The Ancient Roman River Fort Crossing | Time Team | Timeline

It's the afternoon of day one here at Pierce Bridge in County Durham, where we're getting to grips with what we think might be the remains of three Roman bridges in the River Tees. But while most of us have our eyes firmly fixed on what's happening on the riverbeds down here, over here what looks like a breakaway faction of rebel archaeologists appears to be opening a trench in a field that even more bizarrely is nowhere near the river. So John, where are we on this geophys then? I think we've got a little rectangular building here. Yeah. It's on a different alignment to the fort, so we're going from the middle, across the wall, possible ditch outside. Yeah. I have two big questions about this site. Firstly, why are we excavating this little field when the river's actually about 200 meters in that direction? But secondly, and probably more importantly, what on earth is Mick Aston doing here? Mick wasn't scheduled to be on this dig. Ben's in charge, not you. You don't like Roman archaeology and yet you wheedled your way into it. Yeah, well it's because it's County Durham and it's the Tees Valley, and we've done quite a lot of sites in this area already, and I'm interested in where this fits in to the overall picture because we're very near Stanwick, which is a big prehistoric complex, and we're in the Tees Valley where we've got Gainford and Barnard Castle from the medieval period. Do you see that, John? The reason he's here has got nothing to do with the Romans at all. He's interested because of what might have preceded the Romans or what came after them. Yeah. But Ben, you're interested in the Romans, aren't you? Definitely interested in the Romans, yeah. And the reason why we're here is because there's been a lot of excavation around Pierce Bridge, wonderful tome here, you know, you just feel the weight of it, a huge amount of excavation, but it's all taken place over there to the east, loads of buildings, some sort of village-like settlement over there, but no one's actually been over here on the west side. Have we got a small village just contained over there? Have we got something much larger, something like a small town? Mick, do you think whatever we find here might help us illuminate what's going on down at the river? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this has never been looked at. Well, it has been, no. Except for this morning with you. So we don't know what's here, really. Well, we do. We're starting to get a really exciting picture, I think. We've surveyed it magnetically, you can see the corner of the fort, it shows really clearly, and then we've got a mass of anomalies extending across the field. Do you think all this here might be human activity rather than just geology? I'm sure it is. When you look at the detail, some of the ditches are on the same alignment as the fort, but others are clearly on a differing alignment. What I think we may have is an earlier settlement and that the fort has been slapped on top of it. We've opened our first two trenches here to try and find a next to the fort. If we can establish how the Roman settlement developed, that should help us work out the story of the bridges. And if we're going to do that, getting dates will be vital. On dry land, that means finding bits of pottery or coins. Down in the river, though, we're reliant on dendrochronology, or tree ring dating. And if you've ever tried sawing wood underwater, you'll appreciate that's not quite so easy. Mick, it's organised chaos out there. Henry's doing something with his GPS. We've got Bob and Rolf scrabbling away for finds. We've got Mick the dig sawing. Is it worth it? What is it we're trying to find out? Oh, it's fantastically worth it. I mean, if he could come up with the felling dates of the timbers from the tree rings and therefore the likely date the bridges are built, we start to get a chronology of the structures in the riverbed. What about what Henry's doing? Well, he's trying to fix the position of the timbers that are in the riverbed. He's just got a sketch map made of where these timbers have been seen, and that's very difficult to line up with what's going on in the fields on that side, the geophysics results and so on. Ah, so once we've got the alignment of the bridges, we can have a look and see if there are any roads which relate to them. That's right. So it should help to sort out what's gone on with the various crossings of the river at this point. So while Henry carries on plotting the timbers in the river, John started surveying the banks to see if he can pick up traces of any corresponding roads. He's looking for one in particular, Deer Street, the Roman equivalent of the M1 that we know came crashing through here somewhere close by. Back in Trench 2, next to the fort, we've had a small breakthrough, our first find. Naomi? Yeah? You've got a little bit of bone here. I presume that's animal bone. I think there's, um, is that some kind of butchery mark on it? That's definitely a butchery mark. It's a rib from a large mammal, which is like a horse or a cow. So yeah, evidence of butchery. The good news is we've found evidence there was human activity next to the fort. The bad news is we don't know when, though it looks like we might be getting a date from the river. So what do you think, mate? Um, it's wooden, but it's not got that many rings in it. There's only about 30 in this piece and I need 50 plus. So could you do anything with it? Not with this one, but we're going to try and sample more of the timbers down there. If you do find a piece that's got 50 or more rings in, will you be able to date it for us before the end of our three days? Yes, if I can find the right sample. I do have a problem there aren't that many Roman chronologies around here. But if I find the right piece of wood, I'm pretty sure I can do something with it. Right, still no date, but it's only day one, plenty of time to go. Meanwhile, I don't know what John had with his cornflakes this morning, but he's already finished geophysing in this field. We were hoping he might pick up traces of any roads running down to meet our bridges. There's your bridge, Ben, cutting through here. There's no sign in my data of a road going on a north-south alignment. I mean, clearly we've got lots of responses. We've got these very strong ditch-like responses, but they're in the middle of the field there where the sheep are. We've not gone quite as far as your bridge yet, Phil, but at the moment we're not really answering all the questions. I'm not quite so worried. This is good stuff. There's great anomalies there. Maybe this is a roadside ditch. It's just that the road has to curve around to take this steep incline down to the river. So, even though there's no trace of one, Ben's convinced there is a road here somewhere, so we're going to open a third trench to try and find it. Not that we're clutching at straws. All the time we've been here, we've been concentrating on the River Tees, looking at the fantastic finds and the structural remains of the three bridges, but there's an elephant in the room which we've completely ignored, and that is this fort. It's huge, isn't it? We've got this massive eastern gateway here. We've got barracks here. There's enough room for a whole army. Guy, where are those big eastern gates on the ground? You're walking right under it now, so come and sit down here. Yeah. Now, if it was Roman times, we'd actually be in the shade instead of having our heads burnt off, but we'd have the arch going right the way up, and that would be the left-hand side of this double arch into the fort. It is a big fort, isn't it? It's a substantial one. Hadrian's Wall isn't far, is it? Is that why this place was built? Not this particular fort, because Hadrian's Wall itself predates this fort by around 130, 140 years. But presumably there would have been a fort here before this in order to guard the river crossing. You'd think, wouldn't you? But there's been no evidence of that found, but this place has to be all about the river crossing. The Romans arrived in this part of the world in the late first century AD. This is one of their main thoroughfares right up into northern Britain. I can't imagine there wasn't an earlier fort here, but so far one has not been found. Finding the missing early fort would be a big breakthrough, because it could help explain the position of the bridges. Back in Phil's trench, there's no sign of any road, but he has made a remarkable discovery. I've got this fragment of skull in there. Is this a grave? I just need your confirmation. That is you. Yeah, that's no problem. Just by looking at it, you've got this nice uniform thickness, and that is just screaming at me, that is definitely Roman. Because look, what else I found. Oh, it's just... Aha! Look, that's a piece of a very small shale bracelet. That is lovely. What do you think? Oh, tailor-made, isn't it, really? Look at that, just... Add it to the collection. Yeah. So you'd never know whether it is for a child or an adult, would you? No. Cheeky. In the meantime, Ben's got us orienteering up on the escarpment, overlooking our site. He's convinced this is where we might find the missing early fort. It's a stunning view, but that's not why you brought me up here, is it? No, no. I said we've got to get out of the river and look on both banks as well. We've got to look around the river. And what a commanding position this is. It's difficult to believe that the Romans wouldn't have put something to secure this bank up here. I mean, just look at the view. It's fantastic. If the Romans didn't just come up here for a very nice view on their campaigns, I mean, they wouldn't sort of put a fort or something up here just to look down on the river crossing down there. No, no. But you wouldn't want your enemies up here looking down on your fort, on your settlement. You'd want to secure it somehow. Yeah, but that's sort of a medieval view of forts or something. The Romans are a field army. They fight out in the open. They don't need to defend their fort. Both of you, we're not going to be able to resolve it by discussion, are we? How about tomorrow if we get John to geophys here and see if there's any trace of anything? Yeah. I mean, I spent most of today looking at the routes and roadways that might approach these bridges from the outside world, as it were. And the possibilities have got Roman roads coming through this field. There might be all sorts in there. It's a huge area. We've got about 140 metres we can put a transect straight up there. So I'm with you on that one. So it's the end of our day one. Have we got three Roman bridges? Have we got the roads leading up to them? Well, there's our hotel down there. So it'll be easy for John to get up at 6.30 tomorrow morning, come up here, geophys, and he'll have the answers for us before we finish breakfast. Beginning of day two here at Pierce Bridge in County Durham, where the meadow flowers are out, the larks are singing, and it looks like being the hottest day of the year. So all our archaeologists are feeling very positive. I am because at last I'm walking on something Roman. We've got evidence of two Roman bridges over there somewhere in the River Tees, but this is the third one that's already been excavated. Although, forgive my ignorance, Ben, but this looks more like a road to me than a bridge. Don't worry about that for the time being. Don't worry about that. Have a look at this. Massive great stones, one on top of the other. Huge great things, look. And this is a big bridge abutment. An abutment meaning? Well, it's the edge of the bridge. It's the bit on the bank that sort of consolidates the whole thing. So where's the far bank? Ah, we don't actually know. I don't understand what's going on at all. You don't know where the far bank is. We've got a bridge which appears to be in the middle of a field rather than over a river. What's going on? What it tells us is that rivers are dynamic things. We're not looking at the landscape that the Romans would have seen it, you know. The river has shifted. So how does that impact on what we've got to do? In order to get to the bottom of this, to work out what the bridges were doing, why there's all those finds in the river, to get to the core of this mystery, we really need to understand the shifting courses of the river through time. And thanks to the shifting river, we can now see how this bridge was constructed. Paving to consolidate the riverbed beneath, with stone abutments and piers on top to support a timber superstructure. It's impressive, though since we don't have a date for it, we don't yet know how it fits into our story. Late last night, Ben got all excited about the possibility the missing early fort might be up here on the escarpment overlooking the river. So John was up there with the sparrows this morning to find out. Sadly, there's no sign of it, though what he has found is just as crunchy. I think this is really nice though, because that must confirm the line of Deer Street through this field. I mean, clearly we've got the zebra effect here, you know, the black and white, the ridge and furrow ploughing, that's masking things, but there's no doubting that these series of anomalies show the road line. Yeah, and this is what we're wanting to confirm, Ben, you know, whether Deer Street did come through here in one of its phases, and that seems to confirm its alignment exactly where expected to be, doesn't it? Okay, so we've got these great anomalies, can we be absolutely confident without excavation that that's what we've got, or do we need to put a trench in? To me, excavation along the road line is actually key to understanding the routes and the bridges. Okay, whereabouts then, where do we put the trench? Well, I think anywhere in the middle of the field along this sort of line. John thinks he's located Deer Street, the big Roman trunk road that ran all the way to our site from York and on up to Habrian's Wall, and as it looks like it could be on the same alignment as our middle bridge, we're going to open a fourth trench to find out. In the meantime, we're still trying to find a road on the north bank that ran down to Ben's bridge here. So this sort of slightly raised area with the boulders in, I mean, that's not the road, is it? No, you'll see that in the side of the trench here, there's this sort of white flat material, and I think basically what it is, it's stone that's working its way down through the plough soil. If there is a road here, it's masked by all this topsoil, so we're going to have to remove that, but even if we can't find it, all isn't lost. Stuart thinks he's found another road running down to Ben's bridge back on the other side. This is getting really exciting from my point of view, because what we're seeing is a link back to Stannock's Hill Fort, which is three kilometres down the road, biggest Iron Age hill fort in this part of the world, major tribal centre, it's 320 hectares, it's a huge, huge site, but the really interesting thing that that relates to is this routeway, it links Stannock's right down to Pierce Bridge here, and heads towards where we've got the string line across the river, and where there are some timbers in the river bed. So there's an outside chance that the piles themselves are prehistoric and not Roman? It would be really nice if they were, wouldn't it? That'd be marvellous. This is terrific. John may have picked up Deer Street on Geophys, now Stuart reckons he's identified an older prehistoric road running all the way up to Ben's bridge here. So is the bridge also prehistoric? To answer that, we need a tree ring date, though poor old Mick looks like he's still struggling. The problem is, I float, Bob, and I can't get down deep enough to cut it, so I'm going to bring my stunt double in here, Bob. So Bob's going to have to go in there and do it, so basically I need to get as low as you possibly can. Further downstream, we're getting more Oi! Oh, boy! Oh, let's have a look. Oh, that's beautiful, isn't it? What do you think that is, precisely? Oh, we've got a very nice copper alloy pin there, bronze to you and me, but it must be a hairpin of some description. Look, there's a little sort of piercing through the middle, with this glass bead on the end. I think what's interesting about this is it means women, it must mean women, and of course the Roman army is followed around by all sorts of women, some wives, but also women of certain reputations, only too happy to help those soldiers spend their earnings. So this is what that might be. In all the excitement, I've completely forgotten about poor old Matt. He's been sweating it out over in the field next to the fort. Extending this trench has been really, really useful. We've had the first wall there inside of the building, and we've got the other wall just coming up underneath John there. Inside, you can see we've got these stones, I think it's collapsed wall or roof or something like that, and that is overlying this really lovely dark occupation layer down here with the kind of charcoal, absolutely chocker, with pot and some lovely vines. I've had this, it's like it's made out of a pot base, I think. Looks like a bit of black burnished pottery that's been reused. Yeah, yeah. It's a spindle whorl, isn't it? A drop spindle for spinning wool. Excellent stuff. So what dates your pottery? Well, a second century, certainly nothing later in the middle of the third century, would you say? I think the key to it is this same end, isn't it? I mean, this is sort of, you know, second century onwards, but you don't get it much into the fourth if at all. So it looks to me as though you've got something here that's actually earlier than that fort. So what have they done? Dropped the fort into the middle of a settlement or cleared a space? I mean, whether they dropped it into an existing settlement or whether the settlement was abandoned, that's probably up for grabs. But we do know the crucial thing is this settlement was much, much bigger than anyone previously thought. We thought it was all confined over to the east, now we know it spreads over here to the west as well. So I'm thinking it's something approaching a small town now. I mean, you've got to think in those terms. This is great. We've now got convincing evidence that this settlement is 100 years older and twice the size than was previously thought. Finding three bridges here is starting to make a bit more sense. Meanwhile, Philippa's still sifting through all the finds. If you just look over here, we've got a range of military artefacts. There's this nice scale armour. Yeah. And it's really well preserved. Yeah. And I don't think they've moved very far at all. They've just been sat under a layer of silt for nearly 1,700 years. Yeah, I suppose if they'd been washed away in the natural course of events, they'd have been battered around amongst the rocks, wouldn't they? They've got more bent up, damaged and worn down. Up on the escarpment, we were meant to find Deer Street. Fay's got something, but a giant military highway it ain't. What, just this bit of cobbling here? Yeah, the tiny bit there. Well, I expected a great sort of aggarate bank, you know. You're entirely right. That's what they told us we were going to get. But we have got something more interesting. This kind of wall here, which looks like a revetment. Right. And then we've down here, we had a lot of pottery and bone and it's quite dark and it's like an occupation. So what are you going to do with it now? What I'm hoping to do is stick a slot down the side here and look for more of this road. You think it might be buried under this revetment and all this occupation then? That's what I'm hoping. Down in the river, John's team is about to try and survey the middle bridge. Don't drop it, Kerry. As far as we know, this is the first time radar has ever been used to locate archaeology on a river bed. And there's good reason. No one else would be daft enough to stick £30,000 worth of equipment into an inflatable dinghy. I'll tell you what, you're glad you can't see yourselves from this angle. So not enough rings on this one either. Over in the incident room, the struggle to date our bridges is fast becoming a soap opera. This one we actually found late last night and basically it has more than 50 rings. It's actually got 67 rings in it. So have you got a date for it? No. Date? Why not? Well, if you look at here, on the screen here, and you can see here in the Roman period, I'm just getting nothing. Hang on. So these are the dates. So that's 471. So you've got two there. Yeah. And nothing else in the Roman. But look, you've got loads at 1104. Could it be Norman? No, because I know the data really well there and that just isn't jumping out enough at me. So what are we going to do? Keep looking. Keep diving. Keep getting wet. While we were just filming that scene, Mick's BlackBerry was beeping, but we ignored it. And then after we finished shooting, Mick had a look at the message and it said, we have a result. And the message was from the laboratory that Mick uses in order to have another run at the data to see whether they can get a result. You're covering something up with a piece of paper. Have we got a result? No. Well, we do, but I'm not going to tell you. Why? Because I don't believe it. Come on, let's have a look. I don't believe the date myself. And because I don't believe the date, I'm not going to tell you what it is. You genuinely aren't going to tell me? I'm not going to tell you. I want to check and check and check until I'm 100% sure it's right. Oh, this is ridiculous. It's not ridiculous because if I tell you the date and I come back tomorrow and decide it's not right, I'm going to look like a fool. We all look like fools on time, see. It doesn't matter. Will you tell me tomorrow? If I think it's correct, I will tell you tomorrow. I'm sorry. Back in the river, we're still messing about in boats. But Ratty Mole and Badger may have pulled off a minor miracle. I think as we went over the bridge, there might have been... I mean, when you could feel the wood under your feet, there was a very different response on the screen. So it might have worked. It's been another storming day. We've got archaeology coming at us from all sides. Even if we still can't make sense of it yet. What's really gratifying is that all our painstaking detective work is beginning to pay off. We're on a roll. Phil, you put this trench in, didn't you? So that you could find the road. That's right, yeah. Well, you've got it, haven't you? There's a ditch there and then that bit's humped and a ditch on the other side. That ditch has got some old rubbish or something in it. Well, this seems to be one of those cases of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and... I'm wrong. You're wrong. We do have a ditch here and we still think there's a good chance we've got a burial in there. But what you've failed to recognise is that, in fact, we've got another ditch in here, which we've not actually excavated. So we've got a ditch there, another ditch there and then another ditch here. Hang on, why does that mean we haven't got a road? Because you only really need two ditches for a road, one on either side. The crucial thing is that they literally appear to be continuing straight out towards the river. So we can say, pretty certainly, that this river cliff has eroded back into the Roman town. Just beyond where this wire is, it plunges away down towards the river and you're saying that there used to be settlement there and whoosh, it disappeared. Absolutely. In the Roman period, it would have been way out there. But the other really interesting thing is that, do you see that white tag down there? I do. We had a superb Roman coin there, which Philippa's been having a look at. What have you got, Philippa? It's a really nice silver denarius of Domitian. And Domitian is when? This coin dates to AD 79. So they were here at a seriously early date. Mick, great coin. Cracking date as well. And some more gifters, John Hart of the press. Well, also excellent, as you can see. Yeah, I mean, we've extended the survey right along the riverbank now and just look at the results. There's so much going on. It's so complex. I mean, a series of ditches, masses of pits. But what's really exciting, a whole series of stone buildings right along the riverfront. Now, normally at the end of the day, if we had geophys like this, I would tell you exactly where we're going to put the trenches in tomorrow. But guys, this is so complicated, isn't it? Yeah. I think we're going to think about it over a drink tonight and we'll let you know tomorrow. Well, at the sound of that. A pint or two. Yeah, yeah. Beginning of day three here at Pierce Bridge in County Durham, where we're trying to solve the mystery of the literally thousands of Roman objects which have come out of the river Tees here. But as you can see, we've got a big problem. The water level has risen at least three feet since last night and that's after only, what, three quarters of an hour of rain. The problem, of course, is that our divers aren't going to be able to get in there to do any more work, are they? Doesn't look hopeful at the moment, does it? What is it that we wanted them to do today? Well, we still had sampling to do. We still wanted to plot in some of the timbers. But, you know, that's obviously going to be a bit of a problem now. Stuart, where does all this water come from? From the river, obviously. Yes, thank you very much. This river goes, it's got 30 mile run that way, right up into the mountains and moorlands in Cumbria. It might only rain for half an hour here, but if it's been raining for two or three days up there, it comes in literally waves. It builds up in torrents. And it's not just the power of the water that erodes the banks and bridges, it's the boulders and cobbles it brings with it. There's loads of them deposited down there. They're that big. Can you imagine them hitting the bridge, weakens the structure? After a while, you're going to get sick of repairing these timber bridges and so on. So let's build a nice big stone pier bridge over there that's going to last for generations. That's why you have to kind of react to that sort of power of the river. The divers who invited us here gave us two objectives, didn't they? One was to sort out the bridges or the remnants of them, which we found in the river. But the other was to solve the mystery of all these finds in the river. Are we going to be able to meet those objectives? I think we're nearly there. We've got a bit more work to do up on the banks. And then, you know, hopefully that will give us more... I'm confident it will give us more of an idea about what's actually going on in the river. It might not be a raging torrent, but the strength of the current makes working out here far too dangerous. It's frustrating, certainly, but it does at least demonstrate the destructive power of the river. Which we decided last night must have undermined the north bank here, causing a great chunk of the cliff to collapse into the water, taking part of the Roman town with it. It's hard to imagine a more dramatic episode in the history of Pearsbridge. You'll remember last night that John produced this fantastic geophys, which was so complex and so confusing that we decided not to start putting trenches in, but to have a think overnight about what we wanted to do. And the archaeologists thought overnight, and they've come up with a solution. They've done more geophys. Doesn't this just make it even more complicated? Well, I think it's actually helped a lot. Look, we've got the river here. There's Phil's trench with the early coin. Now we've moved back inland. I mean, we've got a whole series of buildings. These white anomalies are clearly buildings, and they're part of the civilian settlement. This is the vicus outside the fort, isn't it? But these buildings are clearly sat on top of these ditches. So how early are these ditches? Right. That's the important thing to find out. And I think if we put a simple trench across one of those ditches, we can establish whether it's military or whether it's part of the early fort. Mick, I don't understand why we're so interested in these ditches. What's so important about them that we need to date them? It goes back to the whole idea that all these crossings of the rivers up in this part of the country, where the roads hit the rivers and there are bridges or forts or whatever, there's usually an early Roman fort. And there's been many attempts around here to find it, and they've never succeeded in finding it. We've only got this later fort. And so if these ditches here were military, it might mean that that is the early fort and it's underneath the vicus. So it's an important thing to sort out. And it's a relatively simple exercise to establish whether it's a military ditch, because that will have straight sides and an ankle breaker at the bottom. So even if we haven't got dating material, we'll know if it's military. We're still looking for the missing early fort. So we're going to put a fifth trench in here on the north bank to see if we can find it. Ah, you've got the other leg there. I have, Phil, yeah. There's two legs here. There's also a couple of finger bones just here. So that must have been the position of the hand. Thankfully, all the painstaking excavation over in Phil's trench has finally paid dividends. So we are beginning to get a real impression of the layout of this body in the grave. Trench is four foot, in old money, wide. So I guess the skeleton, the body, would be somewhere between, what, four and five foot tall? Must be, mustn't it, yeah. From the length of the skeleton, the bracelet and coin found next to it, we think this inhabitant of early Roman Piercebridge was likely to have been a young woman. And as it was the custom to bury people alongside roads, we're convinced there was a road somewhere nearby, even if we haven't found it with our trench. Yesterday afternoon, for, I think, the first time in 17 years of Time Team, I asked a contributor a question about the archaeology and he absolutely refused to give me an answer. The guilty party was Mick Worthington, our dendrochronologist, and I'd wanted him to date one of the wooden supports of the bridge in the river. You had processed the dating yourself, hadn't you? And you'd also asked your mate at your laboratory to process it. He'd come up with a date. What date? They didn't say he came up with a date at all. Well, you covered all the data over with a sheet of white paper, didn't you? And beneath that there was a date. No, beneath that there was a conversation between two dendrochronologists saying this is an interesting area, you should look at that. In the river, I've only found two pieces of wood which are suitable for dendrochronology. They have more than 50 annual rings and they're of oak. I found two of those, I measured both of those, they do not match each other and neither of them match any of the reference chronologies. Therefore, we have no date. And we're not going to get one? No. Hang on, this is disastrous. If we can't get dates from the bridges, we've got no chance of telling the story of this place. On top of that, our radar survey hasn't worked either. There's nothing that obviously jumps out as saying bridge timbers. And the problem is that there's so many big boulders down there that the energy is hitting those, it's bouncing back up off them and we're not getting the penetration that would answer that question. Right, so it's the energy of the radar as well, but this is about the energy of the river as well. It's transported all those boulders, strewn them across the bottom and it stopped us from looking at the archaeology. That's it, yeah. It looks like the mystery of the bridges will remain unresolved, although there is one small glimmer of hope up on the escarpment. I thought you've just about finished here, haven't you? Yes, we have. I mean, we've found what we came to look for. We've got our Roman road, Deer Street. It's really vivid in the landscape there, isn't it? It looks fantastic, doesn't it? And actually, we also have our ditches on the other side, so we've got one there and one coming in over there as well. And of course, this street, Deer Street, goes slap bang to our middle bridge, doesn't it? Exactly, and that's what must date it, because that's when the Romans conquer the north. So give us a date. The big Roman push into the north is in the 70s and early 80s AD. Terrific, we've found Deer Street. Better still, it lines up exactly with our middle bridge here. So we think they must have been constructed at the same time, in the late 1st century AD. But we still haven't resolved the other big mystery that brought us here. Why so many religious objects were found in the river? It does seem to me that we've been ignoring the obvious. We've got the remains of a lot of bridges. We've got a puzzle about finds at the bottom of the river. Couldn't they just have been dropped by people walking across the bridges? I just don't think that could have been the case. These objects here were placed inside this pot, and it was placed on the bottom of the river. If it had been thrown off a bridge, they'd have been in tiny pieces. The great thing about the Roman Empire is that you can actually look up some of the literary sources written by people who were there at the time. Pliny the Younger actually describes a river shrine in Italy, and he talks about how they built their little shrines around to the god and other deities, and they put their objects in and around the shrines. What we've probably got here is what's left from what was in and around the shrines, perhaps on an island like this in the middle of the river. Why would people have ritually deposited a handle and some knobs? Well, I don't think they were putting the handle and the studs in on their own. I think they were probably putting objects inside boxes that have rotted away now, and that's what we've got left of them. But we do also know from other Roman writers that what some people would put in were objects that reflected their trade, what they manufactured. So some of these studs, furniture fittings, might actually have been put there by men who were working here, manufacturing that kind of material. So what crafts do you think might be represented here? Well, we've got this nice copper alloy medical instrument here, so perhaps the doctors are involved in the cult. I mean, actually, because it's a Roman military establishment, I can say with virtual certainty that the man who threw those in would have been a Greek, because it was only Greeks who worked as doctors in the Roman army. And that's a reminder of what an exotic world this was, because here we are, right up in northern Britain, and we would have had Greek doctors with the Roman army here. We now think there was once an island in the middle of the river before it was washed away by flood water. On this island, there were a series of shrines where people made offerings to the river gods before crossing over one of the bridges and continuing on their journey. Finally resolving the finds mystery is fantastic, but we're still looking for our missing early fort. Sadly, there's no sign of it in Trench 5, though what we have found vividly illustrates how these bridges were used. Look, that one road surface down there is earlier than that road surface there, because in between it, you've got that band of sand. So that sand goes under the road, does it? Absolutely. So that shows that there are two road surfaces. The whole thing has been relayed and reused. That's presumably heading down to a crossing of the river, isn't it? Absolutely. You see, when you look at it on the geophysics, this is the hallway, the roadway that we've actually excavated there. Now, if you know that this is a roadway, then this is most likely a roadway joining up to it up there. Then this one also becomes a roadway joining up there, and who knows, probably this one as well. It looks to me as well as if it's the sort of width that you might have, say, a pack horse with panniers on, rather than a loaded cart. Well, actually, I mean, in the middle there, you can actually see it is hollowed in. It's more heavily worn in the middle there. And, I mean, you can visualise these people coming up and down this roadway down to the bridge. To reach the middle bridge, we think people had to descend a steep slope using one of the curving roads Phil's found in his trench. A tantalising glimpse of daily life here. It's been an enthralling three days, and contrary to all expectations, we've even managed to get a tree ring date for Ben's Bridge, using a sample obtained by our local divers shortly after we'd finished digging. The results indicate it was built sometime between 40 BC and 85 AD, so we're almost certain this is the oldest bridge. Rolf and Bob asked us here to solve two mysteries, didn't you? That's right, yeah. The first one was how come they'd pulled literally thousands of small Roman finds out of that little stretch of the teeth? How many did you pull out? Something like 2,000 objects and, oh, 1,040 coins still counting. It's a treasure trove, isn't it? It's absolutely superb, and I think what we've now come to the conclusion is that these things weren't just lobbed in the river, they were carefully placed in these shifting islands, in these silts, as deliberate offerings, either on your journey up to the north, the military zone, or perhaps honouring the river itself. And what about the other riddle of the riverbed? Well, we think Rolf and Bob were right. The first of three bridges built here was prehistoric and probably repaired later using Roman concrete. The second bridge was built by the Roman army in their big push north during the late 1st century AD, by which time there was a settlement already here on the north bank. And when that bridge collapsed, a stone replacement was built further downriver, probably around the same time as the 3rd century fort. How long have you been diving here? We've been diving here for 22 years. Well, you'll be able to pack up now, won't you? We've solved all the problems. No, I think we've got another 22 years on us yet.