Look at that, one of the finest manor houses in Britain.
It was built for a powerful family, played host to Charles I.
You can imagine how excited the archaeologists were
when they discovered the moat of this Grade I listed building.
Except there was one tiny problem.
Look at this map the archaeologists drew. There's the house,
here's the moat and does it go up to here and turn round the house?
No, it goes hurtling off in that direction.
This is the direction the moat's going in
but what on earth's going on, what's it protecting?
There have been several theories -
from a Roman fort to a royal court,
from a chapel to a heavily fortified cattle enclosure.
And we've got just three days to rip up this field
and find out what this has got to do with that.
Please don't let it be a cattle enclosure, please!
Not a cattle enclosure.
Subs & Sync by Prodix Bierdopje.com
Llancaiach is just north of Cardiff, sitting on a plateau of land
in the middle of the rolling South Wales Valleys.
The earth works we're here to investigate were first recorded
in the 1970s but, so far, all attempts to establish what they are have failed.
Where he's coming in is where that ditch was shown from through there.
Yeah, yeah.
But it makes sense to assume they've got something to do
with next door Llancaiach Fawr Manor,
where the powerful Pritchard family once entertained Charles I.
And the manor itself, now a museum and education centre,
is also a bit of a mystery because no-one knows
if it was the first house to be built on this site.
You've got this whole place to run
and you've got coach loads of kids coming in and all the tourists
and you've invited us here for three days.
We have indeed, I just really want to know
whether we've got anything else that's earlier than about 1530,
which is the date we think the house is, because I don't think
it is the only thing that's important on this site.
It's always struck me as rather strange
that we have this potential moated enclosure
and it actually goes out in the opposite direction from the house.
And, in this document from the Royal Commission,
it says, "This might be a Medieval moated site
"or on balance, more likely of Roman origin."
And then the golden words,
"excavation will be required to decide the matter."
So you're quite happy to fend the kids off and let us get on with it.
Absolutely.
So, do we have an earlier moated house or even a Roman fort
in this enormous field?
It's a big question
and for once we're not waiting for geophys to answer it.
There are definite earthworks there, definite earthworks.
Because some of the team have decided to break with tradition
and open a trench immediately.
Look at that, not only a trench but a big one!
Here are the three wise monkeys of archaeology.
Ben, how come we've got a trench in already?
Stewart had a wander this morning
and he picked up these three low earthworks
but they seem to line up with the possible moat
so we thought we'd go for it, we couldn't wait any longer.
A couple of years ago they put a trench
across where they think the earthworks were
and they found two rows of stones,
two sort of banks of stones with a post hole in the middle.
Until we open up a bigger area,
we won't know whether we can identify these stone rows,
whether we can find any more post holes, we've got to think big.
Surely this is going to be the easiest dig we've ever done -
the house, the moat, something in the middle, bosh, go home!
Yeah, except the term "moat" on an Ordinance Survey map
covers a multitude of sins.
What does he mean?
All it means is that somebody's seen a depression. First of all, what is a moat?
It could mean a water filled ditch, it could just mean a dry ditch,
it could be functional, defensive,
it could be for fish, it could just be something that looks nice
in your grounds. We've got no idea what this thing is until we dig it.
So, our first trench has gone in over the tantalisingly visible bit
of the L-shaped earthworks that everyone is calling a moat.
In this first trench it's always so important.
I reckon you learn more from that first trench than you do
all the other ones you put through,
it gives you that first impression of the site.
We suspect this earthwork may only be one corner
of a much larger feature
with some potentially stunning archaeology in the middle.
And until John and his team finish their survey of this field
we can only guess what that might be
Stewart, do me a favour, tell me our moat isn't a cattle enclosure!
(LAUGHS) The problem with any ditch that turns a corner with a bank,
historically, people think of moats
and moats they associate with medieval manors and so on,
but that could be the corner of any type of enclosure.
Like it could be a corner of a Roman fort or fortlet,
a medieval moat, it could be a cattle enclosure.
But we've got to remember just beyond that set of trees up there,
there's a fine manor house, so we've got to take those trees away
and perhaps see in this field that we're part of the landscape
that goes with that manor house over there.
To work out what's going on in the field,
we need to find out as much as we can about the house.
And the most obvious thing about our Llancaiach Fawr Manor
is that it's a house of wealth and power.
Which is probably not that surprising,
considering it belonged to a powerful Welsh dynasty called the Pritchards.
As far as we know, the history of South Wales goes,
Pritchard was quite important during the Civil War.
He was Governor of Cardiff Castle and then of Cardiff itself.
And he comes from quite an important family.
They're thought to be part of the royal line from Glamorgan
and that's the genealogy they want to hold to.
Going back to Ifor Bach, who was sort of a King of Glamorgan, some centuries beforehand.
I know it's early days yet, but what do you think
might be the relationship between this house and that field?
If we've got what looks to be a moated enclosure
that's heading out across the field, it's always made me wonder
whether there's the possibility that there's an earlier building.
We just need to try and see if we can find it.
So could our potential moat enclose the ancestral home
of the Pritchard family?
Well, archaeological digs have shown time and time again
that posh houses are built on top of or next to slightly less posh houses,
belonging to an earlier generation of the family.
And it seems unlikely that a house as grand
as the current Llancaiach Fawr was the first to be built on this site.
It's as though, you might have had a big post in there.
And Ben and Phil have now hit the first evidence
of the mysterious earthworks that promised so much.
That bank out there is one row of stones.
This could be the post hole in the middle.
And then we go that way
and we have another row of stones which is the other bank.
Who knows, geophysics might be able to track it all the way across?
Picking up the rest of this earthwork feature,
and what's inside it, in this lovely flat field,
should be a walk in the park for geophys. What could possibly go wrong?
It's lunchtime day one, we've put in our first trench.
It was over where this moat-like feature is supposed to be,
and sure enough it's there.
But the problem with this moat on the maps
is that it looks vaguely L-shaped, nothing more.
But now John has done the geophys, is everything clear?
As clear as mud.
What do you mean?
Well, I've got an old stream bed for you,
ridge and furrow ploughing, a few lines,
nothing that looks like a moat ditch
and I can't see any evidence for an enclosure.
In other words, the field could be completely empty,
which is not good news with two and a half days still to go.
Afternoon, day one, here at Llancaiach in South Wales,
where we're looking for a moat which rather than going round
the medieval house over there seems to be going off in this direction,
which is a bit of a puzzle.
But in order to solve it, John's been out with his geophys team,
and frankly, Ben, I think we now know even less about this site
than when we did when got here, look at that.
Like someone sneezed on it!
Yeah, that's not quite the idea of geophysics, is it?
'Basically this geophysical phlegm has found no hint of the moat
'or any suggestion for the earlier medieval house
'we'd hoped to find in this field.
'And as for the moat, well,
'Ben and Phil have worked out what the surveyors actually saw.'
If we look here,
this mound of stones, boulders and pebbles here,
that's more or less conforming with where the moat should be.
But I have to say there's nothing in this trench that looks
terribly moat-like and it ought to be here. There's no moat.
'0h, dear, so the moat, the reason we came here, doesn't exist.
'But all due credit to John.
'The geophys has thrown up something unexpected
'that's got Ben and the team intrigued.'
There's some sort of linear feature, a ditch, something like that,
running up here, turning a corner and coming down here.
This is enclosing a very large area.
That ties in with something that Phil's got at the end of the trench.
We think we've got a feature running in that direction.
But until we get a section across that ditch
we can't tell what date it is.
It could be much earlier than the medieval period.
We've got to dig it basically and have a look.
And what's intriguing about this newly discovered enclosure,
is that it, and what's inside it, appear to be under,
in other words earlier, than the medieval ridge and furrow ploughing.
Well, let's have a go, carry on, and we'll see what we get.
So, as well as investigating it in trench one,
we're opening a second trench further along its northern boundary.
I think we've got an edge there.
This is quite compacted, I think that's our edge.
We've been working on the theory that our main field may have
been the site of a posh house
that's earlier than the next door grand Manor House.
Austere looking, isn't it?
It is rather grim and grand.
But to work out if that's the case, we need to get as many dates
from this site as possible.
including the correct date for when the Manor House was built.
So it's cutting through this original beam here with a partition
and it looks like this whole corridor had been added
early 17th century.
If we look at this collar, it's not in a great condition, is it?
What about the purlins, they look original, with peg holes
for the rafters.
So we've brought in a dendrochronologist
because, oddly enough, the best dating evidence for a house is often
found in the roof timbers.
It's either significantly later than anticipated or significantly earlier.
We'll pick that up with the dendro.
And that would potentially allow us to fit it into the family history.
Hopefully we'll get results to you by day three.
Brilliant.
The dendro dates and digging will have to be our main sources
for the early story of Llancaiach, because there's almost
no written history for the Pritchard family prior to the 16th century.
That was all passed down through word of mouth.
But we do at least have an impressive family tree.
They claim that they went back a very long way indeed.
From up here you will see they trace their descent back
to a distinguished hero in the 12th century,
a man called Ifor ap Meurig, better known as Ifor Bach, Ifor, the small.
We know the Pritchard family lived somewhere in this area
from at least the 1200s.
But the first recorded mentions of a house at Llancaiach
don't appear until the mid 1500s.
(READS 0RIGINAL TEXT)
"We saw mist with no healthy heart
"and rain as a shroud over Llancaiach."
Do we know where they're living before our house is built?
Unfortunately we don't and it'll be very exciting indeed
if the archaeology can show that there was a major manorial centre
of the Middle Ages here, prior to the house that we know of.
We don't seem to have any evidence for a medieval manor
in the big field. But we're not giving up.
0h, yes.
Structure there.
Because Stewart has a theory.
If you come a bit further,
there's the other side of it against that tree there, look.
You'd easy get a cart over this.
This is a seriously big bridge.
'He thinks the landscape may hold a clue
'to the location of an earlier house on the other side of the vast site.'
Guys, you could have chosen a slightly nicer place!
What we're starting to do now is kind of understand
the site as a whole.
We started out in the field on the other side over there.
We're now thinking 180 degrees different, the house is over there,
we're completely on the other side and looking through the maps,
through time, what we see is that the main road that probably
this house is associated with, actually we're standing on it now.
The house is facing south.
So there must be some entrance in this corner rather than that one.
Do you think this is the first house on this site?
I don't think anything in the house
shows anything on that site before.
So is there unlikely to be another structure here?
No, no, there could be one in the vicinity of it.
Ha, ha, ha, maps.
Why did you go "Ha, ha, ha, maps"?
Well, here we have the tithe map for the area.
You can see there's the house complex there,
there is a field here with a number 1483 in it.
0n the apportionment that goes with that, 1483 has the name Hendra.
0ur Welsh speaking historian says
it's a very important name often applied to "the 0ld Settlement"
or "the 0ld Place" and anything with that name is likely to have been
fossilised in the geography of the place by the Middle Ages.
There might be something very old just in that field over there,
that was here before that house.
'So, thanks to his beloved maps, Stewart believes that
'this area to the south of the house may contain an earlier settlement.'
So geophys once again find themselves surveying
another nice, big, open, flat piece of grass.
0nce again, it's the perfect site for a geophys survey.
Any vibes?
Um...
So once again, what could possibly go wrong?!
Is this a Stewart idea or is this actually bona fide?
I wouldn't say anything against Stewart.
Not when he's in the back of shot.
Moment of truth... Hm.
0h, dear!
0nce again, John can see no evidence of any structures.
That was well worth waiting for, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Well, back to the drawing board.
This was a Stewart plan, wasn't it?
Yeah, pretty sure it was.
So, if there is an earlier house here, then where on Earth is it?
This morning, I thought this big field presented us with one of
the easiest, most straightforward Time Teams we'd done in a long time.
Nine hours later, I'm not so sure.
Ben, can I remind you what this Royal Commission report
written 35 years ago actually says?
"This could be a medieval moated site. 0n balance, however,
"a Roman origin is far more likely,
"but excavation will be required to decide the matter."
Well, we've done the excavation, it don't seem to be medieval,
it don't seem to be moated and it doesn't seem to be Roman either.
Correct.
But does this mean that there isn't an earlier building on this site?
No, I don't think it means that at all, I think logically
it's likely that an early building would be somewhere round here.
So what's the strategy for tomorrow?
Well, as you can see, there's beautiful lawns,
we can't come busting in here with a big machine,
but we can get some test pits in here.
And hopefully we'll come across some deposits, some layers,
something that gives us a clue where this early house might be.
Well, we may have lost our moat,
but do we have an earlier building on this site?
Well, the only way to find out
is to put our shovels into this beautiful garden.
I can't wait.
It's the beginning of day two
here at Llancaiach Fawr Manor in South Wales,
and we may not have found a medieval house here
in the so-called moat field, but we definitely have archaeology.
0h, joy, two bits of charcoal. Oh, yeah, lovely.
Because both trenches are picking up traces of a massive enclosure ditch
discovered by geophys.
I do wonder whether it could be seriously old, yes,
prehistoric if you like. I wouldn't mind betting.
And that will now be our major investigation here
because we've established there isn't a medieval moat here,
in spite of what it says on the maps.
What the Royal Commission saw were two banks
and a slightly hollowed area in the middle and I think
what has created one of the banks is this big stony feature
running through here.
And what do you reckon that is?
At the moment it is a bank and that's all we can say about it.
Do you think we'll be able to date these two features?
Well, we got no sort of firm dating evidence but what these,
these features do seem to respect is the medieval ridge and furrow,
so I suspect that some of this is probably medieval.
What I don't understand is that, just behind you,
there's a bunch of stones going in a completely different direction.
That is what is so important, Tony, because it is not going
in the same direction at all, it's a totally different direction
and we think this could be a much, much earlier, prehistoric enclosure on the site.
So, Ben, everyone around here...
Yeah.
..believes that there was at one time a moat in this field.
Yeah.
We've had people leaning over that gate for the last 24 hours
saying, "0h, digging there - digging the moat, are you?"
Yes. Why?
The thing is, the Royal Commission came
and they saw some earthworks and I guess they did well to spot
these features cos they describe them as slight, but given that they're
close to this big fortified house, it was natural to think this could be
a possibility, a moat and once you've put it on a map, it must be true.
Do you now think that this field isn't going to be able to tell us
why this house was here in the first place?
We've clearly got interesting things going on in this field -
these rubble banks, we've got this early feature
that Phil's been dealing with. There's definitely a story
to be told here but I'm not sure it's going to get us to where
the early house is.
There is actually a chance that this big feature
was a cattle enclosure,
a horse paddock or something else,
but because these banks and potential post holes are
so criss-crossed by later ploughing, it'll have to remain an enigma.
Diane, I've got some bad news for you.
0K, break it to me gently, then.
It also means I need to have a chat with Diane.
There is nothing that ties in with this house at all in this field.
Right. 0K, so where do we go from here, then?
I don't know. How do you feel about that?
It's dIfficult
because it creates more questions than it answers.
You know, I can't imagine that this field, you know,
they just suddenly put a house here in the 1530s.
There's got to be something that went before it.
It's such a perfect location, near the Roman road,
near the river, near the ford, you can't imagine that people
haven't used it for living on since time began almost.
If we want to find evidence of an earlier house
or the first version of that house,
we've got to move in that direction.
That's fine.
Moving in that direction means moving into your lovely garden,
moving into your lovely garden means ripping it up, at least bits of it.
That's fine. We'll just dig holes in the lawn and see what happens.
So a lot of our effort is now shifting to the area
immediately around the standing Tudor manor house,
as we try to find any previous buildings that may have stood
on this site.
The test pits are so close to the house, because geophys have
already eliminated an area further to the south, that Stewart
thought may contain a hendra, an early Welsh settlement.
But undeterred, Stewart has another target, as he believes
there should be some sort of structure on the original road
into the site.
We need to get across to as close as that wall as possible,
so looking at some sort of L-shape.
What we're looking for here, if we can find our level
and we can chase it back, it'll be a funny-shaped trench.
It's a funny-shaped area, we've got to have a funny-shaped trench as well!
We're putting in a couple of trenches here,
because we'd expect an earlier manor to have a defensive wall
and a gatehouse, because during medieval times, this was the wild Welsh west.
Constant feuds and lawlessness
meant that even the most powerful families
needed to defend themselves.
It's funny that on that door, there are no defences at all...
No.
..even though that's the first door you come to.
But the second door, pull that across.
Certainly, the current manor house is a monument to the art of survival.
All right.
And... same thing.
Another draw bar, but we're on the first floor.
Now that doorway there goes through to the Lord's private quarters
and that's defended in the same way.
The Pritchards could barricade themselves in there if all else failed.
If all else really fails they can go down this escape stair, to another part of the house.
You'll see that this is a house of power and paranoia.
There's no such paranoia over in the moat field,
more a profound sense of relief and jubilation
because we've just made a remarkably rare discovery.
Isn't that wonderful? That looks very prehistoric
and it looks like it's tending more towards the Bronze Age than...
Well, that's...
..Iron Age, but let's have a local.
I was going to say! Let's have a local knowledge.
It's got to be Bronze Age, hasn't it, we feel Bronze Age, yeah...
That is stone.
That is really something. I've never dug a piece
of Bronze Age pot up in my life and I've been digging over 50 years.
You've never, ever dug a piece of...
I've seen pieces in museums, but no, no, no never seen anything.
This pot suggests that people may have been living here during
the Bronze Age, and when you consider the whole population of the UK 4,000 years ago
was only about 200,000, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
But this should be an ideal place for a little Bronze Age settlement,
down by the stream, lovely place.
Yeah.
I think we're oh, just superb, let's find some more.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the field that refuses to die.
Yesterday evening we discovered that we hadn't actually got a medieval moat here.
Then this morning we thought we might have something prehistoric,
and this afternoon we've discovered that yes, we have got prehistoric
and it's actually Bronze Age, which is apparently quite rare.
But all that brings into question our understanding of John's geophys.
A bit Monty Python, two chairs in the middle of a field?
Yeah, we need the desk.
Presumably looking for a medieval moat is rather different
from trying to find something prehistoric in the geophys.
Yeah, the problem we've got is,
all this medieval ridge and furrow ploughing,
it's masking what's below, and the ploughing has not only
eaten into the archaeology,
it's certainly eaten into the magnetic responses.
So trying to understand the geophysical anomalies it is even more difficult.
0K, so if you forget about there being anything medieval here
and you forget all this ploughing, is there any evidence
in your geophys of something that might be prehistoric?
Well, the stream like that may be of interest now,
then some of the ditches.
Clearly these come into play. We've now extended the survey down
and look at some of these curving responses.
It could be we've got a prehistoric landscape here.
So day one here, day two over there
and now it looks like we're going to come back here again.
That's the way it goes.
That sounds very stony down there, Raksha.
Back over at the house, our quest for an earlier medieval manor is falling apart.
I've just found a piece of plastic...
Oh, no!
..in the middle of it.
No!
If there had once been a building in this area, we'd have expected to find some evidence of it
but there's not even a sniff of anything medieval.
I think we've actually got to call it a day on this one.
I don't think we're going to get to where we want to get.
And as for Stewart's latest target...
Well, er, over here we've got natural.
Yeah.
Over here we've got natural and over here we've got natural.
We have a sewage pipe there and a beautiful 19th century cobbled surface.
Have you got underneath?
Well, we have and we've got natural.
No gatehouse at all.
No gatehouse, no road, no boundary ditch,
none of what Stewart thought was here.
It was worth a try.
Not really!
'0h, dear! So not only no moat but nothing medieval outside
'the Tudor house either and certainly no major defences.'
If there isn't anything here after all, we're really up the creek, aren't we?
I don't think we are.
We've come here to test a possibility - why is this house here?
Is there anything earlier here? And there's a range of possibilities.
It could be that there was an earlier ancestral home
and they simply built this grand new house in the same place.
It could be they arrived on a green field site - "We're here,
"we're imposing ourselves on this area, we'll build a big house here."
The other thing is that although they're thinking a bit
about defence, it's also the beginning of the period where they're thinking
about the picturesque qualities of the landscape, so again is it simply
that it's just a wonderful area to be in and they're just hedging their bets
with a bit of defence because over there is the badlands, still?
They're brave words but I don't know how much faith I have in them.
After all, what do we have?
Well, as far as I'm concerned, not a lot,
apart from geophys being on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
But just as I'm beginning to think this is one of the most
frustrating sites we've encountered in a long time,
we make our first proper medieval find.
Gentleman, I think that might interest you somewhat.
That's a bit nice, innit?
Oh, oh!
This little coin is a major discovery
because we suspect it dates to before the time of the current manor house.
That's a little penny, isn't it? Long cross...
Long cross penny.
Got the cross on one side, hasn't it?
I'm not entirely sure cos if you have a closer look,
there appears to be a cross on both sides.
Oh!
Let me put my glasses on.
And would you believe it, it's not from the garden,
it's from the moat field that we dismissed as having nothing medieval in it.
What we can say is this is earlier than the manor house, isn't it?
Now it might just be that someone dropped out of a pocket or purse
walking across the field, something like that but that proves
that there were people in this field earlier than the manor house.
It's now the end of a perplexing day two...
well, it's perplexed most of us although there is one man
who seems to be content with the results of his labours.
I really am over the moon, I mean not only have
we got our piece of Bronze Age pot, but more importantly, we've now not
got one Bronze Age ditch but three ditches and the beauty of that
is in that it implies that people have been living here for such
a more extended length of time so we've got prehistoric
occupation here for probably hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Not only that, you've got some rather good finds.
Very, very surprising finds, we have not one but two medieval coins.
What sort of date?
14th century.
If they're 14th century, am I right in saying it is medieval
but it's earlier than our house?
Absolutely, yeah.
We've finally extended activity back earlier than the present house.
So there's all to play for.
Not only have got something prehistoric and fairly epic
but it looks as though something quite exciting was going on here
in the Middle Ages, before that house was built. What'll it be?
We'll find out tomorrow.
It's the beginning of day three of our dig in South Wales.
And it's not just the weather that's taken a turn for the worse.
Have you started?
Well, we'd like to start if you tell us where you'd like us to dig.
Well, you're there.
The mood's also darker amongst the diggers.
Yes, but is there a map? You know, we can't dig it all.
In spite of our best efforts,
we can't find any evidence of an earlier manor here at Llancaiach.
But we're not giving up yet,
even if it means we have to turn the whole garden upside down.
So why are we putting this trench in?
Well, this is the backside of the house really
and, er, well, you see that up there, the privy, garderobe?
That tiny little window there?
Yeah. This is the area where all the sort of rubbish and muck
would be deposited in.
And presumably we could possibly find evidence here
of an earlier phase of the building, if an earlier phase exists.
Absolutely, yes.
The thing is, hopefully we'll have some rubbish pits or a midden heap,
something with some early pottery in,
because it's been remarkable how clean this site is.
We've got very little pottery - it must be going somewhere
and pushing it towards the back seems a good candidate.
A lot's riding on this trench to the north of the manor.
We found no trace of an earlier house in the test pits
and trenches to the south, and yet common archaeological sense
suggests there could be an earlier manor here.
We've got to go back the whole way now,
so hopefully something else comes up further along
otherwise we're going to be rather disappointing again.
And all I can say to people is "natural"! (CHUCKLES)
'The Pritchards, who owned Llancaiach Manor, lived in the area
'since the 1200s and yet this house was built much later,
'although no-one's ever come up with an exact date.'
I hope he's in after all.
'Until now.'
Nigel, um, you've got a date for us?
'I have, and that date is...
'AD 1548 to 1565.'
1548 to 1565, and you're pretty certain about that?
'Yeah, absolutely, black and white.'
0K, thanks ever so much, mate. Bye.
You murmured the word "later".
Well, yes, I mean, sort of, all the things in the Commission volume
suggesting around the 1530s, so 1548 -
a little bit later than we thought but, you know, got a date.
What does that date tell you about the house?
It tells us that the house is more old-fashioned than we thought.
Looking at the mid-16th Century,
you don't expect something like this at that date, normally.
So we're a bit in the backwoods at that point?
A little bit, yes!
And you've been looking after this house
and doing all this reconstruction for ages,
but never actually known how old the house was.
No, we just... All we knew was around the 1530s.
That's fantastic to know, that's the thing, cos we've never known.
'With this date of roughly 1550, we've at least answered
'one of Diane's questions about Llancaiach.
'It also makes the coins we're finding in the next-door field
'all the more intriguing, because they pre-date the standing house.'
It's either a thrupence or a sixpence, er,
most likely of Elizabeth I.
Could it be something a bit special?
It's already special, I think.
'As well as this fantastic find, we've also discovered coins
'that are over 100 years earlier than the current house.'
I can see a crown. I can see a crown because we've got the fleur, the...
I'm so excited I nearly knocked the light over!
You can see one of the fleur de lys is complete in the middle
and a half fleur de lys at the end - the angular end of a crown.
These marks - kind of around 1280, don't they?
But instead of jumping for joy that we found evidence of an earlier house,
the archaeologists have taken a more pragmatic view
as to why the coins are here.
This coin could just have been dropped as an accidental loss.
It isn't necessarily evidence for earlier activity on this site.
Three or four coins, different dates, all from this area.
You've detected all the other spoil and the other trenches but they're concentrated here.
That's interesting.
Do you think that might be evidence of settlement, or trading, or what?
It's evidence of where people have congregated with money in their pockets.
That's routeways, meeting places, that kind of thing.
'And it would seem that Llancaiach
'was at a major intersection of routeways.'
We've got the house here and it's quite clear looking at it
that it's in a landscape dominated by deep valleys.
And the great advantage of the stream coming down there
is that it defines for you.
You've got a shallow path running through here that actually
allows you to run from east to west, um, across the valleys.
It's something quite unique and important for this area.
This is one of the few places that routes from deep in the valleys
would meet with east-west traffic.
So the coins aren't evidence of a grand early house,
but more likely of a dodgy crossroads where, for centuries,
travellers tripped up and lost their loose change.
Is that another patch of charcoal in the bottom there, Phil?
Yeah, it is, Tracey.
And yet this field has produced our best discovery so far -
a network of Bronze Age ditches,
some 3,500 years older than the house.
But even with this information,
we still can't make head or tail of the geophys.
We've done more survey and we're getting the same sort of results.
I mean, we've still got odd lengths of ditches,
we've got odd pits, and they're scattered right across the field
but there's no clear patterns in the results.
There's no sort of discrete, nice juicy target to go for.
If I could extend that trench all the way down the field...
Hang on, how wide is that trench?
Er, very wide.
And you'd like to extend it the length of this field.
Yeah, why not?
Slightly impractical!
Just maybe, just slightly. I don't think we can just go poking around,
hoping that we're going to hit something in here.
Keep looking - you might find something small and sexy.
In the meantime, I'm going on to another scene!
Right so, Phil, we've got all sorts of features in here
so when I've got schoolchildren coming in to go round the site
and I want to tell them what we found in the field,
what will I be able to tell them
about what was going on here in the prehistoric period?
Well, what you can say with absolute certainty is that
people have been here for at least 4,000 years.
And we do have a lot of ditches.
Let's be clear about this - where Matt is, he's standing in one.
Next door is another one, and next door to that is another one.
Those ditches have been re-cut, they've been re-dug,
they've been re-dug by hand. That's a lot of effort.
What that does mean is that their boundaries have stayed static
for a very long time.
What is absolutely indisputable is that we've got one piece of early Bronze Age pot -
that's going to take us back to about 2000 BC.
So thanks to Phil and his diggers' dogged determination,
Diane has got a story to tell about this field.
Just not the one she was expecting.
But there is a chance that the kids who visit here
will be more interested in the story about the day Time Team took
a mechanical digger to Llancaiach's beautifully manicured lawn.
Because Ben, under the concerned watch of the manor's gardeners,
is opening another trench to the north of the house.
This trench is our absolutely last ditch attempt to find any evidence
of a house or actually anything medieval that pre-dates our house.
0h.
It's a cable but I don't think it's still connected to anything.
Let's hope not!
'Because our previous last ditch attempt to find
'something of archaeological note hasn't been completely successful.'
Just when we thought that we weren't going to get any archaeology at all,
away from the field over there, away from the house,
on the far side of the current boundary of that house,
where Faye and Raksha have been working on their own for ages,
they've found evidence not only of life, but of death too.
Certainly evidence of death, yes.
We've got what looks like a dead horse.
A dead horse?
Can you date it?
We've got one bit of pottery from that trench, which is 17th Century.
So we can now say that some time, a horse died on this farm.
Thank you for your contribution to this story!
'I'll avoid any remarks about flogging a dead horse.
'But I can't help but wonder that, in spite of Ben's heroic attempts
'to re-landscape the whole garden...'
It's natural. This looks natural.
'..we are now flogging a dead what-d'you-call-it.'
I just cannot understand the lack of pottery, rubbish, detritus.
These must have been the cleanest people in Wales.
'The evidence speaks for itself.'
So here we go, the time line.
This is the Bronze Age, the little piece of pot there.
Nothing in the Iron Age, nothing in the Roman,
nothing in the early Christian, or the Viking or the Norman.
Here we are in the 15th Century - we've got two coins.
16th Century, a thimble.
17th Century, a ropey piece of tile,
19th Century, a penny and a bit of pot.
Helen, what's happened?
Well, from the archaeological evidence it seems like we have
a bit of activity here in the Bronze Age and then a great lot of nothing
until, in the 16th Century, people start dropping things.
Maybe they built a house and then they went away again.
I have to say in defence of all the people who were living
in all these vast aeons of time,
they might have made stuff that hasn't survived in the ground.
They might have done but that's absence of evidence.
It's dangerous to use that to argue that that is evidence of absence.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's getting there.
We've nearly got enough to say nothing was happening.
Is that too depressing?
No!
'Thank you, Helen!
'So we nearly have enough to say nothing was happening
'between the digging of these Bronze Age ditches
'and the building of the current manor.
'And that's a resolution of sorts, I suppose.'
It really doesn't help having that native feature.
This ridge of the furrow?
It must have chopped the top of it.
But surprisingly, there is a faction of the team that thinks
the two could still be linked.
And it's all down to the medieval Welsh love of heritage
and making a link with your ancestors.
We now know the ditches over there might be as old as Bronze Age.
They're certainly old.
Do you think the Pritchards would've been aware of that when they built their house?
Phil and Ben seem quite confident that whatever there was out there
could have been visible in the 16th Century,
when they got here, and this could,
I think, have been a real attraction for a gentry family.
So if it's an ancient place, to build a house next door
would give them a kind of air of legitimacy -
that "we've always been here". Yes.
This is a period when the antiquarian movement is becoming more popular,
much more widespread, as part of the cult
and the education of the gentry.
There was certainly a cache - there was a value to having
what now, in modern archaeological terms,
we call an ancient monument.
Having that very direct and immediate connection with the past
would have meant a great deal to them
and I think it's very exciting, the possibilities here.
We're now confident that echoes of that prehistoric landscape
would have been visible in the 16th Century.
But our hunt for an earlier medieval manor
has been a completely different kettle of fish.
Well...
Digging produced nothing to the east of the building,
while geophys and test pits showed nothing to the south.
The results weren't too hot either to the west.
And as for the north, well we did find an electrical cable
and a dead horse!
If I was feeling generous, I'd call it a mixed result.
0K, after three days' excavation, are we in a position to say
whether or not there was a medieval manor anywhere on this site
before this one?
Yes, we are in a position to say that.
Yes, we are in a position And what's the answer?
No, there wasn't!
I'm certain.
Not one scrap of medieval pottery from all these holes we've dug.
And if there was a medieval house here,
we'd find pottery everywhere - I'm sure of it. It's just not there.
We've not seen any background manuring on fields you get
when privvies are cleared out and they chuck the stuff on the land.
Which begs the question,
why did they build this place on a green field site?
If you think about what originally brought us here,
it was that people saw an earthwork over there.
And if it was visible in the 1970s,
it should have been visible in the 1570s as well.
I think that is what drew them here and we know that there was
an interest in the past on the part of the Pritchards
and we know that there's an interesting field name of Hendra.
I think those all point to this being a special place.
That's interesting - you're saying they may have built this place here
because in folklore it was an important site.
I think there's every chance of that.
'So we now know the Pritchards didn't come here until the 1550s
'when they built a beautiful, if somewhat old-fashioned, house
'on a major crossroads beside some ancient, mysterious earthworks.
'And it's tantalising to think they were trying to forge a link
'with the great Welsh hero Ifor Bach, the 12th Century icon
'from whom the Pritchards claimed to be directly descended.'
Diane, I was talking to a couple of local people who work here.
And they were over the moon that we'd managed to
take the story of this site right back to the prehistoric.
It's absolutely wonderful.
You always hope you'll find things that are fascinating.
But to find out we've got something
that's a Bronze Age enclosure is wonderful.
And we've dated your house.
Yeah. You know, every little bit extra just makes more of the story,
means you can tell a better story.
But what strikes me as really ironic
is that the people who put that house up
thought they were harking back to ancestors of 400 years previously.
But in fact, they were harking back to ancestors 3,000 years previously.
Yeah, amazing isn't it, really?
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