Hunstrete, Somerset
First screened 17 February 2008

Q & A

Time Team's buildings expert Jonathan Foyle answers our questions.

What's your favourite Time Team dig?
No question – Syon Abbey, beneath the lawns of Syon House in Middlesex. Uncovering the remains of a forgotten 15th-century cathedral-sized royal abbey is a once-in-a-lifetime find for a buildings historian.

What's your favourite Time Team find?
I'm fond of the Roman bath house at Whitestaunton Manor, Somerset because for the first two days nobody believed it was there, within a bank of nettles. For a Victorian antiquarian with Roman interests and access to the salvage of ancient Bath to suddenly announce to his friends he had found a Roman bath house in his garden, which he alone accounted for and drew, seemed far-fetched. In fact, he was dead right and we were all humbled through our cynicism!

What's the most important Time Team discovery?
I think the Viking sword blade, which analysis clearly showed to have been planted (Llygadwy, 2001). In that programme lay the reason, method and rewards of archaeology, shown at its best as the pursuit of truth through discipline.

What's your best Time Team moment?
Tony's experience of the reconstructed Woodhenge surrounded by timber poles and facing a tree trunk replanted into the earth, roots up. I wasn't there, but I wish I had been – especially at night. I reckon you never get close to experiencing ancient sites unless you recreate them and the original relationship of their form and material with the viewer is reinstated.

What's your favourite archaeological site in the UK?
I haven't seen it yet because the next one is always my favourite – watch the next series of Time Team.

And abroad?
Rome – and its ancient port Ostia Antica on a clear winter day.

Who's your archaeological hero?
They tend to be characters who retained their curiosity: John Aubrey, William Stukeley, Thomas Rickman. They looked with discernment and began the process of cataloguing and typifying the remains of the past, which allowed us to establish values and significance, which in turn promoted the protection and care of the historic environment. Care brings us to tireless campaigners such as John Betjeman, the saviour of St Pancras.

What's your favourite archaeology book?
Archaeology is a broad church – sometimes literally – and for the archaeology of building materials, Alec Clifton-Taylor's The Pattern of English Building remains as lucid and useful as the day it was written.

If you could travel to one moment in time, where to and when?
 To January 1529, when I'd have put hemlock in Henry VIII's drinking cup before he got jiggy with Anne Boleyn and so averted the dissolution of the monasteries, which wrecked a thousand years of medieval achievement. That would have been a good day's work.

If you could dig one site, what would it be?
So many … One is the site of the Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), near Calais.

If you could make one find, what would it be?
I love coins because they're beautiful, informative and useful, and picking up a coin from the earth is like holding hands with a centuries-old individual. A big gold coin isn't just a child's idea of archaeological perfection…

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