From a WW2 Raf Base Camp to Stone Age, one country park in Kent boasts a huge range of historical artifacts. Follow the archaeological team and our reporter Finn Macdiarmid across Shorne Woods to investigate the kind of people who lived, fought, worked and died from as far back as 6,000 years ago.
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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.