Time Team (1994)

Golfers at a popular East Midlands golf club now know that a huge wooded bank beside their fairway is a rather special area of 'rough'. Time Team's experts discovered, that 90 years ago it was a machine gun firing range - and buried in the bank are tens of thousands of spent bullets. Belton House near Grantham may be one of Britain's finest stately homes but during World War I, the grounds were home to thousands of men training for frontline duties. It was where the Machine Gun Corps was created and its troops were trained. The Corps was set up as a response to German superiority in using these deadly weapons and became vital to the war effort. Most of the Machine Gun Corps' records were destroyed, first in a fire and then in the Blitz in World War II. Today almost nothing is visible above ground. Tony Robinson and the Team have quite a task to locate the hundreds of barrack blocks, kitchen blocks, roads, social centres and shooting ranges. To the Team's relief, the dig is rich in finds, revealing glimpses of the men's lives in wartime; whether from the site of the YMCA, where a cup of cocoa could be had for a few pence, or from the hastily erected huts where they lived for their six weeks of intensive training. They uncover stories of young men who went so bravely to their deaths. Of the 170,000 who trained here more than 12,000 were killed and another 50,000 injured. The Corps' nickname was 'the Suicide Club'. The sound of a Vickers gun reverberating around the park for the first time in 90 years provides a shocking but fitting tribute.

Tony and the Team uncover their largest ever range and number of items from Roman Britain, and undertake their most ambitious geophysics project to date. The archaeologists explore a spectacular site at Brancaster in Norfolk, which is believed to have been a Roman 'Shore-Fort'. Excavations could determine how large it was, what it looked like, and whether it was one of the key military outposts of Roman Britain. If the site turns out to be as significant as the Team hope, it suggests this question: Why build a major stronghold in such a far-flung corner of the country? As the Team try to answer, they unearth an unprecedented 2500 finds, which provide lessons about everything from Roman sports to the decorative arts and even cockfighting. They even find a spectacular piece of a legionary's armour in a previously hidden chamber. The Team also take on a high-definition geophysics survey covering 24 acres. It generates so much data that the computers grind to halt. Can they be fixed in time to reveal the site's layout? The biggest surprise reveals evidence of a staggering level of trade with the local population, and clues as to how wealthy nearby Britons became on the back of the Roman presence.

Time Team investigate a huge hill near Cardiff that may be immensely significant; is it the long-lost Iron Age capital of South Wales? During the course of their investigations the archaeologists make one particularly rare discovery: the most complete Early Iron Age cup ever found in South Wales, which proves that the site is from the earliest part of the Iron Age, at around 800BC. A huge hill dominates the Ely housing estate in Cardiff. Its towering ramparts and deep ditches identify it as a hillfort, and the effort of their construction indicates that this was no ordinary Iron Age homestead. The site's so big that thousands of people could have lived up here. It's never been explored before. If there were houses, none are visible now and the age of the fort has always been a mystery. Tony Robinson and the Team have five acres of hilltop, half a mile of ramparts and ditches and just three days to answer some very big questions. Fortunately local residents are keen to help, and finds such as jewellery and fine drinking vessels show that Iron Age domestic life in the area was rich and colourful. But finding any houses is harder than anyone imagined and provokes fierce arguments amongst the Team as time ticks away. But the hours of careful scraping and one spectacular find do pay off, revealing that Cardiff's hillfort is as old and as important as anyone could have hoped.

Tony and the team attempt to help Hektor Rous, the son of 'Aussie Earl' Keith Rous, work out the mysterious history of the family's Tudor country home in Suffolk.

Tony and the team work with veterans of the war in Afghanistan, investigating the ancient Barrow Clump on Salisbury Plain, where they discover burials from 2000BC and rare Saxon finds.

Tony and the team make their way to the Lake District on an expedition that takes them both higher and deeper than they've ever been before. They are looking for a forgotten piece of the nation's industrial heritage.

Oakham Castle is the best preserved 12th-century building in Britain, but there's much more to it than meets the eye.

Roman remains have been turning up in an Oxfordshire field for decades, where a student in the 1960s believed he had uncovered a Roman mosaic.

Tony and the Team search for the remains of a renegade knight's Norman castle in one of Northern Ireland's most picturesque spots. King John sent John de Courcy to Ireland in 1170 as part of his invasion force, but de Courcy rebelled against his king's orders, instead establishing his own small kingdom and building a fine castle to defend it. King John refused to tolerate his disobedience and sent the loyal Hugh de Lacy across the Irish Sea to defeat him. De Courcy's castle was rebuilt, and much of its replacement is still standing. But the experts are convinced that some of what remains dates from de Courcy's time, and the archaeologists set out to find the lost structures. But as they survey and dig within the huge castle walls, they are in for a big surprise. It seems the site was occupied by tribal chiefs for many centuries before anyone had even heard of the Normans.

For 100 years schoolboys have been playing a few feet above the remains of the most opulent palace in Britain. The Manor of More was masterminded by Henry VIII's right-hand man, the all-powerful religious leader and statesman Cardinal Wolsey, who was also responsible for Hampton Court Palace. Tudor visitors remarked that it was grander than Hampton Court. But the palace went missing until the 1950s, when a group of pupils at Northwood School in Hertfordshire discovered its remains beneath their school playing field. Now one of those schoolboys - Martin Biddle, who is now one of the country's most distinguished archaeologists - joins Tony and the Team as they try to piece together the complete picture of this huge palace. In its heyday, the Manor of More would have been an opulent playground fit for royalty and state visitors. Like Hampton Court, it was built as a place in which to entertain. Thomas More and Catherine of Aragon would have known it intimately.

When the Barlowsbought Upton Castle in Pembrokeshire they weren't sure if it was a Victorian folly or an Anglo-Norman castle. Time Team try to discover if it was one of the Anglo-Norman castles built to defend 'Little England beyond Wales' from the locals.

Tony Robinson celebrates the more than 150 practical experiments and re-creations that he and the Team have conducted over 20 years in order to unlock the mysteries exposed by their digs. Rebuilding - and even reliving - the past is a controversial area of archaeology. But it's one that Time Team has long championed, and one that has yielded some amazing results. This programme revisits some of the programme's greatest hits, from recreating individual objects such as Stone Age axes, Roman pewter bowls, medieval pottery and a Stone Age sword that throws new light on the myth of King Arthur's Excalibur, to building an entire Iron Age house and a Roman machine that lifted water from a deep well. The programme also revisits some of Time Team's forays into living history, from finding out what it felt like to be in Dad's Army to surviving 24 hours as a Victorian prisoner, in an attempt to see the past through our ancestors' eyes.

Tony takes a look back at the best bits from two decades and over 250 episodes.

Tony Robinson reveals astonishing new evidence that shows how, 8000 years ago, a huge tsunami swamped the east coast of Britain.

Lincoln has been dominated by its castle for over 1000 years. Its high stone walls and gatehouses were built to impress the locals with Norman power, and it has housed medieval dungeons and Victorian and Georgian jails. Extraordinarily, today the castle is still a centre for justice and punishment, containing an active court. As part of a £19million refurbishment programme, a preparatory archaeological dig at the castle is revealing new secrets about the horrors of its early jails. Sir Tony Robinson and the Time Team cameras have had exclusive access to the dig. With help from Phil Harding and Alex Langlands, Tony traces the story of punishment over the course of a millennium. He discovers that, behind the walls of Lincoln Castle, the Victorians launched an experiment in prison justice that pushed human beings to their limits. Some went mad, many died, and the prison regime broke down in shocking circumstances. In this grim jail in the heart of the city, something went badly wrong.