With a history that goes back 2,000 years.
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Channel 4's TIME TEAM's, 3 day live excavation in York
First geophysics result
The very first geophysics result from this year's 'live' comes from the St Leonard's medieval hospital site, which the team surveyed with magnetometry, resistivity and ground-penetrating radar.
The magnetometry results were the most striking. There was a mass of incredibly strong responses parallel with both the Roman wall and the library, extending about 25 metres and going right through a flower bed.
Magnetometry results However, according to Dr Chris Gaffney, what they were seeing didn't look medieval to them, and simply raised questions. Was it a dump a modern midden? Or was it an early flower bed that had been backfilled with bricks and bits of iron (lots of ferrous material was showing up)? There is a slight earthwork connected with this area, what did that signify?
In the end, the answer was found by talking with people with local knowledge. The anomaly is a World War II air raid shelter, right in the middle of one of Time Team's premier sites! York Archaeological Trust director Peter Addyman is very excited by this discovery, he was actively involved in the recent 'Defence of the Realm' project that attempted to log all remaining WWII relicts left in Britain. Here is one right on his doorstep, and it's the only one in the UK that's part of a scheduled site!
For Time Team, however, it presents a problem as the air raid shelter has to be recorded, and its main quest, the medieval hospital, remains elusive.
An Ivarr
who ruled at Jorvik,
Cut an Eagle
on the back of Aella.
From Egil's Saga, translated by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards (Penguin, 1976). This extract from an Icelandic saga tells how the hero Egil avoids extreme punishment from the last Viking king of York the infamous Erik (or Eirik) Bloodaxe by declaiming a poem dripping with praise of the king:
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