I think I’ve watched every single one of the original Time Team episodes, many more than once.
Phil Harding was always my favorite. I could imagine myself after a hard day of “digging” sitting down at the pub with Phil and having a pint or two.
As a kid, I used to love digging in the dirt and once found an Indian arrowhead and some old coins and a gold and garnet necklace, probably late 19th or early 20th century that was probably worth a lot of $ but that sadly I lost as I used to wear it all the time and the chain broke. :(
My husband and I bought a nearly 100-year-old house in N. Baltimore in the late 80’s that was next door to a stone house built in around 1820. As I was cleaning up my overgrown and long neglected yard, I found the remnants of a smoke house and chimney, animal bones and a trove of old glass bottles going back to the mid-19th century, and some rusty tools. I was in heaven.
And I liked Mick but also how Tony used to argue with him. I didn’t like Francis Pryor at all as he used to be more wrong than right and was always attributing everything to a ritual site.
I also used to feel sorry for John Gater as I think a lot of pressure was put on him to find things that were not there, even as he often said, “these images could be anomalies or natural geologic features” or “pits” or “ditches” or “roads” or…..
I think the re-boot has gotten better over time but skip Time Team America - it was “bloody” awful.
There is an on-going archaeological dig near where I live:
And I looked into volunteering, but I have no experience and now have a bad back and bad knees, so I made a donation instead and went to the site last year as an observer which to most people would have been boring, but that I found interesting.
Before Covid and the loss of my job, I had been planning a trip to York, UK. I was calling it my “York PA to York UK Adventure”.
I had gone to Hull UK for a business trip in 2012 but was able to fit in a day of sightseeing and fell in love with Northern England. Hull has many great free museums and a maritime history that in some ways reminded me of my hometown of Baltimore’s early history. There was a lot that I didn’t have time to see.
But I’ve long also wanted to go to York, with perhaps a day trip back in Hull and to Glasgow.
I find York so interesting in that it has all the British history I find interesting – Iron Age and earlier, Celtic, Roman, Viking, Medieval.
Perhaps I’ll be able to make that trip sometime in the future.
:^) Thanks, great post.
Phil Harding was always my favorite. I could imagine myself after a hard day of “digging” sitting down at the pub with Phil and having a pint or two.
I recall one episode where Tony had to break it to Phil that the only nearby village didn't have a pub. I think they built a makeshift one to down a few at the end of the episode.
I've never found anything in a lifetime of strolling around here. I found a fragment of (apparently) some old machinery that had what remained of a serial number or model number on it, and the four visible digits appeared to be a year in the 16th century. :^) There never was an explanation for that, what it had been part of, or anything.
A few years back a metal detectorist and his apprenctice asked to sweep the west half of the country yard here, in the area where the garden, corral, barn, granary, and whatnot used to be. They found a couple of nondescript bits of rusty metal, probably fence components. I guess generations of my family have managed to leave very little evidence. :^)