly is in black and white and in 3D. This big regular horseshoe, the building range, you see, this is what artists drew on his plan quite clearly. This is where Phil is digging in this building cluster in here. There's clearly other buildings and structures coming up along here, and at the north end, this is where Matt's trench has gone along there. You can see there's a regular courtyard, as it were, the range coming along the south here. This has never been spotted before. There's clearly an area there which is another possible isolated building. If you come away from the site, there's a rectangular area showing up there, which looks like either a building or a big compound. Very definitely a building sitting there. Well, we can't just sit around speculating and watching a square spinning round. Thanks to these high-tech results and Stuart, we're now looking at a site that's much bigger than we originally thought, so we need to choose our targets carefully. As over in Phil's trench, we've already got plenty of Roman archaeology to deal with. We're actually starting to get some metal work. I think that's a Roman key, isn't it? You're quite right, it's a key, but it's quite a simple type of key, but where there's a key, there must have been a door. And some are worth locking up. So I was right about that one, but I don't know about that. This is one of those things that, you know, academics are tearing their hair out, exactly what this sort of thing is. Some people think it might have been a stylus for writing, like, you know, old pens with nibs on the end, but it's very crude for that. The other possibility is that it goes on a piece of dowel for shoveling along an animal, poking along a sheep to get it moving. As well as bizarre sheep handling devices, there's also more building evidence. That's part of the flooring, that's a huge great floor tile. It's much too thick to be a hypercourse tile or a wall tile. It's probably a much bigger piece like that. There's still lots of rubble to remove, but already filled discovered the walls survived to some depth, and in places are built with fragments of stone and tile, creating a herringbone pattern. 80 meters away in our second trench, Matt's finding that the walls he's unearthed are built in exactly the same way. There's quite a few bits of floor tile out of there, but I think these were actually built into the wall and have formed a part of the structure. Right, because you get layers of tile in Roman walls. Yeah. That rather suggests it is a building. Yeah, and there's been a few bits of pottery as well. Oh, that's good because there's very little from elsewhere. So what have you got? The local wares? Yeah, that's Roman Neen Valley. Yeah, which is rather good. And we've also had a bit of iron ore as well. Ah, now that's good because we've got a metallurgist coming tomorrow, so you can have a look at that. But as we approach the end of the day, there's another intriguing aspect of this site that's got everyone talking, and it's that Edmund Artis recorded these two statues being found in the woods here in 1845. However, Guy's a bit doubtful. He's not sure they're actually Roman. I'm always a little bit suspicious about very classical types of sculpture like that being found in this country. Guy, are you sceptic? Of course these are Roman. They were they were made of Barnack ragstone, which wouldn't have been used in the medieval period or after the medieval period for this type of statue. Plus, other ones have been found in this area as well, at Sibson, just down the road. But it's precisely because they are so unusual in this country that makes it very difficult for us to put them automatically into a context and say, oh, we definitely know what that would have been from. We can put them into a bit of a context, though, because we've got the other things that were found with them. We've got the pot with the bones in it, and we've got a couple of other accessory vessels, so we're pretty sure that it's some kind of funerary monument, aren't we? I think the most likely thing is a tomb or mausoleum, and the crucial thing is that they're both so similar. In spite of any misgivings, Victor's had a bash at picturing how the statues looked complete. They were probably meant to represent charioteers, and might have been part of a roadside tomb built for a wealthy landowner. Your point is that it would be really rare because you don't get much Roman statuary in England, right? Ah, there might have been a lot more, it's just that very little survives. But more could still be surviving in the woods, presumably. That is quite conceivable, given the fact that this building seems to have been allowed to fall down in its own right, rather than be demolished and cleared. Well, it's not often you hear talk of possible Roman statues at the end of day one, and given the preservation here, who knows what we might turn up in these woods tomorrow. Day two here in what looks like being a pretty wet Bedford Purley woods, where we're investigating some Roman buildings which have been hidden here for the best part of 2,000 years. Mick, you love these woods, don't you? I do, yeah. When I started out in archaeology, we used to think that the woodland was the bit left over beyond the settlements and the fields. They were just bits that people hadn't got to yet to clear them. Actually, it was only when a lot more work was done that we realized they were part of the picture. People in the earlier times, of course, needed woods much more than today. All the constructional timber came from them, the firewood, wood for charcoal, because that was the main fuel for metalworking and stuff like that, so they were a very important part of the economy. Morning, Stu! He's on the prowl, as usual. Yeah, I hope he's gonna find me one of these pits that we can have a look at. This woodland dates back to at least the 11th century, and it's protected the 2nd to 4th century Roman settlement that's been hidden here by the trees. Incredibly, this laser scan has revealed the stone structures spread across this area, and in Phil's trench, we're slowly starting to make sense of a collapsed building that could help us work out what was going on here in Roman times. Ah, it's gone. I mean, you had a big stone in here, didn't you? Yeah. Now that's come away, you can see there's a nice, clean, clear cut edge there, so it looks like there never was a wall in there. So we've got a doorway. Very nice. To help us understand this long range of buildings, we've overlaid this more detailed earthwork plan, and we're now opening up another trench here. Stuart pointed out there's something very different going on here. I think what we need to do is get into the interior. What's going on inside that area? What we really need, actually, is a pen. Faye? You got a problem? Well, not really a problem so much, as we've got a load of rubble coming up again, just like Phil's trench, and what I need to know is whether I can get the machine in, take this down further, or whether you want us to do it by hand. Well, I think your problem is the root, isn't it? This is a national nature reserve, and we've agreed that we won't cut any roots more than one centimetre thick. Good news for the trees, bad news for Faye. So we can take out all the little rubbish, but just leave the one. All this stuff is vital for the growth of the tree. But Faye's going to have to dig it by hand. Am I digging underneath this big root then, basically? Well, you'll have to. That's going to be interesting, isn't it? And you'll have to do it by hand. Meanwhile, Matt's trench has done its job. It's shown that the Roman buildings extend along here and are all part of one settlement, so we're closing it down and packing Matt off to investigate this large earthwork. It appears to be a building that stands alone, which might mean it's important. But again, gardening comes before archaeology. Do you want to save the buddleja, Hugh? No, we don't. The buddleja is a species here we're trying to control by cutting and removing it, so we're quite happy if you cut some of that. But only a few metres away from here, there is deadly nightshade, which is a species we want to conserve here. It's important we don't damage those plants. So is it alright if we put a trench in here, provided we don't put the spoil over where the deadly nightshade is? Yes, that's fine. Well, that's perfect because we're right on this sort of mound, this sort of tell-like platform that looks like a building. Yeah, I mean, presumably it might be well-preserved if it's a big mound like this, mightn't it? Yeah. And right here, I mean, there's tile just under the surface, so it looks like a good place to start. So, as Matt gets his new trench started, I'm wondering if all the walls and tiles we're discovering means our mystery settlement is a Roman villa, exactly as Edmund Artiss predicted back in 1828. So this is an original copy of the Artiss book that I've been looking at photocopies of? That's right, yeah, it's an original copy. And Artiss certainly knew Roman. This massive villa was dug by him at nearby Caster. Artiss talks about Caster as a major villa, where he looks at Bedford Purleys as a second-order villa, and that's a bit confusing, really. And I think probably the answer is that Caster is such an enormous site, and by comparison, what he saw of the Roman remains at Bedford Purleys was not unimportant, but lesser when compared with the villa at Caster. But in spite of Artiss's description of a villa here, there may be a chance he got it wrong. I'm in two minds, actually. It looks as if it could be a standard Roman villa, but the plan is suspicious, and I suspect the linking with ironworking is very intriguing. John's persisted in his search for evidence of metalworking. He's been using the magsus, that's a magnetic susceptibility machine to you and me, and he now reckons he's getting very strong signals over here on the western edge of the site. I've agreed to meet Mick out there, and I shouldn't get lost if I just follow the signs. Two men and two signs. Oh yeah, don't take a nose of the signs. I want you to see this test pit here. A couple of years ago, we had a little test pit here. It's been fertiled around by animals now, but you can see there's a bit of walling here. But very importantly, this produced a couple of bits of slag. It doesn't look much, but slag is a byproduct of making iron, and it could mean we've got a Roman iron smelting furnace nearby. There's a big enclosure around here. I mean, it's probably too big for a building, Ben, isn't it? Well yeah, I mean, unless it's a very big aisled barn or something like that, it's certainly very large. John, have you managed to cover most of this? Well, we've done half the survey so far, and what's really interesting, just show you the results. Look, the test pit is down here, and that's where you've got a bit of walling. But I'm getting really strong readings here in red, and I've done half the survey so far, and I'm sure that this is the concentration of the area of burning. And just look at the soil. Look here, it's really grey, whereas in here, in amongst the trees, look, you can see the red clay. This is the concentration of the burning. But professional to the end, John wants to finish the survey before we start digging. I'm confident this isn't barbed wire fence. Well, fingers crossed. But if we do find a Roman furnace this time, it could completely change our view of what was happening here. Because there are also an awful lot of pits showing up on our LiDAR picture, and quarry pits can be classic signs of Roman ironworking. So maybe we haven't got a villa here, but a specialist industrial site. So to help us find out, we've invited an expert in Roman metalworking to join us, and he's going to start by looking at one of the pits that seems to have a spoil heap around it. You can see the spoil that's been dug out, dumped on that side, and you can see the spoil dumped out here, Roger, as well. Yeah. And it's a lot of stone. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, the thing we can say straight away here, this sort of excludes one possibility, and that's it. It's not geological. Yeah. This is not natural. This is man-made, and you can sort of see the spoil sort of backcast there, and these sort of stones here. This is the worst material they didn't want as well, isn't it? That's the problem with mining archaeology. Unlike most archaeology, where people tend to sort of deposit stuff on top of each other in mines, you're taking stuff away. What we hope is that we can sort of find small amounts of what they did. Can you tell from this? Well, you can see here, I mean, if you look at this, the orangey colour tells us there's a little bit of iron in there, but not enough to be worth smelting. Right. This is some stuff we found down the road, just in a cutting, and you can see, feel the difference in weight. Look at the colours. I mean, I could spot that as iron straight away. Exactly. It's very different to that, isn't it? Well, this will occur in bands underneath this stuff, so you've got to get this overburden off. You've got to get through this, potentially, to get like that over here. Exactly, yeah. With so many pits to check, it looks like Roger will have his work cut out, but what I find most surprising is that we could have so much industry close to what we suspect is a villa. Interestingly, we're getting evidence that people lived and cooked in the buildings Phil's investigating. Cracking. Absolutely cracking. What's it like on the other side? Get some of that muck off the other side. Oh, yeah. That is some pot, isn't it, really? This mortarium would have been used for grinding food like corn or maize to make bread, and it suggests that we could be close to a kitchen. In fact, we do seem to be getting the sort of finds you'd associate with a Roman villa. The problem is we're not finding very many of them. Everything we'd expect to find on a villa site is here, both in terms of sort of range of material and dates, but in really small quantities. What do you reckon's going on, Stephen? The other way to look at it is to ask the question, what are they doing with their rubbish in the first place? I mean, if, for example, we've got evidence of ironworking here, could they be digging pits to extract the ore and then chucking their rubbish down the pits to get rid of it? And that would be a very simple explanation about why there isn't much material on the site full stop. Which is another reason to start digging those pits. Exactly, yeah. But, and this is typical, just as I point out the shortage of finds, news reaches me that Matt's trench is starting to look really exciting. He's finding huge quantities of stuff, and it's all much posher than we've seen anywhere else. Look at all this brick and loads of tile. It's fantastic, Mick. This is hypercaused heating flue tile, look, with the marks on it where the plaster sticks on. You've also got lots of roofing material. These are the clay tiles off the roof, one like that, and the curved one over like that. So, you know, it's all looking much more like a sort of high-status building than we thought. Is that painted plaster? Yeah, you've actually got stuff with patterns on it, look, and red patches, and there's even more coming out. Where, Matty? You've got more of it there, haven't you? There's actually a piece there, in the top of this rubble there, with a black painted line across the top. You've got the trench of the day, without any doubt, haven't you? It's coming up with the goods, isn't it? So it looks like we could have found the first evidence of a fancy villa here in Matt's trench, but it's clearly something very different to the much coarser buildings that Phil's digging. It would seem life was better for some here than for others. What we're starting to see are different sort of character zones in this complex, you know. We're starting to get a sense of the different activities that went on, the different sort of lifestyles, even in one great complex. So what's the lifestyle here? The lifestyle here is obviously not quite as good as the lifestyle just over there. They had heating over there, and painted walls, and they don't have it here. So servants' quarters, maybe little sort of compounds, little workshops, something like that. We're still getting to grips with that aspect of it. But if there are workshops here, could they be connected with ironworking? Well, there's some tantalising evidence in Fay's trench that suggests they could be. We could be thinking about, we've got industrial activity here. You know, it's either some furnace, or some oven, or something like that, a kiln or something. That's why we put the trench here. We wanted to know what was going on on the inside of the building, and you've nailed it. You've got you've got something that's that's giving us activity inside the building. But as the end of the day draws near, it looks like it's Phil's trench that's turned up the most intriguing find so far. Has that been worn by a rope? No, I don't think so. Is it a very weathered piece of a statue? Is that an arm going? Well, there you go, you see. I mean, it does make you look... Well, that is some sort of an arm, then. Yeah, I mean... It does look like an arm. It appears to be possibly a bit of carved stone. This? Well, yeah, but what you can't see, Tony, is that round here, it does look like an arm. It really does. I wouldn't mind. If it's Roman and it's carved stone, that would be a big one for us, wouldn't it? You were the one who was saying, oh, it's very rare to find things like this. It is very rare. But we have our occasional moments. Don't you wish at a moment like this we were 19th century antiquarians? We could just tip it out. We'd actually find out what it is. What, rip it out without bothering about the archaeology? Well, can I point out that thankfully we are not 19th century archaeologists. We are responsible 21st century archaeologists. We want to do this properly. Have you got no sense of... Basically, Phil's telling us to clear off and come back when he's ready to lift this piece of stone and, crucially, when we'll be able to see the other side of what he's uncovered here. Meanwhile, carefully placed in between the ant's nest and the deadly nightshade bushes, Matt's trench is revealing the first glimpse of some sort of posh structure. Can you see the mortar there? Yeah, coming up, yeah. Yeah, look, there's the edge of another one there. Yeah, well, that could be a lead into a flue or something. So this would have formed some kind of floor heating or something like that? Yeah, if it's a hypercourse, yeah, a sort of pili within the room itself. It begins to look ever more structural. And as the earthwork here is quite high, there's a good chance that this building survives to some depth. Yeah, you can see how big it is. I think that's there. Ah, there we go. At last. I knew it was down here somewhere. Well, you found it, so keep digging. Yeah, how exciting. But if uncovering posh buildings and heavy industry wasn't enough for this site, we could be finishing day two with that rarest of discoveries, a finely sculpted Roman statue. Oh, dear. Well, no, no, no, let's have a look. There's this thing here. It just seems very, very strange. And then there's this as well. That just doesn't seem totally natural. Could that just be weathering? I think it probably could. That's the problem, isn't it? The reality is that this stone is as much of an enigma as the rest of the site. Will we sort that out? Will we sort the site out? We'll know tomorrow. Could it be industrial? Could it be a whole... Day three at Bedford Purley Woods in Cambridgeshire, where we're trying to make sense of a large Roman settlement that's been hidden here for nearly 2,000 years. So far, we've uncovered lots of Roman walls belonging to fairly low-status structures, which are part of this big range. But then we've also got a much posher building here in Matt's trench to puzzle over. Thankfully, this morning, one of our experts now thinks he knows what it is. Stephen, you think it's a bathhouse, don't you? I do. Why? It's a heated room to start with. It's got box tile and flue tile. There's a piece of box tile here, look. And the exciting thing is it's even got ash on the inside, look, from some of the fires that were being burnt here. So this is the central heating system with the hot air going through it? That's right. But is it just a heated room, or is it a bath? And there's one tangible bit of evidence. This rather scruffy piece of limestone is rather crucial, really. It's called tufa. It's a very lightweight limestone. And almost always, they're used in bathhouses. It's been cut, look, with a flat surface there by a saw. And they would have cut these to form an arched vault over a bathhouse. I think that the question still is, if it's a bathhouse, and, you know, your arguments are convincing, is it in isolation? Because we haven't really seen anything to go with it with wall cluster and tiles and all the rest. No, this is the high status end of the whole site. Yeah. And what's it doing stuck out here in the wood? Well, we've got one day left to answer those questions. So we're going to widen Matt's trench to find out more about this bathhouse. But we also need to work out how the buildings fit in with the ironworking we suspect was going on all over the site. So we're opening a trench here where geophys have detected an area of burning that could be the site of a Roman furnace. If there was a furnace and then the spread was around it... I can think of places where it's been central, where it's been on the periphery, where it's even been set aside. This red blob shows what geophys detected. So Ben's decided to make a clean sweep of the site, which should allow us to see the burnt ground surface and spot any clues to what was going on here. What's that? So we've got fragments of burnt ore here. Ore as well? Yeah, so we've got slag, we've got ore. It's smelting. Oh, that's fantastic. That's good news. It's not in vain. I could be here some time. The plan is now to open up a test pit to find out exactly what part of the metalworking process was going on here. People say I'm mad. Let's have a look at this. One person who knows all about the different processes involved is our own Phil Harding. Way back in 1998, a fresh-faced Phil took part in an experiment to try and smelt iron using genuine Roman techniques. The iron ore was collected locally, as was the clay used to make the furnace, the same type of furnace we'd expect to find on this site. We call it a shaft furnace. A typical type of furnace that's been in Britain since probably the late Iron Age at the earliest. So we based it on an archaeological excavation, roughly the right size thickness walls, the right size diameter. The height is something we've got to judge because that never survives archaeologically. They also made a makeshift roasting hearth, again something we might find. This is a process that dries out and cracks open the iron ore, making it easier to extract the iron from the stone. Phil and the smelting team had to get the temperature up to 1,000 degrees. The molten liquid running out is what's known as slag and contains silicon and other impurities that are separated from the iron. It is like a volcano, isn't it? Look at it coming. Tell you what, Jay, you'll work up a thirst on this job. Oh yeah, we'll sort that out later. Can you pull that one out? There we are. Hopefully we've got something in there. Here he is, there it is. Eventually, Phil got to see the end product, a sponge of malleable iron known as bloom. Oh, that's right, and then we ended up, that's it, we just, we ground it up. Eleven years later, and Phil remembers how much work went into making just a small bar of iron. Let's have a look at that in the sunshine. Yeah, yeah, find the sunlight, Phil. Yes. That's the boy. Oh yeah, look at that. Look at the mirror, look at the mirror. I don't think you look any older, Phil. No, I'm weathering pretty well, weathering pretty well, really, you know. Our expert in metalworking is now starting to think that iron could be the main reason this settlement's here, because he suspects the raw iron ore from pits like this one is of very high quality. So what's it actually doing? Well, what it's doing now is shining x-rays onto the rock, and the different elements in the rock will sort of reflect those x-rays back, and if we look at the intensity of them, we can say what's there and how much is there. Right, so that's nearly 50% there. Good solid iron, that, isn't it? It is, absolutely. I mean, that's almost pure iron oxide, really. If you look here, Stuart, look, we've got almost 2% manganese. What's significant about manganese? Well, manganese is one of those things which really helps slag form, it helps it flow. And iron smelting's not just about making iron. If you can get your slag to flow nicely, it means your furnace keeps working, it doesn't get all clogged up. So this is fantastic ore, not just for its iron content, which is very high, but also the other bits and pieces in with it, the other elements in with it, manganese. Fantastic ore to smelt. Having established that the pits with the spoil heap around them are to do with mining for iron ore, we now want to check one of the other shallower pits, which could have been dug for a different purpose. Meanwhile, over at the posh end of the site, Matt's now extended his trench over the bathhouse, and is making quick progress. But ideas are changing. There are several things, actually. One is that the orientation is wrong. It doesn't look like the plan of a villa that I recognise from elsewhere as a standard courtyard villa. The new theory is that this bathhouse is not part of a Roman villa, but built for a manager or overseer who was looking after the ironworks here. Is it possible that we're looking at some overseer here who's working on behalf of the state? And the state, of course, I think, have a very, very large presence in the building underneath Castor Village. And it could be some procurator there who is not only superintending Fenland estates, but ironworking estates as well. And how far is Castor? Castor's fantastic. It's only a few miles away. And this was also excavated by our antiquarian. Artie spent many years excavating at Castor, where he found enormous building complexes underneath the modern village. It's a good idea. Our site, controlled from Castor, could have been one of several iron production centres situated on the outskirts of Dura Breve, the main trading centre in the region. Ermine Street, the M1 of its day, literally ran through the town. And with the River Neen close by, iron could have been dispatched by road or river to almost anywhere in Roman Britain. And if this bathhouse was for an overseer, it looks like he lived in fine style, judging by these chunks of painted plaster that show the colour scheme of the walls of this building 1,600 years ago. It's a stark contrast to Phil's trench, where there's no sign of painted plaster or luxuries like underfloor heating. But we did find what looked like a carved stone here yesterday. And now that our experts have had time to carefully examine it, I'm curious to know what they think it is. It's a stone. A stone. A stone. But not just any random stone. Phil thinks it's been definitely shaped for some purpose or other. Take a look at this one here. Now that was found just outside in the angle of the walls there. Yeah. Look how that ordinary stone has been used as a wet stone to sharpen tools. And it just goes to show that every stone you find on a site like this, you have to look at it, think about it, to make sure it's not an artefact. Thanks, I think that's a very good lesson to learn from someone who was sure that was a statue last night. It looked very good at the time. But at least Phil's trench and Faye's trench put in here have given us lots of useful detail about the actual buildings in this range. Basically, we've got a collapsed building. It's colourful, isn't it? It's great, isn't it? You can just see where you are there. You've got these collapsed stone, this stone wall, and beneath it we've got this tile layer which is our roof. Yeah. And then here, we've got more of this kind of collapsed roof building material. It's very black, isn't it? It is. I mean, this building's been burnt down. Although there's a lot more to learn about this range, we now have some idea what these buildings looked like. This is a reconstruction of the area where Phil was digging, which we now know was a series of rooms based around a courtyard. We think these were workshops or living accommodation for the people who worked here, a workforce probably of slaves, which would explain why we didn't find any coins or items of real value here. The question now is have we discovered the main iron smelting area up here on the slightly higher ground? Time's ticking away, and Mick has called me urgently from over here somewhere because he desperately needs Roger, our man with the suitcase. What's the problem, Mick? We've got some material down here that we're not quite sure what it is. We need you to look at it, Roger, and tell us, because we think it might be bloomery stuff, in which case, you know, we need a furnace, but it may not be, maybe just slag. What can you see there? Well, can you feel it? It's very, very dense. Yeah, it is, certainly is. It's also quite porous. It doesn't look like slag. I mean, could it be the bloom? It's either that or roasted ore. Let's have a look, see what you've got. Now, this is what I call a real expert, someone who'll look at a lump of crud like this and tell you what it is. I would be thinking more towards roasting half, having a look at that. So that means you can really take all that out then, didn't it? So we can get on? That's pretty efficient. You didn't even use your suitcase. I didn't even need the suitcase. We'll keep digging to make sure, but it looks like what we've found is remains of where they've been roasting the ore, like this, to prepare it for smelting, and the actual furnace won't have been far away. It's a great result. We now know this enclosure is a Roman iron smelting area, and we can now identify what looks to be another similar enclosure just here. But with time almost up, how does our posh bathhouse fit into the story? We know we have a building that collapsed when the site fell out of use in the 4th century, but it's proving tricky to interpret. Sorry, could I just... There appears to be another stone on top of this one, which makes me think perhaps we might have a robbed wall as opposed to floor. So that's a wall, not a floor? So I'm on the wall now. So you're on the wall, and I'm inside. But I'm still over the floor of another room. Possibly. So you've actually got a wall running, which still means that could be a door, and that looks like the corner where there was a door. So there's a room there, and there's a room there. But no wall. The wall has gone, robbed away. A lot more work's needed here, but we can get some idea of the extent of the bathhouse from the size of this earthwork. And if our theory is right about the link with Carstor, then it's possible that our bathhouse was laid out like the one shown here in Artis' picture, which means that we're talking about a building that would have looked something like this. It was probably a stand-alone facility used by the official overseer on what would have been a state-controlled iron-working site. Our dig's certainly given me a newfound respect for this man, Edmund Artis, who was clearly a very good archaeologist for his time, but died before he could publish his written reports. His map of the archaeology, drawn in 1828, has proved to be largely accurate, and it's not just the buildings, but also the pits he recorded that are key to understanding this site. Goodness me. It's a journey to the centre of the earth. What we now know is that in Roman times, a lot of the rubbish was being thrown in these pits. So, basically, this pit was open at the same time that those buildings were being occupied and used. And this looks a bit clay-y to me, so is that what they're going for, the clay? Yeah, there's no sign of ironstone or any bands of ironstone in this at all, so it must be clay for some purpose. And the little sort of pock marks and things I can see in there, is this sort of root activity? Well, some of it is, but some of it, some of these dark patches, if you carefully clean them back, you can actually see adze marks or pick marks where they've actually levered the clay out from this pit. Fantastic. We now know not all these pits were dug for iron ore. Many, like this one, would have been dug for clay to build and repair the iron-smelting furnaces. So, at the end of three days, we can now picture this long-lost Roman settlement as it must have looked in its heyday around 200 AD. What's been hidden in these woods is a massive iron-working site, with the furnaces and ore-roasting pits on the slightly higher ground, while the mining was going on here, chasing the seam of natural iron ore. The workshops and living quarters were not far away, and were very much second-class, as mentioned by Edmund Artis. But there was at least one fancy Roman building, a bathhouse, situated well away from the industry, here on the eastern side of the site. But our story's not quite over, because for the next few hours, our archaeologists will be measuring, recording, taking photographs, and eventually they'll write a proper archaeological report on this site, which is really rather nice, because we'll be finishing the job that Edmund Artis, for whatever reason, didn't complete himself. And then, when we've all finally gone, nature will take over this whole site again, just as it did nearly 2,000 years ago, when the Romans finally left this place.