Hugh Dennis and his small team of archaeologists are back on Channel Four and this time they have gone back a full two thousand years and beyond.
The series starts in Falkirk with a fort and a piece of the Antonine Wall, apparently buried under several gardens and a bowls club. After some digging, the team found evidence of the Wall, which was less regular in shape than Hadrian’s, although they didn’t have to damage the bowling green. The second episode took them to Stretton in Staffordshire, to find an Iron Age structure that is partially in the grounds of a primary school, and the third was to a Regency prison, of the panopticon design, under a housing estate in Devizes.
At Beningborough in North Yorkshire, built in the early eighteenth century, they found traces of the Old Hall, an Elizabethan building to the south-east of the present structure constructed by John Bourchier, together with a large sunken garden. Then, to conclude, came an early Norman motte-and-bailey castle under West Derby in Liverpool, which was shown by the water table to be larger than previously thought, but with a shallower moat and a mill stream for power in the later era. A hunting lodge used by Edward the Confessor was nearby but became obsolete after his death.
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