The BEST episodes of Time Team season 12
Every episode of Time Team season 12, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Time Team season 12!
In this popular and (literally) groundbreaking programme, Tony Robinson and a team of experts travel the country to investigate a wide range of archaeological sites of historical importance.
#1 - South Perrott, Dorset - The Puzzle Of Picket's Farm
Season 12 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/6/2005
Thirty years ago the Legg family took over this farm in West Dorset, almost immediately they discovered that one end of this field was difficult to plough and they put it down to the stony soil. But then earlier this year Roman finds started to crop up all over the field. Roof tile, pottery, Roman coins, broaches, what’s going on? The Legg’s are itching to know. Is there a Roman building here that could account for their broken ploughs. Time Team’s got just three days to find out and let them know.
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#2 - Chenies Manor, Buckinghamshire - The Manor That's Back To Front
Season 12 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/2/2005
In 1534 Henry the Eighth visited this manor house in Buckinghamshire. The first of many visits by the king and his daughter Elizabeth. But the owner knew that the royals expected only the biggest and the best. So he had his home transformed into a palace. But magnificent though this Tudor building is, it’s hardly big enough to support the king and his entourage of over 300 courtiers, it must have been at least twice this big. So where’s the rest of it, and what exactly does it take to build a house fit for a king? As usual, we just got three days to find out.
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#3 - Hanslope, Milton Keynes - Animal Farm
Season 12 - Episode 13 - Aired 4/3/2005
800 years ago, England was a far from green and pleasant land. Civil war was raging between King John and a bunch of rebellious nobles, and among those nobles were the Mordwits who owned most of the land around here. A photograph of this field showed these rather unusual crop marks. Archaeologists thought they were probably prehistoric, pretty standard stuff. But some amateur archaeologists decided to have a look and blow me, they’ve found this twelfth century building, along with some lovely finds like this weird corbel, isn’t that strange. It was obviously a very important building but it was abandoned very suddenly. Time Team have been called in to help. What was this place and what was all around it? Was it part of the Mordwit estate and if so did King John destroy it in an act of revenge? We’ve got just three days to find out.
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#4 - Drumlanrig, Dumfries and Galloway - Fighting On The Frontier
Season 12 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/23/2005
Time Team get invited to all sorts of places these days, but they don’t come any grander than this. This is Drumlanrig Castle near Dumfries in Scotland. But that’s not for us typical Time Team, what we’re interested in is something that’s been discovered round the back in the garden. There’s not much to see on the ground here, apart from a few lumps and bumps but look, this photo was taken from the air during a particularly dry summer and we see all these strange shapes and lines. The experts reckon these could be the remains of a Roman fort. If it is, we’re gonna have a real good story to tell. Because it would have been the front line of the Roman attempts to invade Scotland. Time Team have got just three days to solve this Roman mystery in what must be one of the largest back gardens in Scotland.
#5 - River Hamble, Hampshire - Grace Dieu, In Search Of Henry V's Flagship
Season 12 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/6/2005
Under these murky waters on the River Hamble lies some remains of a medieval ship, but this isn’t just any old ship. We’re hoping this is the Grace Dieu, Henry the Fifth’s huge flagship. In fact it was so big that no bigger boat was built for another 200 years. But amazingly she only ever had one voyage and after Henry the Fifth’s death she was just abandoned and left to rot. So, was she too big to sail, was she a failure, and how much of her lies under here? We’ve got just three days to find out.
#6 - Northborough, Peterborough - A Neolithic Cathedral?
Season 12 - Episode 5 - Aired 1/30/2005
The Time Team is invited to a huge circular crop mark near Peterborough, referred to as a Causewayed Enclosure by archaeologists. Huge ditches mark the area, which date the site at around 6,000 years old. Some believe the ditches to be evidence of farming, others that they are of religious origin. Francis Pryor joins the team to get to the bottom of the mystery in just three days.
#7 - Wemyss, Fife - Picts And Hermits: Cave Dwellers Of Fife
Season 12 - Episode 8 - Aired 2/20/2005
Yesterday morning we came here to the Fife coast to look at some caves which had been inhabited on and off for some thousands of years. The first one we looked at was Jonathan’s cave which is way back there and there’s some great Pictish carvings on the walls, but we put a couple of trenches in and we haven’t found anything particularly exciting. But one of our archaeologists was footling around down this cave and came up with something which everyone thinks, could be really exciting, and obviously it had to be another cave that‘s a bit of a squeeze to get into. But tackling the appropriately named sloping cave is well worth the effort.
#8 - Standish, Gloucestershire - Going Upmarket With The Romans
Season 12 - Episode 7 - Aired 2/13/2005
In autumn 1999, Paul Bevon found a Roman coin in this field in Standish in Gloucestershire. And he found another one, and another and an obsession was born. In five years, one archaeology course and several trenches later, he’d amassed boxes and boxes of Roman and Iron Age finds like these broaches, these tesseri, this Iron Age axe, all this building material. There’s clearly loads of archaeology here but what exactly is it. Well there’s only so much that one man however driven can find out with a Trowel and a metal detector, so Paul has invited this lot in to find out. And how long have we got to do it? Just three days.
#9 - Skipsea, Humberside - Norman Neighbours
Season 12 - Episode 11 - Aired 3/1/2005
Tony: Meet a real Time Team fan, this is Francis Davis who lives up here in Skipsea in blowy East Yorkshire, and to put it mildly your fairly interested in what was going on in this field aren’t you. Francis: Absolutely. Tony: Why, it looks like all your other fields? Francis: Except they plough deeper one year and we turned up all these finds. Tony: Which are really fantastic. We’ve got everything from this prehistoric arrowhead, right through to a Medieval. In fact, Francis was so excited that she paid at her own expense for our geophys team, this doesn’t blow away, to have a survey and as you can see there’s a heck of a lot of activity. So clearly something was going on here, but what exactly we don’t know. This place is an archaeological blank sheet. So Francis has invited us here and how long have we got to find out? Francis: Three days. Tony: Just three days. If we don’t get blown away. It is a bit windy isn’t it. Francis: Slightly.
#10 - Nether Poppleton, Yorkshire - The Monastery And The Mansion
Season 12 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/9/2005
This is the village of Nether Poppleton just outside York. As you can see most of the houses are modern, some are Victorian a few are eighteenth or at a push seventeenth century. Up here, it looks very different. Even I could recognize a traditional medieval village layout with the main street running up to the church and lots of different plots running off it. And those earthworks to the side of the church are an officially registered medieval site. But the locals think it’s older. They think they can trace the roots of their village back to the Normans or even the Saxons. Are they right? We got just three days to find out.
#11 - St Osyth, Essex - Lost Centuries Of St Osyth
Season 12 - Episode 9 - Aired 2/27/2005
Long ago, two Viking marauders captured a lonely nun called Osyth and they chopped her head off. But they say she then picked up her head, carried it back to her nunnery and died there. And this miraculous act of martyrdom earned her a sainthood and the pilgrims flocked in and the local village adopted her name and prospered. Well, that’s the story. This little town on the Essex coast is still called St. Osyth, but it’s real origins are a mystery and the locals have called in Time Team to help them find out when and where their town really began. They also want to know if these ancient timbers sticking out of the nearby creek fit in to the story. Could they possibly hold the key to the mystery of St. Osyth. We and the locals have got just three days to find out.
#12 - Preston, Lancashire - The Bombers In The Marsh
Season 12 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/16/2005
Sixty years ago this coastal marsh near Preston in Lancashire was the scene of a tragedy. A group of American A-26 bombers fresh of the production line were on their way to bases in France, but two of them didn’t make it. Shortly after take-off they crashed and all three crew members died. So what went wrong? Over the next three days, we’re going to use archaeological techniques on what’s essentially an air crash investigation. We’re going to locate and excavate key parts of the wreckage in order to piece together the series of events that led to the death of three brave and experienced airmen.
#13 - South Shields, Tyneside - Tower Blocks And Togas
Season 12 - Episode 12 - Aired 3/20/2005
Somewhere under this grass is a Roman cemetery containing the remains of soldiers from all over the empire who were stationed here in South Shields. We know it’s here because Victorian builders found loads of bodies. The fort was in use for 300 years, so the cemetery could be huge, and it’s not just full of your average Roman squaddies. There were troops from Spain & Africa there is even an intriguing reference to what could be a unit of Iraqi’s. There is just one problem, the whole thing is under a housing estate and we’ve got just 3 days to try to crack it.