The Lost Manor That Rivalled Buckingham Palace | Time Team | Timeline

Hi everybody, welcome to this Timeline documentary. My name is Dan Snow and here I am in a Lancaster bomber cockpit, one of the few remaining Lancasters from the Second World War, to tell you about my new history channel. It's called History Hit, it's like Netflix for history. Hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians. Follow the information below this film or just search online for History Hit and make sure you use the code Timeline to get a special introductory offer. Now enjoy this show. Imagine I'm a Georgian gentleman. I've just come from nearby fashionable Bath in order to visit Hunt Street, one of the largest and most opulent mansions of the Georgian era. And no, it's not that, that's just the lodge. This grand design was the dream of local MP Francis Popham, who tragically never lived to see it realised. In fact, despite millions of pounds being spent on it, we don't know if it was even finished. 200 years later, all that's left of it is this portico, all the rest of it's somewhere underneath these stables. But the extraordinary thing is that apart from a couple of pretty little pictures, we don't know anything about it. We don't know who designed it, what it looked like inside or even if anyone ever lived in it. And as ever, we've got just three days to find out. There have been mansions at Hunt Street since medieval times. Sir John Popham, one of the most important figures of Elizabeth I's court, acquired the estate in the 16th century. But it was his descendant Francis who built the last, and legend would have it, grandest mansion of them all. What do we know about the mansion, Jonathan? Well, we know that it was supposed to look like this, at least just prior to the death of that man, Francis Popham, who was the patron of the estate. But what we don't know is whether it was completed to look like that, whether the artist has used license, and or if it was partially completed and they lived in a couple of rooms in a shell. Is archaeology going to be able to give us the answers? Well, I think it will. I think the most important question is, was the house actually over there where that portico is? But what really fascinates me, Tony, is if it was partially completed, what was going on in those rooms? Did you have the families of the builders in there? Were they squatting? And archaeology should be able to tell us. First things first, we need to confirm that the house is behind the portico. So geophys start to look for the grand eastern façade, depicted here in one of a pair of watercolors. The other shows the north façade, complete with an impressive main entrance. So is that portico there, that bit here? That's it. This blown-up painting shows it nicely, doesn't it? How long would this north front have been? Well, in the 1920s, there's a particularly dry summer, and they recorded that the parchmarks on the ground here were 200 feet wide by 120, and took that to be the side walls of the house. That's one, two, three. This is all looking a bit too easy. The eastern façade should be 100 feet away from the center of the portico. Have you done the geophys for this area yet? Of course we have. And have you hit anything that might be our east wall? Well, look at these results. The red line is actually that theoretical line at 100 feet. You can see this very clear black line right on the edge of our survey grid. Tell you what, I'm concerned, John. You see, this looks like a perfectly regular rectangular pile, doesn't it? But relative to the portico there, this thing's coming out at a cranky angle. Yeah, it might just be the effect of the results, but I think the only way is we've got to dig it. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, because if we can actually pick up something really distinctive like this doorway, then from that, we could extrapolate where the front wall and the back wall is going to be. I mean, the other thing is, there's also this feature in the data. That might just be a ditch. Now, whether that's related to the house or an earlier phase of activity, I think it's worth looking at that as well. So in goes Trench 1 to locate the eastern facade. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That looks like a big bit of building. That does. That's the sort of stuff I'd have expected the building to be made of, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Mind your knees. Manganese? No, mind your knees. Manganese. That looks like that mortar, look. That is that same mortar. That is exactly that same mortar as is over there on the portico. That is. Go on then, John. Where's this on the geophysics? Well, I said it was. Yeah, but I thought you said it was right at the end of the trench. No, look, it can see it. Two metres in. Two metres in. Oh, well, there you go, then. That's it. That is it, then. It's still the first hour of the dig, and already it looks like we're onto the eastern facade of Francis Popham's grand mansion, a building project clearly intended to show off the family's status. You know how if you're building your own place and you run out of money, you park a caravan on site and rough it for a few months? Well, this is the Popham's version of that caravan. The lodge that Francis Popham built was up on the hill overlooking the moated medieval mansion, which we believe he demolished to make way for his new house. If there was a perfectly serviceable medieval building here anyway, why do you think Francis Popham spent so much money on building a new place? Well, the 18th century is a century of improvement, and that's a key word, and people want to improve their estates, they want to prove their taste and their culture, and one of the ways that you do that is by building or rebuilding, and so putting up a new house or re-fronting an old house was very, very typical. When did Francis die? Francis dies in 1779 in February. It's his wife who takes over, and Dorothy Popham's an interesting woman, and obviously a fairly forceful woman, and she keeps the building going until 1797 when she dies. Now, this is really intriguing because of the fact that she doesn't have a child, and most of these family houses that are being built are being built with dynasty in mind. You want to perpetuate your family name. And if Francis and Dorothy had no heirs, it makes such a vast building project all the more extraordinary. What's this white stuff? Looks like shell, no? Back on site, Phil's discovered a gravel surface beside the wall line. That looks like burnt flint. It does look like burnt flint. That looks like a yard surface. Pottery, Welsh slate, charcoal. I mean, it goes right the way across, doesn't it? Yeah. A yard surface up against what looks like a wall suggests that we have found the eastern facade, but it's a bit nearer the portico than recorded parch marks had led us to believe, and now Jonathan's noticed that something about the portico doesn't quite add up. All of the illustrations show 17 bays wide. So, 17 windows. Yeah. So, if each of these, then, should be 12 feet wide, and there's five of the 17, this should be 60 feet long in all. But it looks to me like it shrunk. It's about half size, isn't it? It is about half size. Something's clearly wrong. We need to work out if it's just the portico that's small, or the whole house, and finding the corners will help. So, how are we going to do this? That's the edge of a trench. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I've got the corner now we've extended the survey. Yeah. So, that's going to be in here. So, in goes trench two to find the southeast corner of Hunstreet Mansion. Let's start down here. We'll gradually work our way over. The thing about Georgian buildings is that they conform to various architectural patterns, and are therefore easy to date. Jonathan thinks that Hunstreet is an example of the Palladian style, like much of Bath, but he's spotted an inconsistency. So, looking at that portico, what tells you that that's Palladian? It's those rusticated blocks. They're so precise. What does rusticated mean? Well, think of rustic and of the earth, because the Italians thought that the bedrock was the basis for building. The roughest stones are used at the bottom to do all the supporting, and then above that, you have the refinement of the columns, and then the fine balustrade and figures on the top. So, it's a sense of natural order. But herein lies the problem, you see, because these Palladian villas are in fact quite thin to get light in front and back on one rectangular block. You look at the illustrations here, and this is more like a palace. It's just too deep. It goes back too far. That way it should stop maybe there. It feels like this is somehow compromised, because by the time we get to the middle of the century, everyone's building dinky villas with little wings and pavilions on the end, and this is quite the opposite. It's massive, and it's huge. So, if this is a house of 1760, it's completely out of date. An unfashionable building would hardly have been the impressive statement that we think Francis Popham was after. I think that that's banked against the wall. Something's not quite right about Ham Street, and it looks like we're going to have to rely on the archaeology to shed a little light. So, Phil, what have you got? Well, we've got this superb wall coming along here. So, this is the edge wall of the building, the outside wall, i.e. that one. Yeah. One concern I've got, Phil, is that the wall looks, if anything, a little skinny for the footings of a three-story stone building. What do you think? I couldn't agree with you more. But there's something that Matt's digging over there, isn't there? It's got a return on it. It looks thicker where he is. Well, this thing here. And if that, in fact, were the true width of the wall at something just around a metre, and that it's pulled back where you and Francis are digging to make way for maybe an embrasure in the window, for a window seat, or maybe the door threshold, you know, then maybe all of the weight's being carried by the fat sections, as piers as it were, between the windows. Phil expands his trench to find out if the wall thickens out enough to support three stories. Well, that's it. And that's it there. So, we got close on two metres of it. It's looking thicker. Francis Popham was a politician in the public eye at the most fashionable time of Bath's history. So, when it came to kitting out the inside of his mansion, only the best would do. It was very elaborate. Two of the rooms used three Italians for several years just to do the decoration. And we've got an octagon-columned hall, so that's going to be pretty elegant. And that probably was in the centre, and it might have been around the grand staircase. Okay, so I walk into the house. I'm confronted by this spectacular eight-sided room. I go upstairs. What do I see then? What you would have seen is a series of interconnecting rooms, because country houses by this time were made up of, at the top level, for entertaining. So, they had rooms that connected one into the other. So, you went from one into a slightly grander room, into a slightly grander room. For instance, we know that there's a coved room that had 76 squares of blue tiling. And then you would have eventually got your way into the grand or great salon. And that would have been the room that you used for displaying your pictures, but it would also have been your ballroom. These regular layouts should help us to reconstruct the inside of Hunt Street Mansion. And we're beginning to get details from inside a room in the eastern corner. What about the life inside the building? Has anything been found to tell us who, what, when? There's been a bit of a mishmash of stuff, but three things definitely seem pretty significant. This is a big piece of metalwork. Yeah, it's a panelling hook or hanger. And you build that between two stones. So, you set it in the mortar, that projects, and you basically nail your panelling frame to that piece of metal. And it dresses a room beautifully. So, you could make a guess that these rooms here were given wooden panelling. So, rather nice looking inside. Very nice indeed, yeah. The other two bits I wanted to show you were these two bits of pottery. And I've been speaking to Paul Blinkhorn, and he's put them in a date range of 1650 through to 1750. So, if we've got a house that's building, let's say, in the 1760s, is it likely that you'd be using a vessel that's made 60 or 70 years earlier? Well, it's not impossible, but it could be from an earlier occupation too, couldn't it? Well, that's a tantalising idea, isn't it? It would be a real bonus if this dig could reveal something about Francis Popham's ancestors. But the job in hand is to get to grips with his Georgian mansion. And Raksha's trying to ascertain if some stones sticking out of the ground are related to it. And in trench one, Phil's found our first piece of worked masonry. That is cut for constructional reasons, not for decoration. Do you think there might be maybe a lintel on a door or something that gives you a wedge so that you can fit timber up to it? Don't ask me, you're the bloke who's supposed to know! While Jonathan scratches his head, Stuart's looking at a map which could be a gold mine of information. Dating to before the Georgian build began, it shows what seemed to be plans for the lodge, as well as older structures where we're now digging. For instance, the buildings that are drawn here, which is close to the site that we're looking at, they're drawn in a three-dimensional bird's-eye type of view, which is a much earlier style of mapping, probably 17th century dates. But here, this is drawn in plan form, much as you'd expect with the mid-18th century. But it's actually drawn quite casually, so it's not quite clear to me whether it's actually here or whether this is what they're aspiring to put here. Because if you look underneath this heavy drawing, can you see there are ghost lines of earlier features and road systems? There's a complex of buildings here which you clearly need to do more work on, because they're not very well defined. If he can decode it, Stuart believes this map could reveal how not just Francis, but generations of Popham's transformed Hunstreet. By the end of the afternoon, Phil's discovered a kink in the skinny wall of the eastern façade. When we opened up this trench, virtually the first thing we came down onto was this wall, and immediately we thought that maybe it was a bit thin. But at this end, it seemed to thicken out. Yeah. But in fact, what it's done, now that we've extended the trench that way, is to actually dogleg, and in fact this wall here goes straight through to where, and joins on to where Bridget's trench is. So Jonathan, we've got a kinkiest wall. It is kinky, you wouldn't guess it from this drawing, but at each end of this central section is a projection. That's what Phil's found. So if it's got a thickening there and there, it's nicely buttressed at those points. To prove that this is the Grand Central Projection, we'll have to find the other side of it, but that's for tomorrow. End of day one, and we've done the easy bit. We now know that Hunstreet Mansion actually is here, and we've defined quite a lot of the outside of it. It's smaller than we originally thought, but as Jonathan says, it could turn out to be an exquisite little jewel box. There are what appear to be rooms here, were they really as elegant as the records suggest, and were they lived in by the landed gentry, or were they squatted by the workers? We'll find out tomorrow, when we go inside. Beginning of day two, and somewhere underneath these stables, lie the remains of one of the most opulent mansions in Georgian England, here at Hunstreet near Bath. Yesterday we found some of the outside walls, although I have to say the building was slightly smaller than we thought it was going to be. Today we're going to go inside. What's the plan, Francis? Well, these are the walls that we picked up yesterday, but now what I want to do is turn my attention towards the centre of the building, what looked like rooms, and this rather strange pink thing here, which might possibly be another wall. I think it's the back wall of what may now be a C-shaped building. If you look at a map Stuart's got, 1806, there's the portico and there's two wings. So where would the C-shape be on your geophys? Well, that would be one wing, there's the front range with the portico, and another wing onto the stables. Before we can get going, Rakshar's discovered a corner two metres away from the wall line on the geophys. It lines up with the corner bridge found yesterday, so we're going to open up a huge trench right across the eastern wing to work out what Rakshar's wall is, and to get inside some of the rooms of the Georgian mansion. Geophys are now trying to locate the west wing under the stables. In the eastern corner, we're digging through tonnes of rubble in what could be the mansion's cellars, and Matt's been investigating the flinty surface running outside the east wall. We appear to have this feature or ditch or something starts here, where it's cut by this wall, and goes a good what, metre and a half behind me there. So that's way too big for a construction cut for this wall, I think. So what I'm thinking is it might be maybe a part of the earlier moat maybe, and it's cutting through all this stuff on the outside of the building. So you've got this kind of gravelly stuff here, and there's something linear going along there. Now I think those two grooves are possibly something like for the roots of a box hedge, and that looks to me like a proper path. So perhaps the Georgians filled in the medieval moat to create a pathway around the mansion. We're hoping this dig will reveal when the mansion was built. We know it was demolished in the 1830s because the bulk of it was salvaged for Prior Park, one of the most important buildings in Bath. The thing is with Prior Park that it suffered a fire, and when Hunstreet was planned for demolition, its joinery and plasterwork became available. So there are bits of Hunstreet inside. So Jonathan and Ray San, our graphic artist, are looking for clues as to when Hunstreet was built, and what it looked like. What a beauty isn't it? It's extraordinary to think that this was the very staircase that would have greeted Francis Popham. Well that to me is nothing to do with the house of the 1770s. First impressions are this belongs to the earlier 18th century. The reason I say that is because these balusters, the columns that sit on these urn-like things, start fat and big in the 18th century, and they get skinnier. They go on a diet as the century progresses. And these generous handrails there turn into rounded shapes. Everything becomes more slender. So it looks like they put in the staircase when they started building the mansion. But it took a very long time, even by builder's standards, to finish off the plasterwork. Well it's a different world isn't it? Oh it's so much finer and lighter. I guess this must be later then. It does feel later. You know I'd put it 1770 to 1880 this room. We're now in the era where Robert Adam has influenced plasterers and interior designers, and these wonderfully tight and detailed panels within complex ceilings are all the rage. I think we've moved on almost half a century from that staircase. It seems that Francis Popham's mansion took a lifetime to build, but the quality of the interiors was second to none. How about that for a wall then? Back on site, Phil's found another wall. What do you think of that then? That's a wall and a half isn't it? But it's much fatter than anything else we've seen. What do you think of that then? I don't know. Actually got a range of it look. That is a hell of a width isn't it? Isn't it? Compared with everything else we've had. It's twice the width. Oh stone me that is a wall. Okay so it's a big wall, but Phil's job is to find out what it's doing inside the mansion. Yeah I'll have a bit off there. Meanwhile, Marek has dug deep into the rubble-filled cellars in the eastern corner and discovered window mouldings from earlier buildings. I wish you'd have shouted when you found this one, because that's not Georgian is it? That's older. You've got a rebate there for a metal frame window, not the wooden sashes that the Georgians used, and this overlow or round mouldings brought in by Elizabeth the First, and the broad flat front gets more popular in the middle of the 17th century. Over a century before Popham's supposed to have started building. What about some of these older pieces that we've got on the side here? Another edge of a window or door, you'd expect that in Tudor England. So you're talking the first half of the 16th century. This is going back and back now, and then well that one now we're back in the Georgian period. See those beautiful reversed curves, flat sections, all part of a polite classical window surround. So you've probably got three centuries of building here now. We found masonry dating back to the 16th century when the Pophams first arrived in Hunstreet. 200 years later when Francis Popham died, their line nearly ran out because he and Dorothy were childless, and this forced Dorothy to take surprising steps to protect the mansion. What she does is intriguing. She passes the house down to another Francis Popham, the reputed son of my late husband. So we've got an illegitimate son here. But Dorothy's not very trusting, and so what she does is she creates a trust. He becomes a tenant for life. He can get the money and the profit from the rents, but he can't actually sell it. Basically in case he's a wastrel she wants to make sure that this is protected. And was he a wastrel? Well we don't know unfortunately. He dies so early. He dies in 1804. So what happened next? It goes to the Leybourns, her nephew, but she specifies in her will whoever inherits that doesn't have the name Popham has to take it, and if they don't they're going to be disinherited. So her nephew General Edward Leybourn took the name Popham and inherited the estate, but something drove him to demolish the house 30 years later, and finding out what should help us unravel the end of the story of Hunstreet Mansion. By lunchtime Trench 3 and Trench 2 have met. I think, I think there might be a wall here. And Phil's found traces of a thick wall right across the east wing. Running parallel, the thin outer wall turns a corner and kinks out to form one of three equal bays. Hey Matt. But now Jonathan spotted a problem with his theory. Now looking at where the portico comes in to form a boundary for this whole range, I'm just not sure we've got room anymore. Now if you measure 12 metres 30, you'd be able to replicate the measurement from the corner up to this first point. So if that's a regular bay, where's the next 12.30? So that puts us here, just in front of the digger. Where does the third one take us to? Another 12 metres 30 in that direction, and you'd be beyond the line of that portico. So either you've got a tiny end bay, which is a completely weird thing for a Georgian builder to do, or the other scenario is that the Georgians have inherited this footprint of a building, and what the artist shows us as a three bay facade, looking symmetrical, is a fudge job. They've done their best with an old building. So Matt and Ian begin the search for the third bay on the eastern facade. That'll be right in I reckon. All right now, get out that machine and get your trowel. And right where Jonathan predicted, the wall kinks in. There's the kink in. Right, so the other side should be there. There you go. So it does come along in, back in, and then back along in that direction of other things, isn't it? Which is exactly what it does at the other end, but exactly the same distance. So it looks like the mansion did have three bays, but the third one was smaller than the artist depicts. Jonathan thinks that could be because the architect was attempting to transform an older building into a Georgian mansion. Do we know who the architect was? Although it may look like it should be someone grand coming in from London that's doing it, it actually turns out to be a chap named Daniel Green, who's from Hunstreet. Where would a local person have got the qualifications from to be able to build something like this? Well, you have to remember that Bath is a magnet for masons around the country who are armed with these pocketbooks of how to build, and how to carve details, and how to slot walls together, and it's easy guides, basically, how-to guides. So it could be that one of the reasons why this place took so long to build, and why it's so quirky, is because it was local blokes who were doing it, who didn't have the expertise that some of the grander people had. Very possibly, because they'd be happy for the work, whereas a great architect would say, look, I'm not compromising the reputation on that, bodging up that old pile. Records suggest that our local builder never finished the West Wing, most of which lies under the stable itself, where we can't touch it. But Jonathan thinks he's found a bit we can get at in the northwest corner of the building. So in goes Trench 4. Despite digging out a vast amount of rubble, we've found very little evidence of anybody living here, let alone the Pophams. We've got one piece of pottery that we could perhaps regard as high status, which is this. It's a little tiny bit of Chinese export porcelain. Now, this sort of stuff starts coming in around about the mid-17th century, but nearly all this pottery is just simple utilitarian wares. It's not exactly the sort of collection you'd expect to find on a Georgian mansion, is it? Well, it is and it isn't. I mean, apart from a little bit of porcelain, it's not the sort of stuff that you expect the head of a household to be eating and drinking off. It's the stuff they were using in the kitchens to prepare food. It's the stuff the gardener was eating his dinner off. You know, it's the pottery of the lower orders, I suppose. Some of the pottery dates back to medieval times, and Phil's beginning to think the thick wall goes with it. I think that inadvertently what we've done is stumbled on a medieval building. Where? Well, I'm actually standing on it. It comes through there and then it turns and it's coming through here. But if you look on that side of the wall, look, we've got wonderful plaster. That's beautiful. But you see, that means that that must be the inside wall. Exactly. So we've got the wall coming along here and it's a bit muddled up here with robbing. You can get it here. That's right. And look here, we've got more plaster there, more plaster there. So again, that is the inside and our wall comes along here. It's a bit messy, but we've got it there. Yeah. And we've got it. Oh, got it here in space. And it's turning back that way. Yeah. Now, if that's the outside of a medieval building, could it be the moat? All that deep stuff down there, that's moat. That's what my suggestion is. Oh, wait a minute, though. If this is a moat, then what's this wall doing here? That wall is the wall of the Georgian mansion. If my theory is correct, what they've done is to use the moat as a whacking great big foundation trench. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Aren't you jumping the gun a bit? Have you got any dating evidence to suggest that that large wall is actually older than the Georgian one there? Not specifically. I think the thing that suggests this is medieval is firstly its scale, its size. Secondly, we can say that it's clearly of a different phase. The mortar is a different colour. We've not actually got any physical dating. So what you're saying is that your theory is very cogent and very well argued and totally unproven. Yes, but I happen to think that it's right. Medieval wall or not, we found more of it in the northwest corner. I must admit, it looks like those big medieval walls we're getting on the other side of the house. All this would make sense if we were looking for a medieval house, but we're hoping for a Georgian one. So we're off to the other side of the portico, where the thin wall, which we think is Georgian, should turn a corner. And by the end of the day, we have found another wall. There's nothing like the wall we had over in that far corner. No. But it doesn't look like the Georgian or the medieval walls. So day two draws to a close with the promise of a lot of overnight head scratching. When we came here looking for Francis Popham's grand design, we thought it would be huge, and it turns out to be much smaller. We thought it would be really elegant, but it looks like it was a very expensive botched job. And today, we thought everything we'd find would be Georgian, and it looks like there's a medieval house stuck right in the middle of it. What other theories are we going to demolish? We'll find out tomorrow. Beginning of day three, another day, another theory, but this one seems absolutely crazy. The outside wall of our Georgian house, this wall on which all our other theories are based, isn't the outside wall of a Georgian house at all. It's some kind of ornamental parapet. Jonathan, have you taken complete leave of your senses? I've returned to sound first principles. When we opened up this trench, we found a skinny wall. I mean, it could be Georgian, but it seemed too narrow to put a big three-story building on. I think we've just got to accept that it isn't the facade, but it is associated with the Georgian building. So where is the wall, the outside wall of the like a riveting wall of some sunken feature between the gardens on your side and the house, which is here? Then, when you follow that skinny wall around the south side, it forms a neat boundary, and six feet in it on that south side are big, chunky walls that serve very well for carrying a substantial house. So the facade's here. I think he's referring to the big, chunky walls that Phil thinks are medieval, but I'm going to leave that for a moment. Could be. Francis, do you buy any of this? Yes, it is very plausible. It's very plausible, Tony, but I think we need some good archaeological proof of it all. We don't even know that there is an inner wall here. No. So the key thing, precisely, Tony, the key thing is to put a trench here that goes back, and with any luck, it might catch a kink in an inner wall if there is an inner wall. So the theory is that it goes Georgian wall, some unspecified void here, some kind of parapet here, and then the moat, which is, is that Georgian or is that medieval? We don't know. So far, the evidence suggests medieval. The irony is, when we first got here, I said to Francis, the problem with this dig is it's going to be too easy. By now, we had thought we'd be happily digging inside one of the gorgeous rooms of Francis Popham's grand mansion, but instead, we're still faffing about trying to figure out which of the outside walls. But supposing Jonathan is right, the thick corner we found in the west must be the corner of the mansion, which means Matt's been looking for the corner of the thin parapet wall. We've got this, we've got the thin wall there. Yeah. One side there. Yeah. One side there. Yeah. Yeah. Go down a bit. It's sitting under this massive. It's huge, isn't it? It's getting even more confusing. There's no sign of any corner, and the thin and thick walls seem to have merged. Phil, I have a very clear memory of late yesterday afternoon. We're in this trench. You said to me, that wall there is the outside wall of the Georgian house. This wall is medieval. This morning, the archaeologists are saying you were wrong. They're saying that this is some kind of parapet wall, and this wall is Georgian. But that parapet wall is still 18th century. What I've had to do is redraw the edge of the mansion on this. But I still think that these foundations could be medieval. All right. So what have you got this morning? Well, what we've been able to clarify is the layout of the rooms on this side of the building. We have one big room in here with a nice plaster wall there, and paneling along this side. Interestingly, we've got a gap in here. We really need to know whether that's a doorway leading out or a window. We've now got a mid-wall coming through there, and it looks like we've probably got a doorway there into the next room. And we can now see so much more of this room coming along here. You see, we've got another foot end there, and we've got some lovely traces of paneling along there as well. Yeah, but all that rather begs the question of where exactly we are in the house. Is this the ground floor? Is it the basement? What is it? I think we've already gone so low that we must already be below the ground floor level. I think we've got to be in basements. At last, Phil's found us some rooms to get stuck into, possibly the mansion's kitchens and offices. Meanwhile, Francis has been looking for the thick wall on the east side of the building. We've got a big wall, okay, as we anticipated. It's big. It's reassuringly big, isn't it? This will do for a grand house. It's good, isn't it? Lovely. But no sign of a kink to match the kink in the outer wall. No, but the thing is, it's fat enough that if you were to reface it, you could build in a bit of depth and modelling, couldn't you? Oh yeah, absolutely. You can still express that central section. That's nice. Finally, it's beginning to make sense. It looks like Francis Popham put a sort of Georgian cladding on an earlier building to create three bays shown in the watercolours. And because we're all agreed that the thick wall is the outside wall, the footprint has shrunk, which means that the three bays would have been symmetrical. Now, if we could just find the corner in Matt's trench, it would all make sense. Oh, hello. There we go. That's the edge. Yeah. Look at that. But archaeology is never that simple. Oh, flipping heck. I thought you'd like that. It's a world of buttresses. It certainly is. It is. Yeah. Everything you're standing on there is all solid. Mortar and stone goes right back into both sections. Right back there. I'm still on the thickness of this wall. That is a major wall. That pattern of buttresses, the cross buttress, tends to die out as you get late 13th into 14th century, and it's replaced with a single diagonal one. It's much more efficient. So that, to me, is an old manner of bracing a wall on a corner. The other thing is, what direction you guys are facing? East. Yeah, east is that way, straight ahead of us. Now, the 1517 survey begins the description of the site with the chapel of St Nicholas. So if you were to come into the end of a chapel built on this orientation, you'd be facing east, which is perfectly right. Such a good find, isn't it? Isn't it? And for a full description of the chapel, visit our website. I'm about 100 metres away from our site, and I've come up here because Stuart has done a rather clever bit of detective work. Well, we had this plan of 1759, and all the focus of attention was on this medieval hall, which the 18th century house replaced. This is the one that we're excavating? That's the one. But I got quite interested in what appeared to be a smudge over here. Well, you enhance it on the computer, that's a rather fine Elizabethan or 17th century grand mansion. Is it a fantasy, or was it ever built? It was definitely built because I asked John to do some geophysics over here on this earthwork platform, and look, stonking underground remains, so it was definitely built. Why is there a mansion up here? Well, in the medieval period, the happy living down on the moat, that's where everything emanates from. But by the 16th century, they're wanting to make big statements on the landscape. They literally want to put the houses on top of the hill. They need room to expand and show up. They need large areas of formal gardens. All that's up here on top. Stuart keeps saying they did this, they did that. Who are they? Well, the they really is Sir John Popham, and it's Sir John Popham who gets the estate after the dissolution of the monasteries. He becomes Chief Justice of the King's Bench. He's Speaker of the House of Commons, and he's probably the best lawyer of his day. He does the state trials, like that of Essex, of Sir Walter Raleigh. He's massively wealthy. I can just imagine Sir John Popham's grand Elizabethan house looking down the hill to the old medieval manor, the house we now think Francis renovated a couple of centuries later, and it now looks like the medieval moat was the first thing to go. So, if this then were a medieval moat, it would stretch from the footprint of the house, presumably, to about 10 feet behind us that way. You can see the coming around there, look. I see, okay. So, it's a bigger moat. The Georgian wall was put in the middle of it, and then backfilled, so the sloping bank of the moat becomes a hard stone edge. Exactly. Now, one thing I can guarantee you, when they built this moat, the thing that they wanted to create was something that was dry, because right at the bottom, you've got a drain. There it is. Presumably, then, this becomes a dry moat, ornamental feature that you walk around the outside of. Phil thinks that the basements had windows or doors, which logically can't have been built until after the moat was drained, or they'd have flooded. So, perhaps Francis Popham did more than just clad an old building after all. Perhaps he remodeled it from the bottom up. Only half a day left to find out. That is the return there, isn't it? It's a nice little find just come off the spoil heap. It's a small Elizabethan coin. It's been deliberately bent, and the archaeologists are speculating that it might be a love token, which you gave to someone who you fancied, and if they returned it, then you knew you were in with a chance. Well, we found this presumably having been discarded, so no luck that time, I guess. We're now walking up the Stuart and Elaine's bid to unravel the mysteries of the estate has revealed that the bulk of Francis Popham's budget went on constructing a vast lake and planting thousands of trees to create a series of impressive views of the mansion. By the time we get here, instead of being enclosed by the trees, it's like the curtains of a theatre have opened now, and look what happens. You're going to go, wow, that's fantastic. The second viewpoint is the angle from which the watercolour of the Grand Eastern façade was painted. What you've got now is a perfect picture frame with overhanging boughs and the trees here on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side will be the screen of trees. The carriageway would then have swept the visitor round to see the main entrance. You would have seen the portico, and sweeping off to the other side, you would have seen acres of the family's land and their sheep and their animals. It would have been very impressive. It would, wouldn't it? And this is really important for the archaeology, because to achieve the effect they wanted, all they have to do is rebuild the east wing and the north wing. They don't need to do anything behind, because the visitors won't see that. You could keep the medieval buildings and they could function perfectly well. And unlike today, Georgian visitors simply didn't wander round the back, so there was no need to rebuild the service quarters and stables. We're getting towards the end of the day, and Phil's beginning to get a clearer idea of what his basement rooms look like. Oh, oh, oh, hey, there's the wall. Wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee. There's a bit of a recessor, isn't it? We've got a bit of wood underneath. It's not going to fluff over soon, is it? Look at that, Phil. Oh, good Lord. See that running underneath those slabs? There's wood resting on that, which means these blocks are in situ on top of it, in the doorway, with more stonework above it. It gives us some indication of how much further we've got to get down to get the floor that we hope to be standing on. That's right. The height of this doorway suggests there's at least a metre of rubble to dig through, and every bucketful is a reminder of how Francis and Dorothy Popham's dreams came to nothing, thanks to their nephew, the General. In the end, the house is costing the General too much money, and he decides that he wants to have it pulled down. I thought the will specified that the person who had the house couldn't let go of it. They had to look after it. Well, what he does is he gets a master builder to come in here and survey it, and he writes up a report in damning terms, saying just what kind of horrible shape the house is in, and what he actually tells us in this report is that if we wanted to make the house livable, it's going to cost about £5,000. However, if you were going to finish it to the original design, right here he's saying it's going to cost you at least £60,000. What's that in today's money? It's about £4 million. It's a heck of a pile of money. So he submits this document to the trustees? He does submit this to the trustees on the argument that he's going to be ridding the estate of a nuisance. The huge expense persuaded the trustees to authorise the demolition of an unfinished and dilapidated Hunt Street mansion. That's the face there. And the best bits were sold off to Prior Park. Well, that is nice. The General left the portico as a relic of his uncle's grand design, while his family made the lodge their home. We got ourselves up here. Phil's trench is now too deep to work in, but he's determined to get to the bottom of his basement room. Oh, look at that. Does that look like plaster to you? It does, yes. I mean, if I can hook that away. Awkwardest form of digging I've ever done. I'm sure that is a plastered surface there. It's looking like it, isn't it? Oh, look at. Come here. Am I right in thinking that there's a line comes up through there? Yeah. Does that mean that's where the window's going to be then? So it seems that there were windows looking over a dry moat running around the eastern wing, up to the mysterious corner where Jonathan thought we'd found a medieval chapel. Well, I've been slapped around the face by the wet haddock of reality, haven't I? Because this felt like a medieval building. See what I mean? Those corner sort of seem like buttresses, but I don't mind at all, because if what I'm reading is right, is that stub there built into the corner? Yeah, it's all part of the same thing. You can just see there's a vertical face down the bottom there, and you've got another one going along there. That's fine. You're on the corner of that big wing that extends down to Phil's trench, and if that wall, the small one, is built into it, and it returns around this way, and it's built into this corner, then we've got the same wall being built into both the wing and the moat wall at the same time. It's the same build, isn't it? Yes. Right. This requires a major rethink, and it's now clear that the outside wall was built at the same time as the parapet wall. The question now is when, and right at the end of the day, Jonathan's found the answer. This room now, we're past the rubble, and we're on to the details which really revealed the period it was built in, and you can see the plaster lining there, squeezed between what were once wooden uprights against the wall. Some of it was panelled on this downstairs room, stores, scullery, kitchens, that sort of area. All that's typical of the 17th century. In the smart rooms, it might be coloured with tapestry. Down here, those cheap materials are well done for the kitchen staff. Seems to me that after three days, we haven't discovered a Georgian mansion at all. 150 years after this was built, the Georgians slapped a bit of lipstick on it. That's basically So it's a bit of Georgian cladding. Yeah. So Francis Popham's doomed grand design turns out to be the last flourish of a family intent on building ever more impressive houses. Sir John Popham acquired Hunt Street's medieval manor around 1600, and constructed a new house befitting a Lord Chief Justice. But around the time of the Civil War, the next generation of And over a century later, Francis spent a fortune refacing the outside of the house, lavishly remodelling the inside, and transforming Hunt Street's gardens. But to finish it was too expensive a proposition for his nephew, who eventually pulled it down and moved into the lodge. We've all overstretched ourselves, but the Pophams more than any of us. They put all their hopes in a building that eventually turned out to be a visible symbol of their decline. Not only was it sold off for scrap, but if our evidence is right, they hardly ever even lived in it. A perfect example of reality meeting a rather too grand design. And of course, this being Time Team, in the last five minutes of the dig, we found out that it's 150 years older than we all thought.