Time Team

Smallhythe, Kent (6x6)

Air date: Feb 07, 1999

You wouldn’t think that this ordinary looking field and this little drainage ditch had got much to do with England’s seafaring heritage. For a start, we're about ten miles from the sea at a place called Smallhythe in Kent. But around the time of the battle of Agincourt in the early 1400’s, somewhere round here, there was a royal dockyard big enough to build thousand ton ships. If that’s true then where are the docks now, and where’s there a river or an estuary big enough to launch those great wooden ships? As usual, we got just three days to find out.