Time Team Day 27 - A Village Affair

Good morning!  October continues to fly by and we’re just about ready to switch the calendar to November.  However, the Thirty-One days of the Time Team plug on and today it is a Village Affair and the Time Team is looking at Bitterly in Shropshire.  The run time for this episode is 46:18.

Bitterly is the quintessential English village and is bursting with pretty cottages and a church.  It is also surrounded by empty fields.  However, those fields might not be as empty as one would think.  The Bitterly Villagers invited the Time Team to investigate those fields to see if the village was bigger at one point.  Together the villagers and Time Team will be working on solving the mystery of Bitterly Village.  Hopefully, they are not bitterly disappointed.

The village dates back from the Domesday Book.  However, the villagers are looking to learn more about their village.  They will dig test pits and help solve the mystery of the village.  Tony catches up with Mick and Jane Buckard, who is with Bitterly Archeology.  In fact, the Bitterly team put in a trench where they found loads of Medieval pottery.  The Time Team will start on that original trench.  Phil watches the trench going in and immediately Phil makes a discovery that he shares with Tony and Mick.

A mile away, in the modern Bitterly village, Mary-Anne is helping the villagers dig test pits.  She will have to maintain order and report back with the results.  The Time Team will be looking for dating evidence and be able to chart the history of the village.  The village theorizes that the houses in the modern village were moved down from the hill to the modern site.  Jane talks about the possibility of the village being around the church and then when the plague hit the villagers moving the houses down the hill.  Many villages were abandoned as a result of the plague.  The villagers are really enthusiastic about this dig.

In Phil’s trench, he is noticing the appearance of stonework.  It looks like there was a wall in the ground that had collapsed.  Whether or not it is a building wall or a building wall only time will tell.  John Gater geophysics the site while Alex Langlands surveys the site.  It will be a challenge for the Time Team to get to grips with it.  In one of the pits, a coin from the reign of Edward VII and pottery was found.  Alex goes over the results of the survey with Mick.  He points at marks in the ground that hint that there were stone walls buried.  At one point there may have been buildings on the site.  Mick even finds stones poking out of the ground.

Trench two goes in over the marks.  Mick catches up with Mary-Anne and Tony about the theories about Bitterly.  He has two laws when it comes to local knowledge.  One of those laws is that local stories are wrong and the second law is that local knowledge is right.  What could be on this site?  Perhaps there were houses on the site but the landowner cleared them out when he started farming.  Everything is up in the air when it comes to Bitterly village.  Tony then breaks the news to Phil that Bitterly does not have a pub.  This leads to Tony coming up with a new theory: the village disappeared because there was no pub.

The next day, Tony does a catch-up.  Mick believes that Tony has a negative attitude towards everything and that Tony will have to take his medicine soon for having such a bad attitude.  Mick says that the Time Team will carry on with the dig to learn whether or not the stones are part of the house or a field boundary.  Alex plans on a third trench closer to the manor house at Bitterly.  So did the village move during the plague?  Or was Bitterly village always in its present location?  What will the villagers learn about Bitterly?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out.

This was a good episode because the villagers were so enthusiastic about helping the Time Team learn more about their village.   There were some interesting twists and turns in Bitterly’s story as well.  This would be a good episode for a history fun day and for a science fun day because of the application of the scientific method.