Archeologists work to uncover Glasgow’s Viking past digging at the Old Govan Church

National World - LocalTV

A team of archeologists and volunteers are working at the Old Govan Church on an excavation to uncover Glasgow’s medieval past and Viking connections.

Transcript

00:00It's an amazing collection and an amazing building as well.

00:04It's really been here for a very long time and known about for a very long time,

00:08but not many members of the public actually have heard of them,

00:13and so it's our kind of operation to try and get more people involved in that.

00:17The collection dates from roughly the 9th to 11th centuries.

00:22You know, some of the stuff's probably a little early, some of it's a little bit later,

00:26and it's on a site which has a much more ancient history that,

00:29we've got about 1,500 years of Bury Owen activity.

00:33So I think it's quite likely that it's a kind of gatehouse.

00:37My kind of fantasy is that maybe it's a chapel,

00:41and the reason I'm thinking it's like maybe a special chapel for the sarcophagus

00:45because it's in this corner of the churchyard,

00:48in the southeast area of the churchyard, where the sarcophagus was discovered in 1855.

00:54So we think we may have picked up the large pit,

00:59you can imagine how large it has to be to hold the sarcophagus.

01:02For a long, long time at Govan, there was a kind of a story

01:06that Govan had been founded back somewhere in about the kind of 5th, 6th century.

01:10The historians and art historians had kind of argued that

01:16the sculpture looked like it was 9th to 11th century

01:18and that the church couldn't be any earlier than that,

01:21but our colleague Stephen Driscoll was digging with the university and the time team

01:26back in the mid-90s and they actually found two burials next to an early church

01:32just to the left of where the main door of the building is,

01:36and it came back with carbon dates, 5th, 6th century.

01:40So we know that the site is that old and that actually these kind of

01:45legends that have come through to us were true.

01:47Just letting people know it's there and kind of making the building open

01:51and putting some adequate lighting in and a bit of interpretation,

01:56you know, makes it a lot more interesting and accessible.

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