Shoot three navigation
The usual morning mayhem accompanies first day set-up and Tony Robinson appears with a new image, a few stitches on his forehead. ‘I walked into a door!’ he insists with a laugh. The incident room is quite small and geophysics, landscape survey, research, graphics and the Onsite web team all jostle for a little extra desk space.
Outside the sun is now shining. Geofizz are running out cables and firing up their equipment. Chris Gaffney has brought along his ground radar gear together with a deck chair. ‘Oh I’m very busy with all this equipment,’ says Chris as he puts his feet up on a box and taps away on his laptop.
Mick Aston and Tony run through the opening scene where they drive up in one of the Time Team off-road vehicles and come to a stop outside an impressive building. It’s the main reason Time Team is here. A medieval monastery.
By 10.00am Time Team favourite, historian Robin Bush, is already buried in a veritable deskful of hefty historic tomes. ‘I’ve got quite a lot of research to do on this one,’ says Robin. New landscape surveyor, English Heritage GPS maestro Henry Chapman, gets to work pouring over maps with landscape investigator Stewart Ainsworth. ‘The first thing to do today is to bring in the various pieces of data from some other similar monasteries and see if there are any similarities between those and this site. We’re basically trying to get a look at the wider picture. I’ll shortly be venturing out with the GPS ‘staff of power’ to lay down some site grid plans and get going on the surveying,’ says Henry.
So the scene is set, production is rolling and the Team is eager to get digging. By 11.50am geophysics have completed their initial surveys and Trench One is de-turfed and opened on an area of immaculate lawn. The subsoil is quite fine and sandy, ideal for digging and great for troweling.
