"Somewhere down there is the very beautiful and very windswept Scottish Island of Mull." "We've been invited here by Bev and Hylda, who think they may have discovered the remains of a long-lost chapel and burial ground." "They stumbled across the remains deep in a forest." "If they're right, they may have found a community that was wiped from the map over 150 years ago." "So me, my friend here and a motley bunch of archaeologists who are travelling by sea, are about to embark on a journey to find what could be the earliest days of Christianity in Britain." "Or are we just on a flight of fancy?" "The island of Mull lies just off the western coast of Scotland." "So we've had to travel by air..." "PASSENGERS CHEER" "..sea... and, in Professor Mick Aston's case, some sort of self-propelled wheelbarrow, to visit a remote promontory at Baliscate a few miles from the main town of Tobermory." "And all this effort is because of these earthworks, located by two amateur volunteers." "They met on Mull, having moved from England with their families, and joined a local archaeology project where they promptly stumbled across something really special." "Look at this from the Glasgow Herald." ""Meet the amateur sleuths who stumbled upon one of Scotland's earliest communities."" "And there's Hylda and Bev and some obsure lump, and here's Hylda, Bev and Professor Mick AstonI" "See what it goes on to say." ""Can we expect Bev and Hylda's chapel to feature on Time Team in the future?"" "It really does say that." ""But the answer is realistically it's probably not going to be excavated."" "It's wrongI The paper's wrong." "It's wrongI The paper's wrong." "Yep, we're pleased." "How did you find the place?" "We volunteered to Scotland's Rural Past." "Which is what?" "." "They're recording relics, ruins that haven't got recording at the moment." "We got provided with some aerial photography of this area and we were looking for shadows on the aerial photography and just wandering around to see what we could match up." "We're starting to get very excited about the lumps and bumps over here." "When did you decide it was a chapel?" "It was after the surveyors had done this map." "It looked like chapels they'd had proof of in the past where they found relics and crosses and they could say these are chapel sites." "It fits the bill, shape- and size-wise." "Mick, if they're right and it is a previously undiscovered chapel, how significant is that?" "." "I think that would be really significant because there are a lot of these sites in the Western Isles but to find a new one that hasn't been noticed before, and to be able to actually look at it, do some excavations on it, that's fantastic." "What would you like us to find?" "I want you to find the floor - a strange request - but I've been digging around what I believe's a door jamb and I can't get to the bottom." "There might be something on that floor." "How about you, have you got any special requests?" "I'd like you to excavate this area in case there are graves or bones." "At first glance this earthwork survey does seem to show a raised platform with a small east-west building, and evidence of some sort of exterior altar or shrine." "For Mick, this is a classic layout for a 6th- or 7th-century chapel." "But then again, it could just be a small, stone-built shepherd's hut or barn." "And we've got to work out what we're going to do with all this schmozle." "Unfortunately geophys won't be able to help us define this piece of archaeology as it's a mass of stony rubble covering stone walls, which in turn sit on top of a rocky outcrop." "A whole lot of messy noise, as it's known in the geophys world." "See, there's method in this madness, absolute method in this madness." "We're just going to have to unpick it all by hand." "All right, Phil, where do you want us?" "We just run it over the bank and then come up to the edge of the church, chapel or whatever it is." "But John and his team should be able to survey the rest of this plateau, including this mysterious square enclosure that Mick suspects may be a later cemetery." "In the meantime we're concentrating on the east end of the possible chapel where there could be an altar and even evidence of ritual devotion." "If we get any finds at all I think we ought to be wary of what they are because that will tell us what this thing is, and I think probably, in particular, quartzite pebbles." "Oh, that's soft." "If Mick's right, this building could date as early as the 6th or 7th century." "That hat looks almost as battered as mine, but not quite as disgustingI" "And that's an incredibly important date." "It's when the nearby island of Iona, and its famous monastery under Saint Columba, was beginning to spread Christianity throughout northern Britain." "So this early Christian world that centred on Iona," "Mull's quite a central place..." "Very much so, yes, if you think of Iona as being the centre of a spider's web, and the tentacles of this web extend right through Scotland, they extend down to Lindisfarne in Northeast England, they extend into Southwest France and into the" "Mediterranean, because the monastery is a major consumer of trade goods." "Looking at us, in front of us here we have the Sound of Mull, which was one of the main trading routes during that period." "So our chapel, if it is a chapel, could that have been founded in the 6th century as well?" "Certainly could have been, yes." "The problem is that we don't have any historical evidence relating to it so it's only the archaeology that will tell us exactly how old it is." "And excavation is what we're good at." "Especially if the archaeology behaves itself." "As you can see, we're already filming about 15 archaeologists digging what we think is the chapel." "I'm standing about here, they're digging what would be the east end, which Mick says is really important because it would tell us whether or not we have got a chapel or not." "But down here is the mysterious square-looking building, which, Mick, you said you weren't even going to start on yet and yet you're already poking away at it." "Yes, because in order to do any work here we've got to unpick this stone mound." "Derek's drawn my attention to this one." "We have this stone here which looks to me like a piece of sculpted stone, possibly ecclesiastical." "But come round here, look, because there's also this on the corner, which is a saddle quern stone for grinding grain." "And the interesting thing about that is it ought to be prehistoric in date." "Prehistoric?" "." "Well, that's a surprise isn't it?" "." "Looks like it's going to be quite busy today." "Welcome back to the Scottish island of Mull where towards the end of last year two local people, Bev and Hylda, discovered this intriguing earthwork here in the forest." "When they found it, they think it might be a chapel by the way, it was all covered over with trees like this." "You didn't have his magnificent view that you've got here which shows us the relationship there would have been between the chapel, if that's what it was, and the seascape over there." "This has all been cleared away by the Forestry Commission Scotland, it's a standard procedure just so there's room amongst the timber." "But now that we're about to excavate down there, where Mick thinks there might be some kind of cemetery, as you can see it's pretty gloomy round there, we need the trees trimmed a bit, what they call brashing." "Spot of brashing lads?" "So after a bit of heavy-duty pruning, trench two goes in over this striking square feature, which Mick thinks may be a graveyard." "But as we've already found a prehistoric grinding stone here, it may not be that straightforward." "OoooohI" "OoooohI Where's Derek?" "Derek, come and have a look at this." "And the first dating evidence for the possibly 7th century chapel isn't looking too good either." "Yep, that's definitely pottery." "How old?" "Well, now you're asking, you see." "An expert would be able to tell." "Phil, there's another bit there." "Oh, another bit, so what date's that then?" "On the face of it, 14th/15th century." "But this is not what we'd expect from a chapel site is it?" "." "But this is not what we'd expect from a chapel site is it?" "." "No, no." "But within minutes the next piece of dating evidence looks much better." "It looks like a little Jersey royal covered in mud but if you give it a good clean, you can see it's a quartz pebble." "AhI" "Now, why did you make a noise like a pirate?" "Because you get quartz pebbles, white quartz pebbles on chapel sites in the early medieval period in Ireland and western Scotland." "It's typical." "I've heard this before but part of me is sceptical." "Why couldn't it just be an old pebble?" "Why couldn't it just be an old pebble?" "It's not native to the site." "Somebody's had to select it and bring it up here." "And they seem to do that and put them on altars and saints' tombs, burials, that sort of thing." "This small pebble could be a clincher for the chapel argument." "Unless, of course..." "Not one, but two pieces of domestic pot." "Which would actually suggest we're digging a medieval house." "Hang on..." "Well..." "'Unless of course...'" "I give you another quartz pebble." "Two allI" "Ah, but hang on, I've got another piece of potI" "Faye, what have you got in your bit of the trench?" "Faye, what have you got in your bit of the trench?" "I've got another pebble." "YeahI" "YeahI But I've got another piece of potI" "Four-three, four-three, what a matchI" "And so it goes on." "I've got another quartz pebble." "Isn't it funny how the small things can keep archaeologists happy for hours?" "Another piece of domestic pot." "LAUGHTER" "But the best way to resolve this site would be to find burials, especially ones we could radiocarbon date." "'And thankfully Hylda has a plan.'" "It was you who wanted us to dig here, wasn't it?" "." "Yes." "Well, I wondered whether there might be gravestones in this area...or hoping." "John, gravestones and consequently bones?" "Possibly, possibly." "Look, there's the bank, you can see it clearly in the high resistance." "If you use the radar, what you can see is the red reflections here, they suggest more substantial stonework surviving." "The problem is we don't know whether it's a grave slab or whether it's just an igneous boulder." "So trench three goes in over the bank of the enclosure and hopefully a burial." "And if, just if, it gives us a 6th or 7th century date, then we could be at the heart of one of the most important periods of British history - the arrival of Christianity." "You watch this cos you won't see me on a computer very often, right." "Oops." "Hang on, hang on, wait a minute." "Oh, there we are." "And I can't remember the last time I've seen Mick so excited about the potential of a site, or its location in the UK." "Mull is part of an area called Dal Riata which is actually an Irish kingdom which is centred in Northern Ireland." "It belongs to the same kingdom as much of Antrim does." "So it's like a sort of colony from there, and that's why a lot of the features about this building up here, whether it's a chapel or not looks like stuff I've seen in Ireland." "And of course they're Christian, they bring Christianity in, and if we turn this round you see, in the middle of this is Iona, there, off the end of Mull which is Columba's great monastery and Columba" "was the great saint for this area, he died in 597." "And he was sending his monks out to all these islands that you see." "And that influence spreads not only all up the west coast but also through the Great Glen, across into the area of the Picts further over." "It's funny, isn't it, we tend to think of the isle of Mull as being so far away from everywhere, you see it on that map, and bang, it suddenly appears to be in the centre of the universe." "And being at the centre of a busy island network could explain why our site seems to have archaeology spanning some 4,000 years." "Have you had anything out of it?" "." "That little bit of flint." "That little bit of flint." "Well, this definitely shows we've got prehistoric activity up here, people living here thousands of years ago." "Yeah." "Although over in trench two, it now looks like the prehistoric stone found this morning is basically a stray." "It hasn't anything to do with the square structure, which we're still no closer to identifying." "But back at trench one Mick thinks there's mounting evidence that we're uncovering something significant." "I think I can see a straight line across there, and then where you are, Faye, it seems to turn and go along in that direction." "You're entirely right, we've got a line going down here, another line along here, and then up there we've almost got this platform coming in." "Well, you see, you say platform and I think that's exactly right." "It's one of these square-ish platforms that again you get on chapel sites called leachts." "on chapel sites called leachts." "Right." "Which are like outdoor altars or shrines or..." "Sometimes there are burials in them and they're often square like that, sometimes with a cross or something in the middle." "sometimes with a cross or something in the middle." "Yep." "But again it reinforces that idea that we could be dealing with a chapel and we've got a couple of features that should go with that." "It's almost the end of day one and it's now becoming clear that, in spite of finding more medieval pot, we maybe on the verge of revealing a fascinating piece of archaeology." "The exciting news is that we think we might be approaching the floor level and what is really interesting is that you remember that right up there where we had that medieval pottery." "So in other words, if we've got the floor and then a build up of soil and the medieval pottery on the top of that, that floor potentially has got to be so much earlier." "What sort of date could it be?" "Well, I mean it could be anytime from, say, the 6th century if it's to do with Columba or his monks, right the way through to 1200, something like that." "So how do we find out?" "." "I think the only way on a site like this is to get some bone so we can get a radiocarbon date from it, that's the only way." "But if we can't get bone from where Jackie's digging over on the perimeter, where will we get that from?" "Well, I think our best bet is going to be this leacht structure, this rectangular structure off the end." "Sometimes they have bones associated with them." "But the point is they're really rare structures so it will be a fantastic opportunity to examine one." "So tomorrow we're going to dig one of the most enigmatic and rare pieces of early Christian archaeology that we've ever excavated." "I don't think I've ever said that before on Time Team." "You said it beautifullyI" "Beginning of day two here, where we're looking for a possible early chapel and we're all leaving our hotels right now to wend our way up to the site." "But the big talk last night in the bar, or to be honest in the bars, was about what is, basically, a little stone box at the east end of the chapel which could contain all sorts of" "early Christian artefacts." "Some people are even talking about maybe the bones of a saint." "It's not often that I hear our archaeologists get so excited about anything." "So most of our effort is now concentrated on that potential chapel." "Right, see if we can start unpicking this then." "And, in particular, the box outside its east end." "And they'd be able to..." "Ah, leave it." "Oh, well it wobbled." "Yeah, he can come up then." "This is the outside altar or shrine." "He seems to be particularly keen on crosses, but you know what Mick's like with crosses." "And perhaps most surprisingly, it's the normally very cautious" "Professor Aston who's behind the suggestion that it could contain holy bones." "In other times, he was talking about it being like a relic." "Presuming you have the bones of saints or something, you really ought to ask him about this." "Oh, there's another pebble." "What was it that people used to put in here, Mick, and why did they do it?" "." "The most common thing is, there seem to be offerings by people who visit the sites, usually in the form of quartz pebbles." "Phil's just found another two in the last 30 seconds." "Phil's just found another two in the last 30 seconds." "That's very common." "What's inside them is more difficult because there haven't been that many excavated, but they often treat it as a saint's burial so there a bones." "Not necessarily a whole skeleton, but enough to indicate that a saint was here." "And it's usually, they're often called St "somebody's" bed." "When you say St "somebody" is this a hermit who was fairly well known on the island?" "Very well known locally, but nobody we've ever heard of." "St "somebody local"." "In your wildest fantasy, what would you like to see come out of here?" "In my wildest fantasy?" "Yeah." "A piece of early medieval metal work, bronze or something like that, a book clasp or a bit of jewellery." "But I'll settle for a bit of bone we can get a carbon date from." "LAUGHTER" "Well, it's not every day on Time Team that you can honestly say you may discover the bones of a saint, even if they we're only known as that locally and we would certainly seem to have the man power to do it." "Over in trench two, it now looks like we've spent a whole day uncovering an animal enclosure, with a little hut attached for the farmer." "There's simply no evidence it was ever a walled cemetery." "So, we can effectively close that trench down, and speaking of possible burials, trench three has so far failed to find any dateable evidence that may help us." "We've got stones and stones, and in the middle" "I ain't sure whether you've got quite the stony patch here." "So we're focussing on trench one, for the moment." "Because we may be going elsewhere as Hylda and Bev, who first stumbled on this site, have been honing their archaeological skills over the last year, and they've now investigated this whole hillside including poking around in the woods." "Which, funnily enough, is also one of Stewart's favourite past times." "I sometimes think you spend your whole life walking away from archaeology." "The dig is behind us." "But it looks as though, this time, its paid off." "Well, I've found this, which you see there's a walled structure here." "This is a building, but it's not the only one here because" "Bev and Hylda have found lots more like this in the woods?" "We've found sheelings, we've recorded and measured circular and oval shaped ones not far from here." "circular and oval shaped ones not far from here." "What's a sheeling?" "It's like a stone tent, it's a temporary building that a shepherd lives in when he's tending the cattle and sheep which are brought up into the high ground to graze." "But what these things tell us is that there is farming activity up on this ridge up here." "There's lots of walls all around, there's all sorts of archaeology on the surface, and at the moment it's obscured by all these trees." "Absolutely." "You've got to remember that 1958 this aerial photograph was taken." "There's the chapel there, there were no trees up here so you can see out to the bay, you can see the ridge which is sitting on the promontory." "The chapel might have been sitting high for people to see, farmsteads might be clustered around it, we've got to know what it's part of to understand it." "So, was there a farming community up here while our potential chapel was in use?" "If you come up here, Mick..." "Yeah." "Look at this as you come up." "Look at this." "Without a care for their own personal safety..." "Whoa, dropped me glasses." "Mick and Stewart take their lives in their hands to identify targets that may be of interest in the woods." "We're on that building there you see there's the chapel site, possible chapel site there, there's a cairn I've found in-between..." "You've got this crag along the side, all through here." "Yeah, and whole thing is one long promontory and so is within a larger enclosure, part of which are these steep crags, so..." "It looks..." "I'm trying not to think of it as a monastic site, but it looks like a number of other sites in the western isles." "It may seem a long shot, but they're beginning to think our possible chapel is at the centre of a much bigger enclosure." "I think we should come and look at this." "And to investigate what's going on, Mick decides we need to put a trench across a structure Stewart's identified, plus at least one more over a roadway and entrance into this newly extended site." "I just hope that once the chainsaws have cleared the area we can find the man power to dig them, because we're still having problems deciphering the complex archaeology in trench one." "Helen, take a look at that." "Oh, wow, that is truly amazing." "You know, this is just about the last place I'd expect to see this." "It's a medieval silver penny." "Right." "It's just extraordinary, and you can see it's got this cross going from edge to edge, and inside each quarter, it's got three pallets." "So, I think it's going to be from about 1280 onwards." "Late 13th, 14th century," "I don't think it's much later than that." "This coin is just the latest and most spectacular example of medieval activity on this site." "We've also 14th century pottery by the tray full suggesting this was a busy place 700 years ago." "I think there was somebody living here around 1300 who is generating a surplus that they can sell for money, they're doing pretty well, really." "It's quite a high status place to be." "It's a compelling story," "I'm a bit nervous about saying this to you as an Englishman, but if this story happened in the southern counties it would be dead easy to get loads of documents to substantiate it." "We Scottish historians are tremendously jealous of the English historians because they have a far fuller historical record than we do." "It's no surprise to me that we've been unable to get hold of any historical documents." "Were you not writing this stuff down?" "We could certainly write, but we're sitting in the middle of the area that experiences a lot of trouble during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, things get destroyed." "And it's not just the documentary history, you can't do landscape archaeology, landscape history in the same way that you can do in England, can you?" "It's like a big rubbing out of evidence in the landscape..." "What's the rubber?" "." "It comes with the clearances." "And the clearances are?" "This is an event that starts in Scotland around the mid 18th century and carries through into the 19th century and you're talking about a complete change on the landscape." "The landlords are trying to extract more money from their estates and one of the ways they can do this they think, is shifting the people off the land so you're replacing people with sheep." "So what we're looking at now is very new." "Isn't it funny, because I have this romantic idea of a Scottish landscape that was here when St Columba landed, and it's 250 years old." "Yeah." "So, with little or no chance of finding historical records, it's impossible to know exactly who was living here in the 14th century." "But what we can say, is that they made their home by reusing a much earlier structure." "Ah, we're back in pebble land again." "Because Mick is now confident that Bev and Hylda's chapel-shaped earthwork was indeed originally an early chapel." "Oh, there's another pebble." "Oh, here's another one." "Fantastic." "There's another pebble, please." "It's like being on the beach." "What we need now are more than pebbles, we need dateable finds to tell us just how early this chapel is." "And unfortunately, trench three has proved bereft of burials." "So, we're going to extend trench one to investigate the area inside the east end where traditionally the altar and occasionally burials were placed." "As well as looking directly outside the chapel's walls another place where early burials could be found." "With just a few hours left of day two, we're now concentrating all our efforts on working out how early this chapel is..." "..or so I thought." "Last time we were here there was just you, me," "Bev, Hylda and a flat forest floor, and yet now there's a trench here." "And it's all because Stewart and Mick have been refining their theories about this site." "They believe that hidden in these woods are clues to an even more stunning discovery." "What we've done is taken the aerial photograph when there were no trees here so we got rid of the trees, laid it over a three dimensional model of the landscape, and look what we've got." "Can you see coming around, see this wall coming around here and avoiding the chapel coming down here." "What we've actually got, we've actually got a large enclosure which uses the very steep crags and the flat ground within it to define, one large unit with the chapel sitting in the middle of it." "So what might the implication of that be, Mick?" "Well, I can think of a number of sites in western Scotland that look exactly like that, and all the other sites are all monasteries." "Oh, you're joking?" "No, they're all early medieval monasteries, this could be another one." "What do you mean early medieval, what kind of date could this be?" "Something to do with Columba, he died in 597, so you're taking about... 6th or 7th century?" "Or 8th century, yeah." "StreuthI We came here looking for a chapel, none of us thought we'd find an early monastery." "Discovering a lost monastery from the time of St Columba, the monk who brought Christianity into Britain via Scotland, could be the find of a lifetime." "I'm concerned that Mick's imagination has got the better of him," "I mean, this isn't like any monastery I've ever seen." "I can see ever so clearly in my mind's eye now." "You've got the church with the cross bit on it, and you've got the cloister, and you've got the refectory." "Ah, no, no, no, no, no." "Different sort of monastery." "What you're describing there is the typical late medieval plan that you get in Europe and much of England, comes in after about the 1100s, something like that." "Yeah." "Yeah." "And it's, as your implying, very predictable." "You find the church, you know where the cloister and chapter house is." "This is not like that." "What we're talking about on the western parts of the country " "Ireland, Scotland and so on before about 1200, is much less regular." "You can have churches, more than one, churches, chapels, a dormitory, workshops, farm buildings, all scattered around the site." "Makes them much more difficult to deal with." "If we have got a monastery here, that would be really exciting, wouldn't it?" "." "It would be really important because every time we find one, because they're not predictable, there's no model plan, we learn so much more about them." "There isn't this blueprint to fall back on." "But there are a number of features they should have," "I have a sort of check list in my brain of things to look for, which I'm not going to tell you now." "Oh, all right." "Oh, all right." "I'm not going to tell you now..." "But some of them have been ticked off?" "Some of them have been ticked off, and there are others we're looking for." "He is a tease." "But at the moment, a Columba era monastery is just an exciting, even nerve-jangling theory." "What we'll need is physical proof, although of what, Mick's keeping close to his chest." "We'll also have to find reliable dating evidence or at least something we can get a radiocarbon date from." "Basically, what we really need now is something like a tooth." "Oh, my goodness me." "Ah..." "That does look..." "Turn it over, it's quite squishy, so..." "Yes, that is a human maxillary molar, you can see the cusps quite worn down, it's an adult and it is in quite vile condition, whereabouts did it come from?" "It was under the wall." "You know if you get burials in..." "associated with these chapels, they quite often are right up against the walls." "Oh, there's another one look." "Is that another one?" "Suddenly, at the end of day two, we now find ourselves on the verge of a major new discovery." "But bizarrely, finding burials the very thing that could prove it, may be the very thing that stops us in our tracks." "There is a bit of a problem which is that in Scotland, if you find any human remains even on an archaeological site, you have to phone the police and persuade them and the procurator fiscal that you haven't got a crime scene." "All right, well, we haven't got a body yet but, Jackie, am I right in saying you've got a tooth?" "We've got three teeth, in fact." "We've got three teeth, in fact." "Have you?" "All from the same part of the jaw, which suggests that it came from the in situ remains." "And three teeth consequently counts..." "Counts as a body." "Counts as a body." "So, I'll have to make this phone call now, aren't I?" "As of now, we've got to shut the entire dig down." "Let's hope we can open it again tomorrow." "Right, off we go." "It's the beginning of day three on the isle of Mull and we're chomping at the bit to solve the mystery of the chapel site on the hill... once we actually get there." "One thing I'm not going to miss about this dig is the half-hour yomp up to the top of the hill just to get to the site." "It's been raining all night and this is all really skiddy, like an icerink." "Even our caterpillar vehicle's having problems getting up here." "But it's worth it when you get to the top because the archaeology is absolutely fascinating, although there are some problems." "All we've got is the tooth crowns that have survived..." "'Our dig was suddenly suspended last night, when we hit human remains, 'and our bone specialist, Jackie, has had to convince 'the Scottish legal system that we haven't uncovered a potential crime scene.'" "They've come out from basically almost underneath that wall that you can see there." "Which we think is a medieval chapel wall." "I know, for instance, it's an adult because the teeth are worn quite flat, and that again is suggestive that it's not a modern case - you wouldn't get tooth wear like that..." "That's what I want to hearI" "That's what I want to hearI ..in a modern individual." "Having seen that, would you be happy for us to carry on?" "Absolutely, the date that you're talking about, more than happy for you to continue, thankfully." "So with the blessing of Mull's finest, we can get on with the job in hand, which is to try and find a date for this early Christian chapel." "Unfortunately the teeth we found last night just outside the chapel are too decomposed to radiocarbon date, but we still live in hope." "We've got our teeth in that very small area underneath the plastic there, we know it's not coming this way." "So I suspect what we're going to get is a sort of east-west burial." "Right, then, might we move some large rocks first?" "." "But we also have another and even more stunning story evolving." "The team now believe this chapel may have been part of an early monastery set up by the followers of Saint Columba." "And Mick's now opened a number of trenches in the woods, including one over a potential entrance into his theoretical monastic complex..." "..and another over what may be a building." "Well, we definitely have a structure here, definitely have something substantial here but the only find that we have is a flint flake." "Oh, right." "So it might be early Christian but also might be prehistoric." "In spite of the strain on our resources, Mick is in his element." "We are a long way from London." "We are a long way from London." "And that makes you a happy chappy?" "We're a long way from civilisation, all these are contributing factors as far as I'm concerned." "And he's still confident that the small, square leacht outside the chapel may contain the lovely dateable remains of a local saint." "What we haven't considered is what's happening in the middle and stones like that, look..." "Yeah." "..are incredibly loose." "Right, so I hope you're going to suggest that it might have had something set up, like a post or stone in the middle?" "Or, some sort of container, some hollow..." "Or, some sort of container, some hollow..." "Or some container." "I mean, you were talking about, that there would be, like, you could have relics." "A shrine or..." "A shrine or..." "Correct." "It is looking, archaeologically like the ones that still survive, but I've never seen one taken apart like this, but it is looking like what you'd expect." "Well, I've never seen one nor taken one apart." "I think there's an advantage in that because being brutally honest you don't know anything about them." "NoI" "NoI That's a fantastic advantage, I think, in you doing it." "So where I'm sitting now, we're hoping this is going to be the entranceway to our chapel." "the entranceway to our chapel." "That would be nice." "We understood it that way but we jabbed the pole down, we couldn't seem to get to the bottom." "When we were first invited here by Hylda and Bev to investigate this site, I don't think any of us could have predicted just what this dig would unearth." "But it looks like one of the trenches in the wood may be about to give Mick another thing to tick off his potential monastery list." "Over here we've got what Bev and Hylda originally thought was maybe a shieling, a sheep pen, something like that, although Stewart thought it might be a bit more complex than that." "How are you doing, Raksha?" "If you came here this morning, it looked like a big jumble of stones, but we now have something a lot more substantial." "We have these absolutely, great big socking double-skin walls coming through, which doesn't really go with a shieling." "So it's not a shieling or a sheep pen or whatever because there's too much of it?" "." "There's too much of it, it looks rather complex." "It's just very strange because it kind of comes round through there and then we have this other thing coming through just through here which we think is a cell." "A cell?" "That sounds monastic, doesn't it?" "." "This twin-celled building may not be the final piece of the jigsaw but it really does look like the sort of simple dwelling used by monks on early monastery sites across the Western Isles." "And they all have one thing in common... the influence of the late 6th-century monk, Columba." "You do realise I've been pinching your books systematically for the last three days?" "I noticed your nose deep in a book on Celtic Christianity or something." "That's the kind of guy I amI" "Yeah, I thought." "What struck me most was that Columba who lived, what, 1,500 years ago, if not more, you'd have thought he'd be lost in the mists of time but a real strong character comes across." "Yep." "And we only get that because with some of these saints somebody fairly soon after they died wrote what's called a "Life"." "And in this case it's a chap called Adomnan, who was the later" "Abbot of Iona." "And he clearly spoke to people who knew Columba and then he puts this life story together, and it's fantastic, the stuff in it." "He was a child prodigy, all the other monks where he was training doted on him, he had a really good education, he was very tall, he had a very loud voice, which I would have thought would have been very irritating..." "I think that would be very useful, dealing with a load of monks on different islandsI" "And the thing that strikes me so much about Columba is that although in a sense he was living this really freezing cold existence in his monk's cell, he was also using his status to go all round Scotland sorting out problems..." "Yeah." "Yeah." "..getting the whole area unified." "Yeah." "We know from the Life that he went to various islands, he set up other monasteries on those islands." "We know the names of some of them, we suspect there's others we don't know the names of." "It's very difficult to locate a lot of them." "But..." "ButI" "..if there was a monastery here, surely we would know about it, surely it would be in the monks' annals?" "Not necessarily." "We know that Iona has property on Mull in the later Middle Ages." "They had a whole series of properties down the north and west side of the island." "But whether they were there earlier on?" "If they are, they're not mentioned." "And that's your problem, you see." "It's nothing like as easy as down in England." "With only a few hours left, the race is now on to find a date to link our site with the time of Columba." "And we have a couple of potential targets for burials that might give us that." "Over here, if you bring the sound in... ..it sounds quite hollow." "Jackie thinks she's found a couple of hollow-sounding areas outside the chapel that could turn out to be graves, and Matt believes he's just coming onto the floor in front of the altar... a classic place for the chapel's founder to be buried." "There's a distinct line of clay along there." "However, that wouldn't stand up obviously if it was just built like that." "Right." "It might even be worth just pushing it back a bit, I think." "'Personally, I'm amazed that such a potentially crucial 'early Christian site has completely disappeared from the records." "'But maybe, just maybe, this site has been commemorated in folk history." "'It's just no one's noticed, until now.'" "Some people have said that if this was indeed an ancient chapel, there should be a Gaelic name for it which has come down onto later maps." "If you go around and you look for the closest possible place name, we're here, and look, there's this name here, um..." "You better read it, Alisdair." "Coille Creag a Chait, which is "the wood of the cliff of the cat", so it may be a reference to a wild cat." "And its been suggested that this Coille name might possibly have been a Cill name instead because it's very similar." "This is often a problem in Scotland when we're looking for early chapel sites and we have the place name Cill, which we think might be a chapel." "But it all depends on what the first surveyors thought they heard when they were speaking to the locals - was it a Cill or was it a Coille?" "Do you remember when you and I were excavating in the Isle of Man about three years ago, we dug a chapel site there, remember?" "." "And that was called a Cill, wasn't it?" "." "It's the same language essentially, yes, absolutely." "But it is, what, a kilometre away from our site?" "And if only we could definitely say that this place name belonged to this place, then I think we'd have our name." "It's a tempting theory - that someone simply misunderstood the local Gaelic pronunciation of "chapel", and maybe we do have a name for the site." "But that's all on hold now because we may just have hit burials at the chapel." "It's possible." "You know, how I said I thought there was going to be another of these features this way with another narrow gap between?" "Well, that soil there is also very soft." "So there's another grave that side?" "There might be something else that side." "We might have a line of these." "That's just what you get outside these chapels in the North isn't it?" "." "They're so closely packed up against the church or chapel walls, there's no space between them." "there's no space between them." "No." "Mick, Helen, Tony, do you want to come over here?" "What have you got?" "." "What have you got?" "." "Have you got something else?" "You won't believe what I've got here." "I was just cleaning here under the altar area." "You can see this cut there." "There's a void in there." "Do you want to just jump in here, Tony?" "If that's all right." "Yeah, get in there." "It's difficult to see but that's the void there, if you look down right in that hole at this end of the cut." "OhI What's that in there?" "I" "The white stuff, I think that's bone." "It's pretty degraded but..." "They're coming up thick and fast now, aren't they?" "You know who that is?" "If its under where the altar would be isn't it?" "." "That's the most important place, that's the founder, that's the chap who's cill it is." "Look where it is - right at the east end." "Oh, fantasticI What a findI" "That is just stupendous." "Matt has just uncovered the grave of someone so important that they may well have been regarded as a local saint." "And the news just gets better on this phenomenal site." "This tiny amount of bone was enough to give a radiocarbon date of the early 7th century, within one of two generations of Columba." "It would seem that we're amongst the remains of one of the earliest chapels in Britain." "I think we finally understand what we've got here, one of these things called a leacht, which is like an outside altar-cum-shrine." "It ought to have a cross or something marking it." "Phil, I reckon, you've now got that," "I think, that slot in the middle." "Well, absolutely Mick." "You can see here, look at the way these stones are all in a line stacked up." "That is probably where..." "Gosh, yeah." "Gosh, yeah." "..the cross would have stood." "It's a stunning discovery." "But what's almost unbelievable is what happened next." "With the last scrape of the day, we found this..." "Hidden in plain sight amongst the hundreds of stones we've been examining for three days is a part of the original Celtic cross that would have stood proud outside the eastern end of this chapel." "But the chapel didn't just stand here in splendid isolation." "We now believe it was at the heart of a small 7th-century monastic site which must have been founded by the monks based at Saint Columba's Iona monastery." "It's a find that will enter the history books." "And we even think we can give a name to this monastery." "Tony, you remember I was saying that one of the problems of identifying this site as that of a chapel was that we didn't have the Gaelic place name that should have come down in folklore?" "It's so frustrating, isn't it?" "." "Yeah, and Alisdair had that theory that what was marked on the map as" "Coille Creag a Chait could have been a corruption of Cill Creag a Chait." "What do we think the name means?" "Well, "creag a chait" means "cliff of the cat", somewhere on a cliff, so it would be "church at the cliff of the cats"." "Now, if we were looking for the name of the person who might be buried here, we haven't got it yet, but looking at "creag a chait" might be a very good place to start." "And what's so frustrating is that if some 18th-century bureaucrat had known the Gaelic and had written this all down properly, then we could have solved this mystery a day and a half ago." "Except I don't think we would have had to solve, I think somebody would have come here before now." "That mystery is what's preserved it for us." "Bev, three days ago I asked you what you'd like us to find." "Can you remember what you said?" "Can you remember what you said?" ""I'd like you to find the floor, please."" "We certainly found you the floorI" "We found you what's underneath the floorI" "Can you remember, Hylda, what you wanted?" "Can you remember, Hylda, what you wanted?" "I wanted to find some bones." "And we've got bones aplenty, haven't we?" "That may well be the skull of the man who originally founded this chapel over 1,500 years ago." "FantasticI" "So, we've got you a chapel, we've got you a monastery and we may well have got you the bones of a saint." "UnbelievableI" "The perfect Time Team." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd."