A Copper Bottomed Dig | Time Team (Archeology Documentary) | Timeline

I'm in Swansea in South Wales, epicentre of an industry that changed the world. And it's not steel, and it's not coal, and it's not slate. It's an industry intimately connected with the slave trade that employed thousands of people and generated inconceivable wealth for the privileged few. If I'd been standing here 200 years ago, this is what I would have seen. Known as Copperopolis, it was copper smelting that put Swansea at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution. We want to discover why this sleepy backwater became the birthplace of the global copper trade. That floor and you're dead. And that's what ties this simple copper bracelet to one of the worst crimes in human history. As usual, we've got just three days to come up with some answers. But let me tell you, without copper, we wouldn't have any walkie-talkies, we wouldn't be able to work that digger, we certainly wouldn't have any geophys, all pretty crucial stuff. Well, maybe not the geophys. This idyllic parkland hides virtually all trace of an industry that once dominated the world in terms of its scale, skill, and product. Production once devastated this landscape, leeching deadly toxins into the ground and sending countless workers to an early grave. The real danger is getting any of the soil in your mouth. So gloves at all times. And then when we come off site, gloves off, wash hands, all that kind of stuff. Could you just come up just a little bit? Oh yeah, there's a beginning of a wall coming here, be nice to know where it's coming. That's enough, that's enough. Fortunately, the vegetation's quite safe, so we're diving straight in to see what's left of one of the first copperworks in Swansea, White Rock. Well, it just wouldn't be time, team, if we went for the easy option. This is so typically Francis. We've got this massive field. We can excavate wherever we like and look at the area that he's clearing, right in the very corner. Are you agoraphobic? The thing is, this is where it all began, right? You see this picture here, that building you can see there with the long roof, which is known as the Great Workhouse, was one of the largest structures of its type in the world when it was built. It originally continued right the way along all those shrubs for about 300 feet. So it was a huge, great, long thing. What was going on inside it? Well, as you can see from all the smoke coming out of the chimneys, they had furnaces in here, and this was where copper was actually melted down from the ore, a process known as smelting. According to the original 1730s lease, White Rock's Great Workhouse contained 20 furnaces. It was a major player in Swansea's copper empire, sitting next to the River Towie in southwest Wales. Phil's aim is to find the furnaces and discover how they made copper, while Mary Anne's discovering what impact the industry had on this area. Paint me a picture of what it would have been like to, say, 300 years ago. Routinely, in the 19th century, people described the valley itself as being somewhat akin to Dante's Inferno. Noise, smoke, bustle, and so on. Very complete contrast to what we see around us today. What was it that meant that this industry developed in Swansea in the first place? Because there's no copper here, is there? No, that's the key point. There are no copper mines anywhere near Swansea. The nearest mines are in Cornwall. It was more economical to bring the copper to Swansea, to the source of coal, rather than the other way round. The crucial point being that around four tonnes of coal were needed to smelt one tonne of copper. At this time, Swansea had a vast source of cheap coal right on its doorstep. And this coal put Swansea at the epicentre of global copper production. By the mid-1800s, there were over 200 copperworks here. Over in his trench, Phil's going great guns in his quest for one of Swansea's biggest furnace houses. Punch that through, innit? Presumably, that's got a nice straight edge. Presumably, that has been punched through. That, that's the construction cut, if you like, to put that in. Across the river from White Rock was Havod, one of the largest copperworks in the world. Built a century after White Rock, today it's a stunning... Havod didn't shut up shop until the 1980s, so there's a risk that later buildings may have trashed any 19th-century archaeology. Luckily, we've got some insider info on what was once here. So there are some parts here that still survive from the original copperworks? Yes. This is the original road. It's the backside of all the furnaces. Right. Ronnie Maddott was formerly Havod's engineer and the last man out the door when the works closed. What would you like us to find while we're here for three days? What about the years? It's a bit left idle and what have you. What's undone is nobody knows, are they? But there's a chance, then, if we do find something, you'll actually be able to come down here and look at it... And say it's mine. LAUGHTER Fingers crossed we find something here. While Geophys start their survey, back at White Rock, Phil's made a huge dent in the great workhouse, a trench with a peculiar dress code. Why have I been told to wear all this kit and how come you aren't? Well, I mean, this is a contaminated site. Yeah, but you haven't got a mask on. I know, Tony, and you don't need to wear one either. Thing is, we had rain this morning, right? There's no dust. If there was dust, we'd ask you to wear one of those. That's why we're wearing gloves. This ground is so polluted from the days of copper smelting. There's arsenic, there's sulphuric acid, there's cadmium, there's lead, cyanide. Lick that floor and you're dead. Well, I don't think I will, then. LAUGHTER What is it that you're actually trying to do here? Well, you can see we've actually got a bit of wall surviving there. Now, that's 18th-century stonework, and then this is the end wall behind us, again 18th-century, and then the wall's coming off in that direction and heading off like that. And then in the interior here, there were furnaces. At least that's what we're told. Well, it's very interesting, but I'm going to put my mask back on. Yes, yes. Go back to your surgery, Doctor. LAUGHTER It might be toxic, but Phil's trench is looking terrific. Within the 18th-century walls, the archaeologists are unearthing intriguing brickwork, which will need cleaning up before we can categorise it. I don't know whether you might just want to nudge a bit of that down, but that's where the wall's coming in there. By the 1850s, Swansea was smelting over half of the world's copper and importing and exporting on a global scale. Havod was Swansea's largest copperworks, set up in the early 1800s. But whether we can find anything that's left hinges on the geophys results. Surprisingly, the magnetics appear to have worked, and, I mean, although it's not that clear on the picture here, we've got some really, really strong responses that are easily indicative of heavy firing that could go with the sort of furnaces. So, how would the early furnaces that we're getting on the other side, the white rock side, differ from what we're going to get here? The overall basic operation is the same, but size might well be significantly bigger. Right, OK. Well, I think we've done enough talking. It's time we did some digging. Kevin! Armed with John's geophys, Trench 2 goes in here, marked on the plans as furnaces. But not everyone's convinced we've got our trench in the right place. I would honestly say I'd be 99.9% there was no furnaces by there. Up until, what, 70 years ago, there was nothing there. I'll have to tell Francis that. Maybe they've got the map turned round the wrong way. Whoever's right, we now face the huge challenge of getting through tonnes and tonnes of demolition rubble in the search for intact archaeology. Over the river at White Rock, Phil's definitely in the right place. Phil, is that a floor? Oh, you bet that's a floor, Francis. And that's all coal ash, is it, there, Phil? You're getting off the black dust? Yeah, well, that's it. It must be the remains of the furnished floor. Look at that. That's what you want. That's the business, Phil. The trench is crammed with slag and burnt debris, all hot clues we're edging closer to a furnace. The copperworks here jostled for riverside space less than a mile from Swansea's port. By the early 1800s, the port was the spaghetti junction of the seas, with barges bringing copper ore in and ships taking finished goods out. What we're now entering is actually the Abba Tawi, which, of course, is where Abba is Welsh, the mouth of the Tawi, which is the Tawi River here. This river was the artery linking our site to the world. Alex, we've come ten minutes from the port and we're already at our site. I know, we're really actually not far from the sea at all. But this is, of course, where the boats would have been brought up and unloaded, so all of the copper ore that would have been coming from places like Cornwall and Devon, it would arrive here and then get taken into the furnaces. Are you getting a sense of how it's all fitting together within the landscape? Definitely. You know, the more I see of this landscape, the more I see the interconnectivity. You know, the use they would have made of the river, the use they would have made of the coal seams as well, and, of course, the access Swansea has to the Atlantic and the wider world. White Rock's private dock is an indication of the huge volume of goods coming in and out of the works. But after a whole day of digging, has Phil actually got anything furnace-like in his trench? By heck, Phil, there's a lot of brick here. Well, there's actually more stone, Tony. The brick is only the later editions, but the bricks are actually quite interesting. What we've actually got in here is, well, I suppose you'd have to say a brick structure. Thank you. In other words, I don't really know what it is, but you can see we've got some bricks in here, and then here we've got an arch, and then in here we've got black, and then in here we've got another arch and more brickwork out there. So we've got a definite pattern of something that's built into the wall. Francis, have you got any idea what this pattern of arches is? Well, yes, Tony. I mean, the fact is all the brickwork seems to be covered in slag. There's a lot of copper around, there's a lot of coal dust. It's got to be something to do with furnaces. Of that there is no doubt. How are we going to expose what was here in the 18th century? Well, I think the key, Tony, is going to be to extend the trench in that direction, and with any luck we'll actually come up with our 18th-century furnaces. There's a heck of a lot of work to do over there, Phil. We're probably talking about doubling the size of the trench. We can easily do that, and if it really solves the problem of why we're here and explains this building, then it'll be worth the effort. Well, I don't know what we'll find tomorrow, but I'll tell you one thing. We're going to be digging a hell of a big hole. Beginning of day two here in Swansea, where, as you can see, we're shifting an enormous amount of earth, we're looking for evidence of the very first major copperworks in South Wales, which isn't that brick wall, which is Victorian, nor is it that floor, which is also Victorian, but what we're looking for is underneath here, isn't it? Absolutely. Hang on. Before we have a conversation, I'll shut Ian up. Ian, can you stop? Thanks. So, if the original foundry is under here, why are we looking over there? It's all a matter of scale, Tony. The fact is, as you said, this is the first major copperwork in this area. It was large. We're dealing with large furnaces in a large building. It's a large complex. We need a very large trench to really find out what's going on here. OK, that's the archaeology, but there's a dark secret about the copper industry, which we haven't even started talking about yet, but which Francis feels very strongly about, cos you've got a personal connection to it, haven't you? What is this secret? In a word, Tony, slavery. And what's the link between your family and slavery? Well, my foregreat's grandfather, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, was one of six Quakers who set up the original Anti-Slavery Committee. And what's the link between slavery and copper? Well, copper was exported from Wales in large quantities as part of the complex trading arrangements to do with the slave trade. Marianne, you've started doing some research on this, haven't you? Yeah, look at this. This is a manila. This is essentially a piece of jewellery, conspicuous wealth, that was traded for people to the African slave owners. So it's not a shackle? No, it's worn on the wrist. It's a prized, treasured object that you traded for men, women and children. The commercial ambition that fuelled the copperworks here in Swansea is the same commercial ambition that fuelled the global trade in people. Manilas were White Rock's bread and butter, made from copper coming out of the very furnaces Phil's hoping to find in his trench. White Rock pioneered the revolutionary Welsh method of producing virtually pure copper. It was laborious, but highly skilled. Copper ore contained a host of impurities that had to be removed to produce a malleable, durable copper metal. The Welsh method put the ore through a sequence of furnaces to remove unwanted chemicals. First it was roasted in a calcined furnace, then the roasted ore was melted down in a smelting furnace to extract the metal, leaving a waste product, or slag. The Welsh method set new standards for purity. Earlier smelting processes had produced inferior, rather shoddy copper. Cassie and Gerry want to find out just how shoddy. The Welsh are using quite a mixed ore, complicated ore, and they have to go through this complicated series of stages to finally end up with good, pure copper. And is it going to be the Welsh method that you're going to show us here? No, we're going to do it in the old-fashioned way, which is just layering charcoal and ore together. We're using about a bag of sugars worth of crushed ore, and from that we'll be expecting around enough molten copper to fill a baked bean tin. That's what we want. But even traditional smelting's a complicated process. The ore's melting point is 1,200 degrees, and Cassie and Gerry must regularly rake off the slag. Push your rod right in and see if there's any metal at the bottom. Oh, yeah, look, it's running. A sombre force drove technological advance. Pure copper meant big money, and slavery was big business. It's a horrible question, but how many of these do I need to buy a person? Perhaps somewhere in the region between 10 and 50, depending on the physique, the strength of the slave concerned. Could this manila have been produced at White Rock to buy slaves? Thomas Costa, who founded White Rock, we know was involved in the slave trade with his partners, and we have evidence from three voyages that he and his partners undertook that were slaving voyages. One to Biafra, another carried slaves to Jamaica, and a third to North America. I suppose the most compelling piece of evidence is the fact that on the White Rock site there is a building we know from a print of 1744 described as the Manila House. I know another thing we're keen to find on this site is the Manila House. We don't know where the Manila House sits on our site, but Alex is determined to find it using an old aerial photograph of White Rock's ruins. So I'm just going to go over there and literally pace out your building to work out where we've got these walls here. Right-o. Get straight in. As Alex grapples with the complexities of stride counting, Geophys are throwing all they've got at finding more buildings. It's looking fantastic, Phil. I know. Meanwhile, Phil's made a breakthrough. This complex brickwork and blackened floor suggests burning, so Cassie's abandoned her smelting to take a look. Tell me the magic word. Have we got a furnace? We have got a furnace. We are stood on it. Here is one wall, that's the other wall, and this is the pit after you've done all of your roasting or your smelting that you drop the ore into. This is a large, possibly calcining furnace. Calcining? Calcining. That gives us the first process of the ore. The calcined furnace roasted the ore, drawing waste gases up a chimney. But when it comes to furnace bases, well, they're all pretty similar. So to identify the function of this furnace, we need to extend the trench so we can see more of it. It's crucial we determine which type of furnace we're digging. Only then can we piece together the layout and sequence of all the furnaces in the great workhouse. Aha! That'll be copper then. Across the river, Tracy and Raksha have been looking for Havod's 19th century copper furnaces. Yesterday, we weren't sure if this trench was even in the right place. All of a sudden, this amazing brick surface, which we think is part of the furnace, appears. How do you know it's a furnace? Well, can you see the way that these bricks are kind of mushed up and they're really powdery and they seem to be breaking and falling apart? Yeah. It means that there's been intense heat on them and they've turned this, like, amazing swirl of red and orange and pink. It just means that there's been lots of burning happening in this area. But we're also getting lots of fines. We've got copper and we're getting really nice, fresh bits of slag as well. Fantastic. Cos you can see bits of green in the... That's coppery, right? Yeah. It's a furnace-off between the two sides. It is! Brilliant. The race is under way to see who can identify their furnace first. And in his trench at White Rock, Phil's unearthing the entire furnace floor in an effort to find out. All right, Ian. By the sounds of it, you'll feel it. As you can see, we've been getting on really well over there, but that's just one corner of an enormous field and we haven't even looked at the rest of it. Although that's not true of Alex, who's been prowling around looking for lumps and bumps. How have you got on? Well, reasonable success. For example, here we've taken the configuration of buildings on an earlier map. This is a map from 1822 which we've put onto the Modern Ordnance Survey. So we get an idea of what kinds of other buildings were on the site. But interestingly, one of these buildings here is called the Manila House. Now, what I've done here is I've paced out very roughly across this courtyarded area to give me an idea of where this wall would have been. How does Alex's work tie in with what you've been able to find out from the geophers? Well, the one thing Alex hasn't told you is we've got a nice level field and the reason it's level is in the 60s, apparently, they came in with bulldozers, earthmovers, and there's about 2 metres of rubble. Francis, we've got a bit of a problem, haven't we? We can't rely on the geophers and we've got to rely on the width of Alex's strides. Well, I'm not too worried, Tony. I mean, it's just like going back to the 19th century archaeology. You know, you dig holes to find things. You don't worry about geophers. Down you go and if there is an 18th century Manila House down there, then you'll find it. If our gamble pays off, we could be on the verge of discovering a Manila House and our first direct link with the slave trade. Afternoon, day two here in Swansea, where Marianne and I are surrounded by evidence of the copper industry which dominated this area in the 18th and 19th century. Over lunch, some of the archaeologists were saying this is a site of world importance. That's right. We're not just telling the story of one copper manufacturing in a small bit of South Wales. This is a story with global importance. And the archaeology is starting to get good. That furnace over there is looking very promising. And a furnace over there. We've got two, two furnaces and we're only halfway through the dig. We're wasting no time opening a third trench where we hope the Manila House once stood. Let's hope we get some decent finds from here because there's been a distinct lack of them elsewhere. I mean, this is amazing because you've got Charles Davis and Sons, perhaps? Buckley Cheshire. Made in England. I mean, that's really nice. As bricks go, it's pretty impressive. Over in his trench, Phil's grappling with something a bit less obvious. I've never seen a thing like that before in my life. He's already got a furnace floor, but no date, no upstanding structure and no idea what type of furnace it was. We need answers to work out the overall layout of the great workhouse. Well, I reckon we have a scrape over there, yeah. Shifting more spoil and enlarging the trench could shed more light on the story. Luckily, we're digging next door to a stadium and they're willing to stump up some extra labour in the shape of some top rugby stars, the Ospreys. Oh, Ospreys. Your stadium, the Liberty Stadium, is overlooking these sites. Ian, did you know anything about the industrial archaeology that's on your doorstep? To be honest, until we got here today, we didn't have a clue what was going on or what had been here. Are you guys ready to lend a hand? Yes! Phil? Hello. I've got you some more muscle power. Will you send over as much muscle power as you can? All right, lads, you're on. This is the quarry face of knowledge. The object of the exercise is to place that into there and then, once the barrel is full, move it to the heap. Gentlemen, the spoil tip is yours. I've seen more luck in the teaspoon. I guess if you lived round here, I don't know, 100 years ago, you wouldn't be playing rugby. You'd be in here. So you reckon you've got a better deal, do you? I'm a better dealer. Although life as a copper worker was no walk in the park, skills were recognised and rewarded. Try and get it in the barrel, will you? The copper bosses, while turning a blind eye to the brutality of slavery, treated their own workers with compassion. How well were workers looked after here? Well, in the case of the Havard works, pretty well. The Vivian family, who established the works in 1809, 1810, do, I think, take their responsibilities quite seriously towards their workers. What they begin to do is lay out a workers' settlement that becomes known as Trevivian. Street by street, they provide rows of terraced cottages for their workers. These are terraced houses that have attached to them quite significantly large gardens or yards with provisions for pigsties, keeping chickens, coal houses and so on. And I can see that they've established a Havard Copper Works school, a church. I mean, there's a whole community here, isn't there? The Trevivian housing estate, home to generations of copper workers, still stands today. How many of you in the house? Oh, is that the family? Yeah. Oh, look at that. May I get it down? Alex, look at this. And you all grew up in Havard? Yeah, all in the one house. And did you work at the works as well? Donor works. Donor works. Donor works. Donor works. Donor works. Donor works. Donor works. Gosh. That's a family connection. Yeah. Five generations of Ronnie's family worked in Havard's furnaces, all trained in the Welsh method of putting copper through several furnaces to purify it. After six hours' work, Cassie and Gerry have gained some insight into the Welsh method's advantages over traditional smelting processes. How have you got on? Oh, fantastically. Would you like to see our results? Yes, please. Oh, well, if you just step this way. Now, you're both laughing at how ridiculously small this amount of copper is. Did you expect to get more? Of course. Why do you think you got so little? To get it all right, all the way through, to ensure you end up with a good beaker full of copper, is really difficult. And somewhere, it just went offline and we couldn't recover it. But what's actually more importantly, Tony, is that if we put this on this machine and we analyse it, in fact, these peaks here show that, in fact, mostly we've got iron and copper, and it also has the sulphur there. So it's not even good copper? Oh, no, it's absolute rubbish. But that proves why the conventional method of copper smelting for this ore just doesn't work, and that's why they had to go to the laborious, rigorous method of the Welsh process was the only way to get copper out of these ores. The Welsh method gave Swansea such an advantage that workers were made to sign confidentiality clauses to keep it secret. White Rock put their ore through 20 furnaces, one of which we've got in Phil's trench. And thanks to our rugby-playing free labour, he's now uncovered another room in the great workhouse. See, that's actually... No, we've got this big doorway in here, but we don't know how big the doorway is. So it gives us that encouragement to find out. The archaeology in this end of the trench hasn't got anything to do with Phil's furnace at the other end. It's stuffed with 19th-century bricks and slag to reveal what it is, cume or digging, and a monster of a spoil here. In the relative calm of Trevivian, Mary Ann and Alex are exploring where coppermen and their families used to live. Vivian Street, named after the family who founded the Havod Works. Exactly, and then here on this corner we therefore have the original copperworks school. But it wasn't exactly clean living around here. Until the 1940s, residents had to cope with Havod's overspill. So here we go. Get to the end of the road. There's that end terraced house. Can you see that? Just stood there. Yes, I can. Wow. And you can see the spoil heap. Look at that. Basically, it would have come down here. Come down into the road there. That's extraordinary. It must have dominated the landscape. It must have. It would have just risen up like a mountain here. Havod's waste was a by-product of its sheer industriousness. And in her trench, traces finally got what looks like the finished article coming out of the furnace. And we've got one big lump from here. This is looking really interesting. I think it would be really good if Gerry could have a look at that. Gerry, do you reckon you could identify what this is? Right. Basically, it's saying it's got effectively 93% copper in it. There's a trace of zinc, trace of arsenic, a little trace of lead. So this place is at the end of the process. At the moment, I'd be happy to say that it's virtually on its way to being pure. This is a fantastic find. It means we can say this furnace was a smelting one, where ore was melted down and metal cast on a floor. This copper's so pure, it means our furnace must be towards the end of the Welsh process. Time to bask in the glow of a good day's digging at the local social club. Well, the archaeology's really moved forward a pace today, hasn't it? It really has, Tony. We've cleared an enormous area and we've actually got our furnace, which is really, really good news. The other thing is, yesterday, you gave me a lot of stick and you said all I had in my trenches was bricks, OK, and that they were all Victorian bricks. Well, look at this. I've got a brick. Yes, but this one is a special brick. This is a handmade 18th-century brick and what's more, it's come out of the furnace. Look at that. Slag attack. Well, we've got our own bit of metal as well. See that? That is 95% copper made in Swansea. And that came from, what, the car park? That's right, yeah. Wonderful. Not quite as big as yours, but much purer. What about tomorrow, Francis? I think the key thing is to go for that manila house, you know, with the bracelets. But it's going to be a very, very deep hole, so it's going to be quite a challenge. And then I want Phil to find the furnace for certain. Yeah. Well, I've got... I've got a brick. No, I don't... I want more than a brick. I want hundreds of bricks. Well, a great day today and hopefully it'll be even better tomorrow. Beginning of day three. Yesterday, this was just virgin grass, but today, as you can see, we've dug a great big hole. Why? Because we're looking for the mysterious manila house. What's the mystery? Well, we don't know what it was for. Was it called the manila house because it's where they manufactured the manila bangles, which they used to trade with the slave traders, or was it just an office space? What do we know about it? We definitely know that Thomas Costa, one of the founders of the White Rock site, built this essentially in order to get involved with the slave trading, and manilas are a key aspect of that. We also know that it's labelled on this map as the Manila House and Pay Office, but beyond that, archaeology has to answer the questions. And has the archaeology told us anything yet? We've got a stone wall over there, and stone normally means 18th century, but we're not sure yet. There's no stopping Matt as he gets digging to find the manila house. And to understand what it took to make a manila, we're crafting one of our own, starting with a sand mould that needs to be hammered flat. Hey, Kit, this isn't the most skilled part of the process, though. No, but you're doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Having failed to smelt copper yesterday, hopefully we'll have more luck with casting it. Moment of truth here. We're using a manila bracelet to create a depression in the sand, then pouring molten copper into the hollow. That's our two-piece mould, and then once the copper alloy is ready, we'll be pouring it. And that's it, done. White Rock would have churned out thousands of these bracelets using copper made in the Great Workhouse. For two days, Phil's been puzzling over what sort of furnace he's found. Now it's all cleaned up, it's clear this was a calcine, or roasting furnace. Tell me what it would have looked like. Well, we've got a squarish one, it's very large. Fire over that way. We've got the floor just about at this level. All drops in from the top, big hoppers dropping in three tonne at a time. All gets raked out into this pit at the bottom. Fire over there, sucking the flames all here to be taken away up that massive chimney stack. And then how does it drop through into the pit? What you've got is holes positioned down the sides where we're standing. This is where the guys with the rabblers would stand, which is like a long rakey number. You poke it in through the hole and you rabble it out, and it drops through a tube into this pit just here. And then how does the ore get from the raking-out pit out there? What would happen with the raking-out pit is your furnace man is in charge of that. So he comes in at like 4am and he shovels out your three tonne of ore like that, and then it's the same guy's job to come and get the coal in for the next day. So with these big wheelbarrows he brings all the coal they'll need for the next firing. So once all that calcined ore has been shoveled out, where does it go then? Well, it should move to the next furnace down in the process. So it's going roasting, melting, roasting, melting as it works its way down. This looks like one of the first furnaces in the great workhouse sequence. Work here was gruelling. Average life expectancy was below 40. They were infected in their lungs and stomach and frequently would spit blood. When the conditions became unendurable they'd have to rush to the door. And it's not just what they're breathing in, it's the temperatures that they're working in as well. It's suggested by Dr Thomas Williams in 1854 that a copper man could sweat about 600 gallons in a year and consume as much as 1,000 gallons of water to replace it. Yeah, awful. These men are suffering long-term slow-burning poisoning from these really noxious chemicals that they're ingesting into their bodies. In Phil's trench the archaeologists are getting close up and personal with those horrendous conditions. At this end they've dug test pits hoping to find another copper furnace. But they've actually uncovered something very different. What's happening is it's actually filling in a lot of the gaps of the later history of the works here. Because when we started to go through the topmost layers of that test pit over there, squeezed in between the bricks, we've got evidence of lead. So the only way that lead could have got in there would have been in a molten state. So we know that in here they're processing it. But have we got finds, Phil? Have we got finds? Yes, we've got finds. Oh, you've got very heavy finds, haven't you? Absolutely. If that is the product of the lead working, it should have been transported out. Because what you're holding in your hands is money. If there's something wrong with it, then it should be going back into the processing to refine it so that it can be made into good lead to send out. So it seems white rock started as a copper works, but diversified into lead production by the end of the 19th century when it became cheaper to make copper abroad. Unfortunately, there's nothing left of the huge furnaces that once dominated this building. It's a similar story in Tracey's trench. This frame is part of a second furnace, but the issue of where these furnaces came in the sequence is now in doubt. Gerry's re-examining what yesterday we thought was a lump of pure copper from this trench. Right, one thing we can definitely say is that it's not pure copper. Because if it was pure copper, that face would be golden red. So where does that put these Havod furnaces in the copper manufacturing sequence? Gerry's hot-footed it over to Tracey's trench with his latest results. It's actually copper sulphide, so it is actually not the final product of Swansea copper, but it's about two-thirds of the way. So we know that that casting floor is about two-thirds of the way through the whole process, that somewhere further down would have produced the pure copper. Well, that's a real result, isn't it? It's an excellent result. These two furnaces both date to the early 1800s. If they're two-thirds through the sequence, it means we're looking at a colossal building that would have dwarfed white rock and churned out tonnes of copper. What's more, we've discovered a product made here of global importance. OK, I need your expertise to decode this for me. This is a copper nail, and it was used to hold copper sheets on the hulls of boats because it protected the timber and it also meant that they could go faster because there was less drag. Yeah, and we've had this zapped and it's almost pure copper, so if you used this with a normal hammer, it would just bend and break and be useless. So this is a lovely little indication of one of the most major industries Swansea ever had, the sheathing boats industries. I mean, without these, the Navy didn't have its empire conquest. This held together the British Navy that made global conquest possible. It's actually a really important nail. So, tiny artefact, global story. Exactly. These nails not only held the Navy together, but enabled slaving vessels to ship thousands of manilas. Can we get the fan off, Gerry? In our efforts to make a manila, we've now reached the critical stage. I have to say, my heart is beating a little bit faster. This is cool. It's awesome. This is really cool. The pouring tongs go on. Whoa, that is magic. Making this artefact has tested nerves and skill, and it's fallen to Alex to see whether it's all been worthwhile. Whoa, look at that. And you can already see that beautiful rosy sheen of the metal. Fantastic, there's our manila. Unfortunately, our reconstruction might be the closest we'll get to White Rock's manila business. Hey, Matt. Looks like you've just about finished. Yeah, it's all cleaned up really beautifully, Tony. I think the first phase we've got, we have part of the original building, which is this stone wall coming across here, and then there's another piece of it going along there. There's a doorway in it there, and there was a doorway in it there. Do you reckon that's the original manila house? I think it is. It's made of stone, which is the earliest phase over there. It looks really quite high quality, doesn't it? It's very crisp. Some big pieces of lovely stone facing going along here. Have you got any evidence of what was going on in the manila house? Have you got a copper furnace or anything like that? In this trench, in a word, no. Like so much of Copperopolis, the manila house was largely destroyed by later buildings and then demolition. It's not the result we wanted. And in Phil's trench, suddenly things are looking shaky as well. This morning we all felt really triumphant because we thought we'd got the one thing which we were after, which was an 18th century copper furnace. But this afternoon there's been a lot of head scratching and a lot of head shaking because it now transpires that everything is not what we thought. Phil, does that mean we haven't got a furnace? No, we've definitely got a furnace. It is a calcined furnace, but it is not for copper. It is for lead. Oh, that's disappointing, isn't it? Well, maybe it's disappointing if you wanted to find a copper furnace, but it is not altogether surprising. This is the last phase of operation that was in this building. And we do have evidence for copper furnaces as well. Look at that wall down there. Do you see those green on that brick there? Yeah, I can see that very clearly, yeah. So you reckon there were copper furnaces here. It's just that at the later end of the history of this building, they were replaced by lead ones. Absolutely. You've got to remember these furnaces were working pretty much day in, day out. They would wear out and they needed to be replaced. So there may well be evidence of an 18th century copper furnace down below here. It's not quite the result we were hoping for, but it does reveal how the white rock works adapted to the times. When copper demand waned, they simply switched to lead smelting. But copper was the bedrock of Swansea's metal industry, and our work has gone some way to recapturing the heyday of Copperopolis. We've seen that the techniques developed here produced the best copper the world had ever seen, through our trenches we've revealed some of the most important buildings in Swansea's story, and learned how they outlived the copper boom. And there's only one way to finish a dig like this in South Wales. Take it away, gentlemen.