Digging for Britain Series 8

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[edit] General Information

History Documentary hosted by Alice Roberts, published by BBC in 2019 - English narration

[edit] Cover

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Professor Alice Roberts returns with the eighth series of BBC Four’s Digging for Britain. In the first episode, we explore this year’s finds in the west of Britain.

[edit] West

A secret location in the Cotswolds, with all the hallmarks of a high-status Anglo Saxon cemetery, gives up a very precious and fragile artefact. And at the site of Shaftesbury Abbey, Dr Naoise MacSweeney joins archaeologist Julian Richards in his hunt for the missing cloister. We visit the bone cave of Wales once inhabited by Neanderthals and early humans, while on Salisbury Plain archaeologists have a puzzle. Have they found more remains of the mysterious Beaker People, even though there’s no beaker? The programme also follows an archaeological rescue as a team from Cardiff University is called in to investigate medieval bones protruding from cliff face on the Welsh coast.

[edit] North

The remains of a Tudor house in Leicestershire were thought to be the childhood home of England’s forgotten queen, Lady Jane Grey. But when archaeologists excavate, they find more than they bargained for. In Northern Ireland, the graveyard of a Victorian workhouse sheds new light on one of the most traumatic periods of modern Irish history, the Great Famine of 1845. A team from Sheffield University want to understand the lives of people who occupied a village near the famous caves at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire. But could the clues - tales of superstition, witches, and the occult - be hidden in plain sight? Near Lincoln, a return to an Anglo-Saxon site proves rewarding with the discovery of a spectacularly well-preserved bronze and enamel Roman bowl, carefully laid into a grave. And, on Rousay in the Orkneys there’s tantalising evidence of an undiscovered Viking longhouse.

[edit] South

We find out how a lobster led archaeologists to the discovery of an 8000-year-old neolithic underwater settlement, go to a secret location in Dorset to witness the excavation of an Iron Age crouched burial, and in London’s East End, location reporter Naoise Mac Sweeney visits a modern construction site as it gives up the secrets of an Elizabethan playhouse. Also, archaeologists return to a Roman site, first dug in the late 1700s when a series of stunning mosaics were found. But archaeology in the past paid little attention to what the building actually was. A team from Bournemouth University is determined to add to the story of Roman Britain and find out more. And Digging for Britain joins Ministry of Defence archaeologist Richard Osgood on an island near Portsmouth with members of Operation Nightingale, a military initiative using archaeology to aid in the recovery of service personnel injured in conflict. Together they make some grizzly discoveries.

[edit] WWII Special

The team are on an archaeological hunt of our more recent past as they follow the search for artefacts from World War II. They join marine archaeologists in the Solent as they raise the once-in-a-lifetime find of a Fairey Barracuda dive bomber. More than 2500 Barracudas were in service during the war, but not a single complete plane survives today. Naoíse Mac Sweeney joins the post-excavation to reveal how the find could help bring this rare aircraft back to life. Also featured, a dig in the Lake District that tells the moving story of the Windermere Boys and the role the area played in rehabilitating these children liberated from the Nazi concentration camps after World War II. In Aldbourne, Wiltshire, the search is on for the most famous American unit of the US army, 'Easy Company', whose paratroopers were stationed there in 1943 and 1944. Archaeologists are particularly looking for any personal items of this renowned regiment to gain insight into the lives of its soldiers in the months and days leading up to the D-Day invasion. And off a beautiful beach in Devon, divers plumb the depths to discover more about a secret wartime military exercise that may have remained buried from view if it hadn't been for the curiosity of a local amateur archaeologist.