Time Team Day 27 - The Mystery of the Manor Moat

Good morning, October is nearly done, and then onto November.  This time the Time Team is exploring a mysterious moat which may be one of the easiest places Time Team has excavated.  The run time for this episode is 47:53 and it is called the Mystery of the Manor Moat.

The historic Llanciah manor house is an archeologist’s dream.  It is a grand manor house on a lovely landscape.  An ancient moat was discovered and no one knows what it was protected.  There are many theories such as a Welsh chapel, a Roman fort, a fortified cattle enclosure, or the ancestral home of an important Welsh family.  Or did it just protect a fancy cattle enclosure?  The Time Team has three days to find out.

The powerful Pritchard Family, built a grand manor on the site and the family would host King Charles I.  The house is a museum, but is this the original house on the site?  The property manager is intrigued by the moat and would like to know what it is protecting.  Earlier commissions believed that the moat was protecting a Roman fort.  In fact, the Royal Commission had dug in the same area as Time Team and made that conclusion.  However, the moat could have been protecting an earlier house.

Trench one goes in immediately without waiting for geophysics results.  Immediately the earthworks are discovered.  Was this earthwork part of a larger feature that was protecting something special?  A moat can be a dry ditch or a water-filled ditch that is protective.  Tony learns more about the manor and the Pritchard family.  He talks with her about the theories about the moat and what it could have protected.  Could this moat be protecting the ancestral home of the Pritchard family?  The grand house could have replaced a less grand house.

Tony is rather teasing about what could go wrong with the geophysics results.  John Gater goes over the results and they are as clear as mud.  John cannot see anything that resembles an enclosure or even an earlier house.  It soon became clear that there was no moat on the site.  However, another feature is noted in the results.  Trench two goes in over this feature.

The house is going to be dated as well and a team goes in to get some data from the wood beams of the house.  This transitions into learning about the Pritchard family and their ties to the land and the house.  The records are slim in regard to this family.  Stewart continues to examine the landscape and he is looking for evidence of an earlier house.  He believes that there was a house on the other side of the field in the woods.  An area south of the house may have contained an older settlement.  Geophysics works on geophysics on this new suggestion.  What could possibly go wrong?  However, John can once again see no evidence of structures.  If there was an earlier house on site, where was it?  I am starting to think that this is a cattle enclosure.

Things are not smooth sailing for the Time Team.  You would think with such flat fields the Time Team would find something.  The manager of the museum believes the house would not have been built in that place for no reason.  She believes that the land had some special meaning in order for the Pritchard family to build on it.  What was the meaning?  Does the Time Team find something on this dig?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out.

I know I say this often, but Tony was particularly funny in this episode.  I still wish for a Tony-Gus jointly hosted Time Team, it can just happen one time, as long as it happens.  The dig seemed straightforward, but throughout the episode, it has proved anything but straightforward.  Theories were brought forward and then dismissed when the evidence did not demonstrate that theory.  It was interesting to see how the Time Team struggled to find dating evidence on the site as well.  The geophysics team was also a bit snarky towards Stewart.  Anyway, this was a good episode with everything that was going on and would be something I would show to a history class.