00:00Kent is known for its vast historical relevance.
00:17It had a huge stake in WWII because of its position near mainland Europe, religious significance
00:23with Canterbury Cathedral and being one of the favoured stomping grounds of the Romans
00:27gives it a tie to ancient history as well.
00:30Nowadays, Seanwood serves as a country park bought in the 80s by Kent County Council providing
00:35a place for families to walk and schools to go on day trips, with some knowledge that
00:39in the years of being owned by noble families, there had to be some things overlooked.
00:44In 2005, Lynn Palmer became the community archaeologist for the Seanwoods Heritage Project
00:50and started to dig beneath the forest, first using a laser detection device to spot odd
00:55shapes in the terrain.
00:57What they found was far beyond their expectations.
01:00Ancient tools, railway lines, children's toys, animal bones and foundations of entire
01:05medieval buildings submerged beneath the dirt were key pieces of evidence in the hunt
01:10for what exactly Seanwoods once was.
01:14They started out hoping to look around 60 years ago in a massive industrial quarry and
01:19nearby RAF base, but the more they dug, the more they found, leading them further and
01:24further back into the earth and further and further back through time.
01:29Sixty years ago became 600, 600 became 6000 until so many different eras of history began
01:34to reveal themselves in a country park that measured as less than half a square mile.
01:39Well follow me as I attempt to travel through time across the park and get to know the kind
01:43of people who hunted, built, worked, lived and died here, who live on through what was
01:48found beneath Seanwoods.
01:54Archaeology is all about uncovering history.
02:03Like a detective, finding evidence digging below the ground is a must.
02:07And most people assume that finds from times long forgotten are what the digs are for.
02:11But we start our journey through turf and through time a little closer to the modern
02:15day than you might think.
02:17A massive quarry.
02:19And just to show the scale of the quarry, here's one picture of it a few years after
02:22they started mining in the early 1930s.
02:25And here when they finished in 1967, it completely changed the landscape.
02:30John Beaumont is the industrial expert from the Seanwoods Archaeological Group and told
02:35me a little bit more about the process of archaeology and exactly what the quarry might
02:39have been mining for.
02:40So it was really just a question of going out and finding it.
02:44We made sure we went out during the winter months when all the undergrowth was down and
02:48you could quite easily see the imprint of where the railway was, the embankments.
02:54Back in the mid-1930s, the large amounts of clay beneath the ground were to be mined for
02:58the cement industry.
02:59They took the clay out, mixed it with water, which became a slurry.
03:03The quarry, while good for the local economy, provided headaches for the archaeology team
03:07in the present.
03:08As the mining dug away what could have had ancient Roman or Mesolithic finds, only certain
03:12areas were spared from the dig.
03:14Now it's fair to say that the quarry was reasonably well known by the local people.
03:18In the villages of Sean and Cobham.
03:19But the archaeology group wanted to know more about what exactly went on at the quarry to
03:23help them get a picture of the whole history of the woods.
03:26If you can see, just over there, there's a large hill.
03:28That was the real height of the area.
03:30But it was a quarry.
03:31So they would dig down all the way here to get clay to mix for cement.
03:36And there was a train line just up here that would have come and tipped the clay into the
03:39truck to then be taken off to be mixed.
03:42The railway lines formed the skeleton of the quarry.
03:45And aside from finding the actual lines themselves, the archaeologists found a water basin lined
03:49with concrete and used the remains of a mine cart to work out where the line had ended.
03:54It had been so long, a tree had grown straight through the cart.
03:57While this was a find with plenty of evidence to back it up, just a short few minutes walk
04:02around the edge of the park was a slightly stranger dig.
04:05Just across what's now the A2 was an RAF airfield.
04:09But to protect the officers from German bombers, the woods were a good place for the men to
04:12rest, sleep, and prepare for whatever the war might bring next.
04:16The officers' quarters had long since been removed, but near a cluster of trees was an
04:20old closed-off bunker.
04:21It was used as an air raid shelter for the officers, but now was home to mostly bats
04:25and had to be shut off for the safety of locals.
04:28I spoke to Donald Blackburn, the group's military expert, on why the camp was here
04:32in the woods of all places.
04:34Down in the valley on the plain near Dravesend, there was an RAF base, an air force base.
04:44And in order to keep the personnel safe, they were dispersed in various camps around the
04:53area in the woods in order to keep them away from the prying eyes of the Luftwaffe.
04:59But it was once the war had ended that this site became more intriguing to the archaeologists.
05:03After the war, when the RAF exited the camp, people were coming back from the war, and
05:11people that had been bombed out were looking for somewhere to live.
05:15And they started to move in and take them over themselves.
05:19They spent their own money doing them up to start with, and after that the local council
05:27decided to take them on.
05:29The council recognised people would be living here, so they began to support them with water,
05:33plumbing, and even a milk round.
05:35And it was a solution to people having nowhere else to go after the war.
05:39Eventually the houses were removed.
05:41The only thing remaining was the toilet block the council had set up, and the closed off
05:44underground bunker.
05:45For the archaeologists, this was mostly found thanks to written reports and archives, but
05:49the discovery of the squatters came from small items like toys and other household objects
05:54like clothes pegs that told them people were making a home here.
06:01Now we're going to take the biggest leap through time that we've done so far, right
06:04back to the 12th century, where the archaeologists are trying to uncover more of the main attraction
06:09of the park, Randall Manor.
06:11This was the most significant of all the digs, the one that kick-started all the interest
06:15from the archaeology group, and for every summer between 2006 and 2013, they dug out
06:20the foundations of Randall Manor, home to the de Cobham family.
06:24Now though, they were more concerned with a nearby dig that was giving them a bit more
06:27trouble.
06:28We started probably the middle of 2022, and the reason we found this was that we were
06:37walking through here, we noticed that the banks had been cut out, around here.
06:43So what we did was, we put in a number of one metre test pits, and I think it was one
06:49of them over there, we started finding tiles.
06:52The tiles tipped the team off that the site may have a connection to Randall Manor, which
06:55was nearby, and also had a kiln.
06:58It may be that this building was built at the remnants of the other building, the Randall
07:03Manor, which was built in about 1250.
07:06So it may have only been there for about 100 years, and then it went, and then it just
07:13become a farmstead.
07:15The main issue they ran into was they couldn't quite figure out how the building would have
07:19looked, as the lines of stonework were hard to complete, and they were still digging out
07:23walls, not knowing where they would end up.
07:25They told me it was harder to work out exactly what it was, but it was thought to be a barn
07:29to hold livestock.
07:30If you've ever been round someone's house and they like to show off all the awards their
07:35little kid has won, this is sort of like that.
07:38When you were a medieval lord or lady and you wanted to show someone around your land,
07:41you might just so happen to pass your massive agricultural fields where you keep all your
07:45animals, a symbol of your wealth, sort of like a Rolex or a Ferrari in the modern day.
07:51I spoke to Andrew Mayfield, the medieval expert and Kent County Council community archaeologist,
07:56about how they first got started with the dig before a trowel had even hit the ground.
08:01So back in 2006, we put together a lottery project with the Heritage Lottery Fund, as
08:06it was then, to explore the archaeology and the history of the park.
08:10And we started a project here because we knew there was a medieval manor here.
08:13It had been dug very briefly in the 1960s, but we didn't know a lot more about it.
08:17This kick-started the archaeological interest in the park.
08:20At the beginning, an archaeologist was imposed to do the project in the park, and then we
08:24started to develop a volunteer group, and they're the group we've been speaking to
08:27today, so the Shulmers Archaeology Group.
08:29The manor likely started from a fish farm in the 1100s.
08:32After Henry de Cobham took over, he and his son developed the buildings into a larger
08:36group, including a kitchen and a brew house.
08:39After this, we travelled uphill, to the oldest site of interest.
08:43As we walked, I was looking for anything that could give me a hint as to what we were going
08:46to find, until I saw a massive hand.
08:49That was just a distraction though, as the real point of interest was below my feet the
08:53whole time.
08:54Well, we've gone from the 1930s, and now we're all the way at the oldest site of the park.
09:02Six thousand years ago, if you were a person living around, instead of your mobile phone,
09:07your best tool would have been a piece of flint, like this one here.
09:11And the sculptor who created this actually wanted it to mirror how your hand looks holding
09:15a phone.
09:16Now, underneath the ground here, it is littered with Mesolithic-era flint, and what basically
09:22that means is they would take a massive block of this stone, and they'd chip away at it
09:26to make tools.
09:27But that meant that they had a lot of rubbish they didn't need left over, sort of like the
09:30wrapper off a suite.
09:32The Mesolithic era, also called the Middle Stone Age, was around 6000 BC, and the top
09:36of the hill at the park was where they would have hunted, a high ground for spotting animals.
09:40But it was mostly gravel, meaning it didn't get bogged down in the rain, and like I mentioned,
09:44they would have had a surplus of flint they would have used for tools.
09:47But there was a final side to the process I hadn't yet seen.
09:50The finds team.
09:51They're made up of volunteers, and once the finds are brought in by the archaeologists,
09:56it's their job to catalogue it and make sure everything is stored correctly.
10:00What we need to do now is go through each bag, in its stratigraphy, and transfer it
10:09onto a paper sheet, and eventually this gets translated into an electronic model.
10:15The park used to run sessions for schools frequently, and though they haven't done much
10:18in recent years, Jill said it was a very rewarding part of the job.
10:22Good practical experience for them, but anything where the public can actually be involved
10:29in excavating, it really brings it home to them, what the past was like.
10:37Well we've seen the digging, the finding, the cleaning, and everything else, but this
10:40is the last stage of the archaeological process.
10:44In this storage room there's over 20 years of findings, from the Mesolithic flint they
10:50found originally, to the Cobham village finds.
10:54And now this serves as a resource for when school groups visit, they can come out and
10:58show the fruits of their effort.
11:00And this is really what archaeology is all about.
11:03Most people coming to the park will be walking their dogs, or having a day out with the family.
11:07But if someone takes a moment to stop, read some of the plaques, and realise, like for
11:11instance this structure of a horse was made entirely out of railway parts found beneath
11:15the ground, that might spark an interest in Kent's rich local history.
11:19But the key thing to take away is that Shaun Woods is not an anomaly.
11:23Kent has millennia of history waiting to be discovered.
11:26So wherever you live, Medway, Maidstone, Tonbridge, you might have a piece of history in your
11:31attic or below your feet.
11:33The point of archaeology, and of history, is that we remember the past to inform us
11:38about the future.
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