Can Archaeologists Recover This Medieval City Before It's Lost Forever?

Just over 700 years ago, this very spot I'm standing on was about a mile inland. Not anymore. This stretch of Suffolk coast has eroded at a fantastic rate since medieval times. Fair enough, you might say, let nature take its course. But it's an archaeologist's nightmare, because right here, or should I say right there, once stood one of England's largest commercial centres and biggest harbours, the flourishing port of Dunnage. What remains won't be here for much longer. So before it's all washed away, and with the help of some very modern technology, we're going to piece together the few remaining fragments to recreate medieval Dunnage. I mean, the quality, the edges, look at that edge there. That is really, really sharp. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But not only that, we're also going to try to prove what no one's ever been able to prove before, that Dunnage actually flourished as a major Anglo-Saxon port long before medieval times. That is a very, very impressively huge ditch. So it's a nice relaxing three days by the sea then. We're starting our investigation into medieval Dunnage at the beach car park. We believe a medieval hospital once stood here, so this will be our last chance to find any remains of it before erosion washes the car park away for good. John, you've got this huge expanse. This must be your dream place to geophers. Well, this is. There's a slight problem in that the mapping suggests that it's probably in this area here. By this cafe? Where the cafe is, or maybe even the toilets, or that area of seating, or maybe just on this bank where we've got these cars and we've got services. In order to find the hospital, or maison d'ur to give it its proper title, John and his team are going to be kept on their toes surveying around the obstacles, especially the moving ones. So perhaps it won't be all plain sailing for geophers after all. But thankfully, we're not kept waiting long. Well, you've got something there, haven't you, John? Yeah, I mean, these are Jimmy's time slices starting at the top and going into the ground. And yeah, some quite exciting results. I mean, this looks like a whacking great medieval building, doesn't it? It's what, about 20 meters long, something like that? Yeah, there's a couple of problems, though. Go on. Jimmy tells me those are all service pipes. You know, he says they're service pipes, but how does he know they're service pipes? Well, there's a couple of clues. One, the responses in the radar, they're characteristic of pipes. There's also another clue. Manhole covers. I mean, the alternative, of course, is that, if you like, is to go back to the old method, you know, the radar doesn't show anything, but topographically, we're coming down a slope here, presumably to the edge of the estuary, is to put a trench in to see if we can see what it looks like. So, in the absence of clear radar results, it's down to Phil Harding and some good old-fashioned digging to find our lost hospital. Yeah, I mean, you've got bits of brick and rubbish in there. Then let's have a bit more out. Mick's placed this first trench at the edge of the car park, between the path of a medieval roadway and what would, in the 13th century, have been an estuary. See that? Looks like a bit of stone. Is that stone? The fact that this spot was once an estuary, but is almost a mile inland now, shows just how dramatically this coastline has changed over time. And Mary-Anne's wasted no time in seeking evidence of its devastating impact on Dunwich. It's hard to believe when you look at the sea, with those tiny little waves lapping, that they've got the power to destroy, what, at least a mile of coastline? It is, particularly on a summer's day. But you don't have to imagine, just look at these photos, because this shows the parish church of All Saints, the last remaining parish church of medieval Dunwich, as it was washed away in a 20-year period at the beginning of the last century. This shows it as the ruins stood on the cliff in about 1900. And then these series of photographs show how the nave is gradually being washed away, as the sea laps at the sandy cliffs and it falls down as a consequence. This is about 1910, 1911, 1914, all the way up to the tower. 1919, and then lastly, at the end of 1919, you can see the tower's fallen into the sea. That is history crumbling away in front of my eyes. Wind the clock back even further to the Middle Ages, and Dunwich was a large bustling town, a major centre for trade. Its port was third only in size to London and Bristol. But all this has changed, thanks to coastal erosion, and the sea hasn't yet finished its work, as local residents are all too aware. Now, is there a safe place here where we can just get a view? I don't want to go anywhere near that edge, because it just looks so dangerous. I would say that quite a bit of material has fallen since I was last here a fortnight ago. So that's in two weeks? I would say so, yes. I mean, this crop must have gone in, well, perhaps autumn last year, so in the course of this crop being sown, you've lost almost a tractor's width there, if not more. Yes, I think if you look just behind you there and see where it's cracking along the top, that'll probably be one of the next bits to drop. It's alarming, isn't it? I think I'd feel a lot safer back on the path heading back to the car park, so I think we should head back to Dunwich. It's estimated that what little of present-day Dunwich remains will all be gone within 100 years, but the vast majority of the medieval town was lost centuries ago. Up on the clifftops, though, dangerously close to the crumbling edge, a fragment of medieval Dunwich remains, the iconic Greyfriars Friary. English Heritage look after it, and they're as keen as we are to catch the last archaeological fragments of the medieval town. But where to start? Mick, there are murmurs of discontent here. Really? The archaeologists want to put their first trench in. Here? No, no, no, no, no. Over there, look, over there by the fence. There's nothing there. Look, we've got fantastic remains here. Surely we can learn an awful lot, can't we, from just putting something in down here? No, we need to dig over there, where we know very little about what's going on. Well, what is there? The town that existed in the medieval period was beyond those trees, where the seas eroded it. But there's one little bit of it left in the corner of this field, which is the town bank and ditch that went round the town. You're not digging this, it's going to be a ditch, apparently. Yeah. But what's so significant about this ditch? That is the town ditch. I think the town is going to be Saxon, and this rampart and ditch could well be the Saxon defences for it. That really doesn't make much sense to me, because everything that I've read says this place didn't really kick off until the Normans came, the Norman invasion, 1066. It must be older than that. The fact it's got so many churches later on is an Anglo-Saxon feature. No, Doomsday says there's only one church. No, it says there's one in 1066 and three in 1086. Yeah, but it's not so many. No, it would have had a lot more than that. Doomsday's not good on churches. Oh, so Doomsday's wrong, not us. No, it's not that it's wrong, it's just not interested in them, because it's only interested in them when they produce an income, and most churches aren't like that. So we could actually date the entire settlement from this trench. We're not digging here, it's up here. We're digging the ditch. Apparently, we could find Anglo-Saxon... But to get down to those Anglo-Saxon layers, we'll have to dig a very, very deep trench, and, of course, get some dating evidence from the bottom. If this trench can prove that Dunnage was already a large settlement in Anglo-Saxon times, we'll have to rethink the whole story of the rise and fall of the town. Meanwhile, back on the other side of the village at the beachside car park, Phil's found something that could be our first solid hit of medieval archaeology. Well, this is a bit of a turn-up for the books, isn't it, Tracey? I wasn't expecting to see something like this quite as quickly as this. No, I mean, it does look like we've got... Well, it almost looks like a sort of paved area made of local beach cobbles. I mean, it's a sort of raw material, stones you use to really make a firm stand in sandy soil. Oh, you'd need it up here. Could these cobbles be part of a medieval yard from the Maison d'Eau hospital? It's too early to tell, but while the dig motors ahead, Mary-Anne's keen to learn more of the nature of an early medieval hospital. Mark, Maison d'Eau was a hospital, but that's not a hospital in the modern sense of the word, is it? No, the modern sense of hospital is really rather a technical and narrow definition. In the Middle Ages, it's associated with hospital as in hospitality, looking after people as opposed to just having a medical function. And it's different in two other ways. Firstly, these are religious houses. These are houses of worship. And secondly, they tend to look exclusively after the poor rather than for a wide range of different people. And that's why it's called Maison d'Eau, the House of God. The House of God or Domus Dei in Latin, the House of God. And Phil's Trench is still a buzzing hive of activity. Finds are now coming thick and fast. But do any of them link us to the Maison d'Eau hospital? Oh, you've got a load of pottery out of Phil's Trench. Yeah, it's good. There's not a lot else come out of it, but we are getting quite a lot of pottery. And it's quite a nice pattern forming. It's telling us a story. I'm attracted by this thing over here. That looks splendid. This is really nice. This dates probably to the second half of the 13th century. And it's the base of a French jug. It's from the Saint-Ange region of southwest France, which was the main wine-producing area for England in the 13th and 14th century. So if you want any evidence that you're in a port, this is fantastically good. These things rarely get outside the ports. So all this stuff is for wine and beer? Yeah, it's all booze-related. There isn't any food-related pottery. They're all intriguing finds. But as yet, there's nothing to confirm this as the site of the Maison d'Eau, unless the patients there had a very unusual diet. It looks more likely to be a tavern than a hospital. But it's not a bad result for the end of the first day's dig. Apart from those cobbles and the lovely bits of pottery that Paul's found, we really haven't got much archaeology here yet. But it is early days, isn't it, Phil? Oh, absolutely, Tony. But you've got to remember that all this pottery that we're actually finding, it is actually telling us something about the lifestyle of the people that were here. And that is one of the reasons that we're here. So we're going to continue on down in this trench tomorrow? Oh, absolutely. We've barely started. It really is all to play for. What about up the top at Greyfriars? Up the top, we've got the town ditch showing up now, and we're going to be looking at that for dating evidence. So it's the end of day one. We've already got this beautiful piece of medieval pot, which you two really love, don't you? What are we going to get next? We'll find out tomorrow. Discover the past with exclusive ancient history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of Pompeii to the rebellion of Boudicca and the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland. Immerse yourself in the captivating stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. Beginning of day two here in Suffolk, where we're looking for evidence of the town of Dunedge that was completely overwhelmed by the sea hundreds of years ago. Yesterday in the car park, we put in a trench just beyond that stone wall over there, and we came up with some lovely medieval pottery. But the trench that we're really putting our money on is this one, because it could tell us whether or not there was an Anglo-Saxon Dunedge, something which no one's ever been able to prove before. But, Mick, we've got a bit of a problem, haven't we? If there is anything Anglo-Saxon, it's going to be, what, 10, 15 feet below us. And yesterday, after meticulous hand excavation, we got down that far. This is going to be time, Tim, over three months, not three days. Probably three years, actually. No, and you're right, and in order to get to that primary silt, the actual bottom of the ditch, we're going to have to deal with a machine. Explain to me why this trench might prove that there's something Anglo-Saxon here. Well, if the ditch was dug in Anglo-Saxon times, it's quite likely there'll be Anglo-Saxon pottery in the bottom of it. And it's such a big project. Yeah, because the ditch is 40 feet wide. 40 feet? Yeah, so it's back to where Ian is. This is somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's 15 feet deep, so it's a massive structure. I tell you what, I'm going to be really relieved when that engine starts up. Yeah, we've got to wake Ian up first. Down in the beachside car park, Phil's trench is developing nicely, and he's continuing to make fresh finds this morning. It might be a bit of a book clasp or something like that. I've got Phil's spit all over it now. Oh, lovely, corroded. It's still not clinching evidence of a medieval hospital, but it's certainly evidence of medieval activity in this area. Yesterday at Greyfriars, Mick was more interested in digging for defensive ditches than examining the standing remains. But in order to recreate medieval dunnage, we urgently need to find out as much as we can about the town's Franciscan friary. It's estimated that within 50 years, all that's still standing will have collapsed into the sea. We especially want to examine the friary layout, and the obvious starting point is to look at the visible remains and work out where they fit into the whole complex. So, presumably, this is part of the friary, and it's medieval? It's certainly part of the friary, and it's partly medieval. You can see these windows at the bottom. They've been mucked about a little bit. Right. They weren't glazed, no sign of glazing. And then you can see in between these two windows, you've got a full-height buttress, which is fine. Medieval. Yeah. Up on the first floor, things go a bit haywire. That buttress goes up. But look at those peculiar windows up there. They're not medieval. With brick in them. With brick and latches and things like that. So, what I think's happened in the early 19th century, it was restored. Right. And I've got a suspicion that it was restored to look a bit like a folly, a Gothic folly. Oh, right. Yeah. So, it doesn't look like the church? It's certainly not the church, but what it is, I don't know. So, would it help if we did some geophysics around it, and perhaps put the odd trench in, to try and sort that out? I think it's essential. We need to know the context of this in the medieval period. Otherwise, we're just left with an isolated fragment here, which seems to be an awful long way from anywhere. I'll put that on my shopping list. So, there's going to be a lot more work for the geophys team. Let's hope their results will reveal the layout of the friary around the standing remains. Meanwhile, as the neighbouring town ditch trench gets deeper, thanks to Ian's mechanical assistance, we're starting to make some pottery finds. But are they from the Anglo-Saxon period, as we're hoping? That bit might be a little bit earlier. That could be late 11th into 12th at a push. That's pretty good for us, because it's fairly early medieval stuff, where we're still really at the top of the ditch, and this ditch is meant, you know, it's been excavated to be, what, five metres deep? Really? Yeah. So, we're just really early days. We're about a bit under shy of one and a half at the moment. So, you've got a fair old way to go, haven't you? Yeah. All the finds so far may be medieval, but this trench has a long way to go before we reach the bottom of the ditch. Fingers crossed for Anglo-Saxon finds within our remaining two days. Over in the incident room, Stuart's been making finds of his own. He's been looking through all the historic documentation relating to Dunnage, and he's found the oldest surviving map, the Aegis map. It's a vital source of information, and will help us understand what medieval Dunnage looked like. This is a fantastic map, isn't it? But how accurate is it? Yeah, that's the test, isn't it? I mean, this gives us a snapshot, in 1587, what the town looked like. Yeah. But by 1587, a lot of the town itself had gone. That's not the complete town. I mean, it's lost at least half, hasn't it? It has. But this map shows the layout of the streets, it shows the pattern of plots, it labels and shows individual churches and gives us the street names and so on. So what we can do is compare this map and the patterns on it with the modern Alden survey map. There will be features that are still in the landscape today that we can lock the two together and test how accurate this map is. So it's a sort of map regression job you're going to do, look at all the maps between this date and the present one. That's right, yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, John and his geophys team haven't even had time for a tea break, as they try to keep up with Mick's ever-expanding geophys shopping list. But they've now got some results from around the standing remains. John was hoping that these would confirm a conjectured plan of the friary, which was created by the last people who dug here back in the 1990s. But unfortunately, things don't seem that clear-cut. So these are the standing remains in the middle of the friary. Now, about 10, 15 years ago, there was an evaluation done to the north and they put in a series of trenches, got some walls and then made a reconstruction of what they believed to be the layout of the whole friary, the nave, the cloisters, etc. So Jimmy's done the radar in that area and those are the results. So there's the standing building. Now, we have got sort of wall lines and so on, on the right alignment. How do those wall lines tie in with the church and cloister that they projected 10, 15 years ago? Well, we thought you were going to ask that and the answer is not really at all. I mean, there's some correlation. Just down here. Yeah, but not a lot. No. So what do we do now? Do we put a trench in to test whether these things on Jimmy's screen are walls or whether actually the stuff in the original projection is more accurate? Well, we'll just put one somewhere down by the surviving building, I think, just to see what it looks like. I knew you should dig there. I said that to you yesterday. That was yesterday, Tony. So based on John's geophys results, we're opening a new trench at Greyfriars on top of one of the curious blobs that appear all over the results. If these geophys blobs are in fact walls, it's likely the previous archaeologists got the layout of the friary wrong. But we'll only know for sure by digging. Alex and Stuart, meanwhile, are resorting to rather more high-tech methods to get to grips with the overall topography of medieval dunnage. So, Karl, this is LiDAR technology. Can you explain to me exactly what it is it does? Yeah, basically we have an instrument mounted in an aeroplane which flies along and it fires laser pulses down on the ground and builds up a picture of the terrain from those laser pulses. It fires about a million laser pulses every 10 seconds, so you get a very detailed view of what's going on on the ground. We can basically look from any position we want to and you can see you've got the car park site just here, you've got the friary just here, those little lumps just there. Yeah, yeah. So the car park's actually very low down here, isn't it? It's quite light green and all this presumed is land that was formerly flooded. Yeah, it looks like it's some kind of flood plain. Right, that's now trapped in behind here. So the idea of sort of harbour behind here, Alex, is not... It's got mileage, isn't it? Yeah. And this ties in nicely with Mick's positioning of Phil's car park trench yesterday, between the high ground and a potential medieval harbour in what's now marshland behind the car park. Phil's busy down here, still looking for the remains of the Maison d'Eau hospital. So far, he's pulled out some pottery and metalwork, but has he now got any evidence of a hospital? As you can see, we're under some degree of scrutiny right now, although frankly, Phil, they are getting rather short-changed, aren't they? Well, absolutely, but so are we. I mean, the point-blank truth is Maison d'Eau is not here. It's not in this trench. Maison anything isn't here. Absolutely, Maison anything. I mean, I think what we are is standing on the edge of the foreshore. Now, how do you know that? Well, if you look everywhere in this trench, what you get is sand, and that's very, very typical of what you're going to get on the foreshore. And I think if you want to use the foreshore, and they must have wanted to use it, they would have pulled boats up. They would have done loading and unloading. If you want to consolidate that, you do what you do here. You put down cobbles. You throw stuff down to firm up the ground. I mean, you only got to look. They've done it here. They want to create a car park. They put down rubble. So really, all we've got is the 13th century equivalents to a car park? I'm afraid so. Well, that's the bad news, but the good news is the finds. Danny, you've had some lovely things out of this trench, haven't you? Absolutely, we've had some fantastic things coming up. We've got a couple of dress accessories and a thimble, all dating to around the 15th century. So that's 1400s. And the fantastic thing is that that ties in really nicely with the pottery that we've coming out of this trench as well. Come on then, let's have a look at them. Okay, well, the first item that we've got is a strap mount. Now, strap mounts, there would have probably been more than these, all fitted together along a strap or a leather belt. You've got to remember, this would have been all really nice and shiny when it was brand new, so it would have looked very decorative. What about this thimble over here? This is a lovely thimble. Again, it's a 15th century date, i.e. 1400s. It's a domed thimble. What's really nice about this is that you can see where the indentations have all been hand-punched all along the thimble. And they're gathered very closely together so that we can tell that this type of thimble was used for doing very delicate work for hand-stitching garments or possibly even for doing embroidery work. So, the finds are getting better and better, the crowds are gathering, and will we find Anglo-Saxon dunnage? We'll have to wait and see. Middle of day two here in Dunnage in Suffolk, and Time Team doesn't get any more exciting than this. We're digging up a public toilet. All right, I am exaggerating slightly, but Stuart is putting in a little trench right here in front of the toilet block. Why are you doing that, mate? We know we're on the edge of where this Masson-Durr hospital is. We're confident in this corner. We know we've got material round about it from the other trenches. Everything points to being up here on this high ground next to the road, which is just through there. And this literally is the only bit of ground we can get in to see if there's anything down there. So, I'm afraid we've just got to put up with it. Well, even if you don't find anything, you've got a little hatch for the ice creams right over there, so you'll be all right. Yeah, handy for the loo. Yeah, and great for the loo. So, fingers crossed that Stuart finds some signs of the Masson-Durr, and not just the drains from the toilets. As well as recreating medieval Dunnage, we're also trying to prove that the town flourished hundreds of years before that as a major Anglo-Saxon port. We're hoping to find evidence for this at the bottom of the old town's defensive ditch, but the trench up here resembles no trench I've ever seen before. Matt, you've got a bit of civil engineering going on there, haven't you? What's this step for? Well, the trouble with this trench is it's dug through this sand. It's very unstable, so we can only go 1.20m down before we have to step it out to make it safe, and then we can go down again. And this ditch, you know, it could be up to 5m deep, so we've got to do this side, and then we're going to do that side, and then we can go down in the middle. And what's this slope here? Oh, well, that lovely slide that we've created, that's actually the bank, that's the side of the ditch coming down in here. So this slope here would have been the ditch, and it would have gone way, way, way deeper than this, and all this here is just fill? Yeah, and the original fill that they would have taken out when making the ditch is thrown up to make the bank, so what we're aiming to hit here as we go through both is the original ground surface that would have been at the beginning of the settlement before anything else was here. So that's where the Anglo-Saxon treasure may lie. For us, even a tiny scrap of pottery would count as treasure if it was Anglo-Saxon. Anything to date the birth of Dunwich back to that period. Mark, I thought the name Dunwich means that this has to be a Saxon trading post because of that witch ending, like Norwich or Harwich or Ipswich. So why are we wondering whether we're going to find Saxon or not? I'm a bit confused. If the Pales Dyke is an Anglo-Saxon ditch, then it's a huge Anglo-Saxon town. If the Pales Dyke is, as we think up until this point, late 12th century or mid-12th century, then it just indicates that it's a Norman town that is laying out its limits in the middle of the 12th century. So what we find at the bottom of that ditch might rewrite history. Whoa there, Marianne, that's a mighty big claim. By the look of the trench around the standing remains, we're not finding anything. Guys, remind me again why we put this trench in. Because we had a blob on the geophysics, which we were hoping was going to be a big stone base. Tracey, have you got a big monumental block in there? No. So what have you got? It looks like what we've got is a quarry pit. Well, it's a very interesting piece of archaeology, but it doesn't really help us as far as the fire is concerned. Get the plan out, John. What perplexes me is, can we really interpret any of that on that plan? I'm still confident that we've got stone features out there. The unfortunate thing is we can't dig them. I know that sounds like an easy excuse, but it's not. We can't dig them because? Because we've got the horse in the field and that's going to cause us real problems. Look, at the far end there, you've got drawn this colossal church. I mean, there's a huge building somewhere across there. Well, how do we know? There's no real hard evidence for that. I thought you were going to do some geophys. That's what you said this morning. We are going to. But we're running out of time because we've been pushed in so many different directions. What we're going to do is survey over that. Absolutely. So if John has got time to do the geophys over there, and if the bloke who owns those horses will let us poke around in that area, can we put a trench in? Well, I think, yeah, because there's such reports here of demolition, debris and glass and stonework and all the rest of it, and we'd have to demonstrate that it was actually there in that form. And you shouldn't be worrying about the interpretation of a little pit like this. No, absolutely. And John, you shouldn't be sitting down. You should start that geophys. So the blobs all over the geophys map are nothing but filled in pits and don't appear to form part of the friary layout at all. But if we can confirm the existence of the possible church, first by geophys and then by digging a trench, we should be able to use John's geophys results to prove the validity of the rest of the friary layout. But that's a big if, and it's already the end of day two. Here you go, chappies. Oh, what a star. What an absolute star. Thank you for doing this. Cheers, mate. So how you been getting on down the car park this afternoon? Well, I dug a lot of sand, Tony. Ever such a lot of sand. I really have. I mean, we got a load of sand in my trench, which is pretty much finished. That's trench one. Stuart's test pit outside the loo is, well, that's a sand pit, really. We haven't found Maison Jo in there either. We've had a very interesting discussion up on the top field. You know where the big ruin is? You know where the horses graze at the far end of that field? Well, according to the projection that was drawn in the 90s, they reckon there is a massive medieval church there. Whether or not there is, we're not absolutely sure. Well, could we dig it, if we can find it? Can we dig it? Well, the bloke who owns the field is away, and the field is sealed off at the moment because he's got horses in it, and he's coming back tomorrow early, and we need to get permission from him if we're going to dig it. So what we need is someone with charm and diplomatic skills in order to persuade him. Hold on a minute. I know where this is going. You know exactly where this is going. Are you up for trying to persuade this bloke? So that I can make Phil dig more sand? Exactly. Of course. Thank you very much. So will we get our Anglo-Saxon dunnage? Will we get access to our church? Will we be able to allow Phil to dig something that... I was just going to say, dig something that wasn't sand. We'll find out tomorrow. Cheers. Here's the sand. Beginning of day three here at Dunnage in Suffolk, and the great news is Mary Anne has worked her magic. She's managed to persuade the farmer to let us put a trench in in his field, just beyond where Geofiz are now, where we're hoping to find an enormous medieval church, which it's theorized could be there. Look, this is what it's supposed to look like. Well, early this morning, John sneaked out and did a bit of Geofiz in the corner, and look, this is what he found. See that black? Is that a wall or is it not? We've set out to investigate the few medieval fragments that remain in this vast disappearing village, with the hope that we can recreate what the town was like in medieval times. One fragment we hoped to find was the lost Maison Dieu hospital, which we thought was located in the beach car park. But as Phil pointed out in the pub last night, the trenches we've dug down there are just full of sand. The finds from the car park suggested some medieval buildings, but unfortunately, there was no sign of the hospital. But that means Phil can now turn his attention to finding the church up here at the other remaining medieval fragment, the Clifftop Friary. John, you got that trench marked out? And the pressure's on. We've only got today left to prove or disprove the friary layout. Over to you, Phil. Well, that's not very impressive. Five of you against one of me. Keep it sharp. That's what you gotta do, keep it sharp. Though it doesn't appear that Phil's making the quick start to the trench he'd been hoping for. Get on with it, guys. There's less than a day left. We're also trying to prove that Dunnage was a flourishing pre-medieval town, as Mick thinks it was. We're looking for Anglo-Saxon evidence in the town ditch trench, where the remainder of our effort's now focused. And it looks like they're heading for the centre of the earth. We're gonna keep taking them as we go down. But you never know, it might just be the last chance we get. But time's running out. Will we ever reach the bottom? And typically, this being an English summer, the heavens open on us. Even Phil's had to don his waterproofs. But it takes more than a summer shower to send him scurrying for cover. Phil, this is the trench where we were looking for evidence of the big church. Have we found that evidence yet? I think we have, Tony. I think we're, according to the geophysics, we're right in the southwest corner of the main building. And what we believe at the moment is that we've got the west wall, this white spread coming along here, turning around a corner and then going back in that direction towards the sea. If that is a wall, and I know it's early days yet, it's a zonking great thing, isn't it? It is. It is a massive wall foundation for a massive building. Any finds yet? Well, come and have a look at our star find. Look, we've got our first piece of carved stonework. And you'll see here where we've got a fresh break, it's a very white stone. You can see here we've got part of a carving sort of edge there, a scallop in there, and then a bit of a slot, and it's scalloped again on that side. Haven't got the foggiest idea what it is, so we'll have to work around it and get it out. Phil's trench appears to be proving that John's geophys results are on the money. Armed with this vital piece of evidence, we should now be able to make a good judgment as to the layout of the rest of the church. But we'd need to excavate much more to decisively prove the full plan of the entire friary. And unfortunately, that's something we don't have time for. And it's sites like these that suffer most when there's such limited time. I always tend to think of our national heritage as being things like palaces and castles and the kind of stuff which will remain there forever and a day, provided we look after it properly. But that's certainly not the case here, is it? Well, no, unfortunately not. I mean, this is very much a scheduled monument at risk, and part of this site here is already going over the cliff. Presumably, this must be the exception rather than the rule. Well, in fact, not. I mean, we've done a survey of about 20,000 sites, and one in six scheduled monuments are at risk in the country. So now we've done the evaluation, what kind of strategies can you use? Well, English Heritage isn't a coast protection agency, but in fact, we do have to work with the local communities here to come up with some form of further investigations or analysis before the site's lost forever. But while all the frenetic activity continues at Greyfriars, Stuart and Alex are looking at scans of the seabed taken with the latest sonar technology. It's the first chance any of our archaeologists have had to look beneath the waves, and it could be a major tool in helping them reconstruct the layout of medieval Dunnage. Here you can see the lidar, that's the land, and then this area here, this is all the seabed mapped with the sonar. If we zoom in further, you can begin to see that there are these blocks of masonry. What we've been finding is incredibly exciting because we've actually been detecting the remains from large structures like churches. Why were the church ruins so important? The church ruins are important because large chunks of masonry, they fall down a cliff, but they still are fairly big. They're not going to be moved, even during storms and large tides. These big blocks don't move around, so they're going to be pretty much in the location where they used to be. Now, David, I don't want to appear sceptical here, but how do we know that this sort of random scatter of stones is not natural geology? We sent divers down, and they were able to bring up a couple of samples, large stones, and on the stones was mortar still smeared on them, and then when we analysed the mortar, it matched exactly the mortar that we found on the medieval Greyfriars Monastery site. Right. So David's next step is to plot the sonar results onto the oldest historic map of Dunnage. OK, so I'm going to overlay the Aigars map of 1587 in red, and here you can see the east end of the church of St Peter's, and here you can see immediately that that collection of stones are actually very close to the Aigars map position of St Peter's Church, and then it enables us to have points on the seabed that we can date, and that tells us where the coastline was at that time. This is wonderful from our point of view, being able to build up this picture of the town. Well, that's good enough for me, Stuart. Brilliant, isn't it? It's fantastic. Yeah. The sonar results prove that the oldest map of Dunnage, the Aigars map, is reliable. Not only is Stuart finding anchor points on land, he now has them out to sea as well. This means he should be able to confidently reconstruct the layout of old Dunnage, up to a certain date at least. And over at Phil's church trench, the piece of architectural stonework he showed me earlier has been removed, and he now thinks he knows what it is. Look here. Oh, great. Got a bit of the window. That's very nicely done, yeah. And then, of course, you've got exactly the same thing on the other side. Yeah, yeah. So you've literally got the run of windows. It's a bit up the middle of a couple of bare windows. Absolutely, absolutely. It would have formed the centre bar between two large arched windows, most probably filled with coloured glass. It's got the marking outlines and things on it, look. God, you little closet stone mason. Marking outlines, he knows all the terms. I do. And now that Alex and Stuart have fitted the final pieces of data into their landscape jigsaw, it's time to find out what the picture shows of medieval Dunnage. The work from the sonar has shown that St Peter's church can be still found under the water, Blackfriars church. And what that's helped confirm is that 16th century map of Agathes is actually accurate. So we can start to use that town plan and what that does is it helps us understand the size and shape of the town. So finally, we're starting to get a vivid picture of this place. This is what we think it would have looked like, taking the extent of a walled town right out to the sea, almost half a mile further out. It would have had its own street layout, which we can only speculate about, obviously. But what that's showing us in the size and shape of the town that where we are down here is kind of car park area. This was all commercial, industrial area, probably a bit of wharfage just on the edge up here. That was all water up there. But I think one of the main findings as well is that we've clearly got an enormous urban centre here, OK? One that's required a large bank and ditch to defend it at some point. And I think we've probably got a settlement that if it wasn't for the erosion, might well have gone on to become like an Ipswich or a Norwich. So this was clearly a very, very important place at some time. Everything yet again comes down to the real story here, coastal erosion. If this coast hadn't eroded away over the last 700 years, Suffolk today would be a very different place, quite possibly with Dunnage as its main city. But after some wild and dramatic events in the 13th and 14th centuries, Dunnage would never be the same again. It would have been laid out in front of us here, something like five parishes, the marketplace, all of the churches, about 500 metres away from the current shoreline here. It was probably the best harbour on the East Anglian coast. And then something happened. Yes, there was a series of storms starting in 1287 that wash away lots of Dunnage and also block up its harbour. And we know that because we have this wonderful document, an inquiry from 1326, that at the top says, the houses and shops in Dunnage washed away by the sea. And a great example here, three houses belonging to Reginald's son of Robert, valued at 20 shillings, washed away by the tempest of the sea. And that's one night of utter destruction. One night of destruction repeated again in 1328. And those two storms really mark the end of Dunnage. Something like 600 houses, five parishes, were swept away. And the town is rapidly receding in this direction as the sea encroaches. It brings home the devastating power of erosion. And it's the reason why medieval Dunnage has been lost for good. The dig's almost over. You've finally managed to complete the geophysics. Well, I mean, it's down to Jimmy and Claire. They've done a fantastic job. They've collected so much radar data. And we've actually got the plan of the church. And it matches so well, the interpretation. I didn't believe it yesterday, but it's there. We've got the detail of the buttresses, the pier bases, probable graves around the outside. It's over 60 metres long. I mean, it's a massive structure. And we've found it in the ground as well. That's the important thing. It's always reassuring to be able to actually open up a trench and actually test the geophysics. And we do have the west wall coming along there and then trending up towards us, the south wall of the building. I mean, it does mean that we can interpret this geophysics with so much more confidence. Yeah. Good job, innit? It's fantastic to see it so clear. And this is a remarkable piece of work. To get all that lot done with radar and get the plan of the church is absolutely amazing. The imposing church would have had the large windows we saw earlier on its west side. And although we don't know the exact layout of the friary cloisters, it's pretty certain this church would have dominated everything around it. But our archaeological pièce de résistance here must be Mick's town ditch, the Palesdyke. Has he found evidence to prove Dunnage was a flourishing port in Anglo-Saxon times? That is a very, very impressively huge ditch. Is that the bottom? Pretty well, yeah. It's got to be one of the biggest holes we've ever done on time. Yeah, it is, yeah. And all that huge amount of labour has produced three tiny bits of pot. What is that pot? This is Thetford Ware, 850 to 1100 AD. That's frustrating, isn't it? Because 1100 is Norman, but 800 Saxon. Yeah, so this is late Saxon pottery. And I think, without any doubt, this proves that this ditch is in existence in the late Saxon period. Why can you say that when the pottery could be later? It could be, but it's still got to get into there from a settlement by 1100. That suggests it's there somewhere before that. This demonstrates, archaeologically, that this is a Saxon town and it's up and running and thriving before the Norman conquest. Presumably, because if they're building their ditch here and most of the activity is on the coast, almost a mile away, that's an enormous settlement. So, turning back the clock through the centuries, we can imagine Dunedge in medieval times. It was a bustling market town of 6,000 people with a flourishing port and harbour, which grew wealthy on trade. But roll the clock back even further into Anglo-Saxon times and it was already a major town and port, serving this part of the eastern coast. And that's something that has never been proved before. People have always thought there was probably a Saxon settlement here, haven't they? Logic dictated it, but we're the people who proved it. Nobody's reached the bottom of the ditch before, therefore they haven't found the early stuff before. And this is good, solid archaeological evidence that the place is there at that date. So, this is a huge achievement. It is. And we secured it before it was lost. Yeah. Job done. Yeah. Job done.