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Digging for Britain

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Factual: History

Prof Alice Roberts follows a year of British archaeology, joining up the results of digs.

A small island with a big history. Professor Alice Roberts reveals the fascinating world hidden beneath our feet, showcasing the latest finds of dedicated archaeologists.

Series 9

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Alice Roberts

Onyeka Nubia

Edward Hart

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Theo Williams

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Digging for Britain: Series 9: Episode 6

Episode 6

BBC Two - Digging for Britain, Series 9, Episode 6

A 3,000-year-old Bronze Age wooden coffin is found buried beneath a golf course.

Featuring a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall, evidence of early writing by the Picts in Scotland and a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age coffin buried under a golf course.

The north of England is so rich in archaeological finds that Alice Roberts is travelling back there once again to reveal more of its fascinating history.

She starts this journey at that most spectacular of Roman monuments, Hadrian’s Wall. Alice is on site to witness a new dig at the famous Birdoswald Fort, once home to around 800 Roman infantrymen. She joins a team from Newcastle University as they uncover a completely new building, alluded to in the 1930s but never fully excavated until now.

Next, we travel further north to learn more about the so-called barbarians that the Romans were so worried about. The dig is on the shores of the Moray Firth, where archaeologists are uncovering a fort which once belonged to the Picts. A wealth of new evidence suggests that far from being barbaric savages, they were a sophisticated people who were perhaps far more educated than anyone has given them credit for.

Alice also visits the town of Rochdale in Lancashire, just ten miles outside Manchester, where a huge community dig is altering our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. Alice meets local families who are digging beneath the spectacular Gothic town hall to uncover the remains of terraces and tenement blocks that housed the working men and women of Rochdale, shedding new light on the way industrialisation changed our towns and cities.

In Northern Ireland, another community dig highlights a particularly dark period of recent history, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. For the first time in Northern Ireland, a team are excavating one of the island of Ireland’s many famine roads. These were roads built by the starving population. Often going nowhere, they were part of a misguided attempt by the British government to boost Irish infrastructure and support the hungry by forcing them to build roads in exchange for money to buy food. Historian Onyeka Nubia travels to London to search for evidence that might explain the British government’s reasoning for what turned out to be a futile relief effort.

Back in Scotland, a new tramline being built from Edinburgh to Leith gives archaeologists the opportunity to study and preserve hundreds of skeletons unearthed at a graveyard dating back to 1300. This dig throws new light on the residents of Leith as they lived through 500 years of Scotland’s history. In the Digging for Britain tent, archaeologist John Lawson brings in one skeleton with a unique set of injuries, and an incredible facial reconstruction brings her vividly to life.

Finally, a once-in-a-lifetime find under a golf course sets archaeological pulses racing as a Bronze Age wooden coffin is remarkably preserved in the waterlogged soil 3,000 years after it was buried.

Digging for Britain: Series 9

BBC Two

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Alice Roberts presents a revamped series featuring extraordinary discoveries.

Alice Roberts returns with a revamped series featuring extraordinary archaeological discoveries found across the UK, from a spectacular Roman mosaic to a secret World War II bomber.

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