Yesterday (22nd May), TV star Richard Wilson came to do some filming at our excavation site inside the Williams & Griffin store in the High Street at Colchester, for a new ITV television travelogue of the counties of Britain, based on the Shell County Guides (motoring travel guides published from 1934 by the Shell oil company; Essex, by historian Norman Scarfe, was published in 1968). Richard spoke mainly to Trust archaeologist Adam Wightman, who is supervising the site, but he also spoke to Trust excavator Stefania Usai about her discovery last week of a Roman intaglio.
We have just completed our work on the site, which is the first of three which we will excavate within the Williams & Griffin store, ahead of its major refurbishment. This site was extremely interesting. We broke through the concrete floor and began to excavate immediately below it. We uncovered the demolition debris and then the remains of buildings of the modern iron foundry which stood here from 1792 to 1920. We had to excavate all the post-Roman robber-trenches on the site to reach Roman material, and this was fascinating. We uncovered the remains of a well-appointed Roman town-house which, we think, had not been demolished until the early medieval period. Below that we uncovered a thick deposit of burnt debris, which represented the collapsed remains of a Roman building which was destroyed during the Boudican revolt in AD 60/1. This debris was lying on top of a burnt floor, which was made of the non-burnt remains of an earlier Roman, military building on the site. This building stood in the legionary fortress and it must have been demolished in the AD 50s. Using our plan of the fortress, we can work out what this building was – the living quarters of a junior officer (a tribune) in the Roman army’s Twentieth Legion, which was stationed in Colchester after the Roman invasion of AD 43, until AD 49, when the fortress here was replaced by a colony of legionary veterans.
Look out for the Trust team and the site when the Essex episode of the travelogue hits the small screen!
Richard Wilson enjoys a very successful career as an actor on television, in film and on stage, including directing and presenting, but he is probably most famous for his role as Victor Meldrew in the BBC television sitcom One foot in the grave, between 1990 and 2000. He recently starred as Gaius in the BBC television series Merlin. He will be joining the cast of the Frinton Summer Theatre for a week in 2014, for their 75th anniversary season.
Our excavations at the Williams & Griffin store are being funded by Fenwick Ltd. Many thanks to fellow subcontractor on site Sir Robert McAlpine and their team for all their help yesterday.
The images show Richard Wilson at our site yesterday: talking to Adam, being filmed, and filming on site.
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