The Woodwoses and Wildmen of Suffolk - a talk for Dunwich Museum, now online

MY TALK for Dunwich Museum on The Woodwoses and Wildmen of Suffolk is now online, here. Many thanks to Dunwich Museum managers - Jane Hamilton and Sarah Peel for making this talk possible and especially to Sarah for editing it.

The talk was a fundraiser for Dunwich Museum. If you enjoy the talk, please consider donating to Dunwich Museum. A donation of around £6 per visitor is enough to keep the Museum going. All heritage tourist attractions seem to have seen visitor numbers fall and not recover since Covid, so we as a sector are increasingly dependant on donations.

At the request of some attendees I have included some notes to the talk with links, adding also some additional research since the talk happened on 8 October 2025.

Slide 2 The talk is an update from Chapter 1 of the book Mystery Animals of Suffolk, (Matt Salusbury, Leiston Press 2023), available via bigcatsofsuffolk.com  (it has a list of Suffolk bookshops where you can buy it) or via its distributor Bittern Books of Norwich.

There are updates on Mystery Animals of Suffolk and on Suffolk big cat sighings on used-to-be-Twitter at @MysteryAnimals  and on BlueSky at https://bsky.social/mysteryanimals.

The mailing list for Mystery Animals of Suffolk is via mysteryanimalsofsuffolk@gn.apc.org The mailing list for Dunwich Museum is chronicles@dunwichmuseum.org.uk

Slide 5 King Charles VI of France and others were burnt while cavorting in wildman costumes at a ball in 1392. I erroneously said King Charles VI burnt to death at the ball - he survived, but the trauma of the fire greatly exacerbated his existing mental illness. His brother Louis, Duke of Orleans, was killed, along with a friend of Louis.

Slide 8 Saint Onuphirus, wildman saint.

  Slide 9 The Four Sons of Aymon and the Horse Beyard features the four sons killing wildmen on an island. The Ros Beyard parade held every 10 years in Dendermonde, Belgium, is based on The Four Sons of Aymon. Five years before the parade, the bearers of the Pijnders' Guild - strong men who carry the float of the horse Beyard - are selected in the "Wildemanloop", the Wildman Run, in which they strip to their underpants and glue feathers to themselves (to look like wildmen?) and compete in feats of strength.

Slide 10 The Romance of Alexander

  Slide 11 - the Wildman of Orford, in Ralph of Coggeshall's  of the English

  Slide 13 - See Simon Knott’s  excellent Suffolk Churches website.

   Slide 56 - Many of the Suffolk wildmen are in my Fortean Times article The Woodwoses of Suffolk. and also in Chapter 1 of Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

  Slide 58 - Michael Angelo Rooker, View of the Interior of All Saints, Dunwich, Suffolk, V and A Museum; Sketch of the interior of All Saints, Dunwich, photo from Dowcra Collection, Dunwich Museum, see e-hive.

Slide 62 - "wildeman" pubs in Belgium and the Netherlands: In De Wildeman beer tasting pub, Amsterdam
Restaurant De Wildeman, Tielt, Belgium
Hotel Wildeman, Lemmer, Netherlands (closed)
De Wildeman Community Centre and Cafe, Herent, Belgium 
Café Brasserie De Wildeman, Saantpoort Noord, Netherlands
Café Restaurant De Wildeman, Vierlingsbeek, Netherlands
Café De Wildeman, Oirschot, Netherlands
Grand Café De Wildeman, Eindhoven, Netherlands
De Wildeman, Ziekerzee, Netherlands (closed)
Café Brasserie De Wildeman, Ijmuiden, Netherlands
Restaurant De Geiser Wildman, Noordeloos, Netherlands 
A new De Wildeman pub recently opened in Dendermonde, Belgium

See below for subsequent research uncovering a Wildman pub in Norwich.

Slide 66 - The Fight between Carnvial and Lent, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559.

Slide 70 - sighting of a "pale ape" in Elveden, #Suffolk, reported to The Paranormal Database.

Slide 71  Donate to Dunwich Museum

See also @DiscoverDunwich on used-to-be-Twitter, @DiscoverDunwich.bsky.social and Dunwich Museum on Facebook and Insta.

Mailing list for Dunwich Museum news and events chronicles@dunwichmuseum.org.uk

Maaike who joined the talk from the Netherlands contacted me soon afterwards to tell me about Pulsatila vulgaris, the herbaceous perennial flower known in England by many names, including April fool, badger, blue money, cat's eyes, Coventry bells, Dane's blood and many others. In Dutch it's known as wildemanskruid, wild man's herb, possibly because it has "hairy" flowers.

Dunwich Museum trustee Sue Hardy at the talk recalled that her grandmother - who was a child who grew up not far from Windsor Castle in Buckinghamshire around 1890 - used to play a game called "Green Man Arise." Whenever the found a big pile of freshly mown grass, possibly to be made into hay, one of the children would climb into it. The other children would shout "Green Man, Green Man, Arise!" and then the child would burst out of the pile of grass and chase the others.

Sue also brought up another wildman in the Bible (besides Nebacubnezzer and John the Baptist, who I mentioned), Samson. I noted that in Tombland, an ancient street in Norwich, there are two wooden giants outside a building that look a lot like some of the little Suffolk woodwoses in the churches. They are known as Samson and Hercules.

They are faithful reproductions of the 1657 originals that are now in the Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell. (It's five-minute walk from their replicas in Tombland.) By the 1990s they were much decayed, Sampson's feet were gone. The fibreglass reproductions were repainted many times, when I saw them they were painted bright red as the property they stand outside was recently a lobster restaurant. They wear lion skins and carry clubs. Their names are Samson and Hercules. (I photographed them back in 2017, I've forgotten which is Samson and which is Hercules.) Here's a photo of them:

Samson and Hercules in Tombland, Norwich

Still on the subject of Norwich, thanks to Ian Simmons. Fortean Times news editor, for bringing to my attention another East Anglian Wildman pub. It's in Norwich's Bedford Street, on the corner of Bridewell Alley. (Yes, a minute's walk away from the Museum of Norwich.) This Wildman pub, though, is thought to be of much later vintage than the woodwoses in East Anglian churches, though. Its name is believed to commemorate Peter the Wild Boy, found in 1725 living wild in the forest and walking on all fours in a forest near Hamelin, now in Germany, by a hunting expedition that included King George I of England, then on a visit to his native Hanover.

Peter was brought to London, when interest in him subsided he was put in their care of one of the royal household servants and their family in Northchurch, Hertfordshire. Peter went missing in the summer of 1751.

He turned up in October of the year - among the inmates of Norwich City Gaol, then in the city centre opposite the Guildhall, near where the Wildman pub stands today. The prison's inmates had to be evacuated as a fire swept through the neighbourhood and Peter was identified. He was returned to Northchurch, in later life he eventually learnt to say a few words and to understand what was being said to him. He died in 1785, his grave still stands in Northchurch.



Update (07 02 2026): Here's a report of another East Anglian "British Bigfoot" sighting at Holkham Beach, Norfolk, from the Daily Star, 28 August 2022.

Sandie Sheals finds fossils on the sea shore

This appeared in Discover Dunwich, the historical and archaeological journal of Dunwich Museum, Issue 3, Summer/Autumn 2021.

MANY OF the fossils in Dunwich Museum's collection have been kindly donated by Sandie Sheals. She has a good eye for unusual objects among the shingle.

What makes these many finds extraordinary is that Sandie's usually in Dunwich for just one week a year. How does she do it? What's her secret?

Sheals finds in the collection – top left: whale vertebra; top right: fragment of a mammoth or elephant's tooth; bottom left: fragment of a fossil deer antler; bottom right: a piece of prehistoric mammal bone. Photos: Dunwich Museum.

I've always loved finding things. As a child I was one of those kids who walked looking down at the small things rather than the taking in the big views. I'd find lots of things, from a small weed to an interesting stone, a fossil, bit of glass or something that's been lost by someone recently or thousands of years ago.

When I was about eight I found a bit of Fool's Gold (the mineral iron pyrites) in a piece of flint in a pile of builder's rubble, It made me wonder what else I would find.

I lived in Suffolk as a child and often visited the Suffolk coast. I still visit with my family and my own grown-up children. Every year we stay for a week or two and we do the odd day trips as well. We always seem find something interesting.

We love beachcombing, and the great walk between the mysterious Dunwich and Walberswick.This is where I find most of the treasures I take to Dunwich Museum. I think it's because this is where we spend most of our time, relaxing, playing, watching the wildlife and the sea.

Between Dunwich and Walberswick we've found treasures including fossils, worked flint, semi-precious stones, seed pods from thousands of miles away, bits of coral reef, bits of ancient petrified wood, bricks, pottery and glass. Also bits of ancient leather shoes including very small children’s shoes, fragments of human bone, a World War Two mine and much else that would need identifying.

I've also found things nearby at Southwold and Covehithe and Minsmere beaches too.

I have little knowledge of fossils so I gratefully rely on the Dunwich Museum to look and let me know what my finds are.

Visiting local museums like Dunwich helped me imagine what I might find.

I don't go out to look for fossils or anything in particular. I walk along, zigzagging across the beach looking for anything that has an interesting shape or colour or just looks out of place among the shingle. The dark brown colours and shapes of bone fossils stand out against the pebbles.

Advice? Go out to enjoy the walk.You will find something.

Sandie Sheals

All the way from Holland (and Flanders)

For several years now, I have been recording Dutch rubbish (and some from Flanders, Dutch-speaking Belgium) washed up on Suffolk's beaches. As a British and Dutch dual national and Dutch speaker living in Suffolk. I am particularly interested in the writing on this flotsam and jetsom from over the North Sea, which often gives clues to where exactly this washed up rubbish has come from.

"Car, boat, household, technical" Kara brand spray paint, Dingle Beach January 2015

Complementary cigarette lighter from Adinkerke, a seaside village on the Flemish (Belgian) border with France. Adinkerk is where Brits go to buy Belgian tobacco. Tobacco duty in Belgium is lower, and the village is full of giant tobacconists. I've checked, the lighter floats! I once found two of these on Dingle Beach on the same day.

Crate for Holland Fish Auction, Ijmuiden. Ijmuiden is one of the closest Dutch harbours to the East of England, it's where most of the yachts that sail to Suffolk depart from. Found on Covehithe Beach, December 2014

"Koffiemelk" (coffee creamer), gold band "extra creamy". This is the popular Friesche Vlag (Fries Flag) brand, for Friesland in the North of the Netherlands. Found on Covehithe Beach, December 2014. Most Dutch people drink this stuff, rather than milk, in their coffee.

Jumbo brand "halfvolle melk" (semi-skimmed milk) from Veghel, on the coast of North Holland Province, roughly opposite Suffolk. Jumbo is a local discount North Holland supermarket chain.

Bleached "lippenbalsam" (lip balm) stick, Dutch brand, Dunwich Beach, summer 2014

"Nutritional content" information on a Belgian fizzy orange drink bottle, in both Dutch and French. Between Walberswick and Dingle Beach, May 2014.

Dutch-language safety cap, stamped with OPEN/DICHT (open/close) and "Tijdens duwen indrukken" (press in while turning). Between Dunwich and Sizewell, summer 2013.

Most of the items I've found that have come all the way from Holland are milk cartons - those with still legible sell-by dates on them are at least six months old, so they've taken a while to make the voyage of around 90-120 nautical miles over the North Sea to Suffolk's beaches. A lot of these cartons of "halfvolle melk" (semi-skimmed milk) are from local dairies in Noord Holland (North Holland) - the province of the Netherlands that you'd come to if you sailed in a straight line from the Suffolk coast. Some cartons - like the Melken brand semi-skimmed vanilla yoghurt carton below - are from dairies in Zuid Holland, a little bit further down the coast.


Melkan vanilla yoghurt from Beesd in the province of South Holland proudly declares that it's made from milk from cows that have been eating grass in a field for at least six hours a day for the past 120 days.

Milk cartons aren't the sort of thing you'd take to the beach with you and you'd be unlikely to take milk cartons with you on a sailing boat unless you were on a long voyage all the way to England. Dutch people on short sailing trips would be more likely to take "koffiemelk" (coffee creamer, see above) that they drink with coffee (they don't drink milk in their tea). Coffee milk keeps better.

A sailing trip to bring over a boat to Suffolk would take around 22 hours on a summer night, according to the two sailors I met at Walberswick Harbour last summer, who took that long to sail their brother-in-law's boat from Ijmuiden.




Directions to the Netherlands' major cities are given on the Euroscope, the monument marking the mainland UK's easternmost point at Ness Point, Lowestoft. There's also a sign pointing out to sea and to the nearest Dutch and Belgian ports outside the Seaman's Reading Room at Southwold (below).

Some items originating in the Netherlands that end up washed up on Suffolk beaches could have been lost overboard on sailing boats. There's a fair amount of tubes of lubricant for boats and their engines, and I've found one safety top of some kind of container with a Dutch-language version of the "press inwards while twisting off" screw-top. Also notable are the crates stamped with "property of Holland Fish Auction, Ijmuiden" and "Property of Fish Store Holland Northern" (Eigendom Vis Afslag Hollands Noorden). I looked up this particular fish cold storage facility online and it's in the relatively small fishing port of Den Oever, which is right down the coast from Den Helder, a big Navy port. Were a crate to fall off the side of the docks at Den Helder or Den Oever and be swept out to see, coastal Suffolk is where it would end up.

This crate from the Den Oever fish cold storage facility, used by the local fishing fleet to store their catch when it's landed, was at the "Plastic Palace" between Dunwich Heath and Sizewell Beach in the summer of 2013.

The Dutch-language lettering on this tube of lubricant reads, "Universal Water-resistant Spreadable Grease." It presumably fell off, or was discarded from, a boat. Found between Dunwich and Sizewell, 2013.

And there's also packaging from Belgium washed up on Suffolk's coast - from Flanders (Vlanderen) the autonomous Dutch-speaking region of Belgium that occupies the coast. Most Belgian packaging (and some Dutch packaging, destined for the "Benelux" market) is in Dutch and French. Notable among the Belgian rubbish ending up on our shores are the cigarette lighters from Adinkerke, where Brits go after they've filled the van at Calais with alcohol. Adinkerke's right on the French-Belgian border and cheap tobacco, with a lower level of duty, is what they're after. Whether Adinkerke lighters have washed up on Suffolk Coastal all the way from the Flemish coast, of whether they were dropped over the side of a Channel ferry on its way into a ferry port on the South coast is unclear. (I'm in contact with an oceanographer who can talk me through the sea currents between the Low Countries and Suffolk.)

Sty brand mineral water from Belgium, with bilingual Dutch and French label. Found between Walberswick and Dingle Beach, 2014

How this milk carton from the landlocked Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, inland from Belgium, came to be washed up on Southwold Beach in June 2014 is a bit of a mystery! Luxembourg does have a river fleet that cruises the major Belgian waterways carrying freight all the way to the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp, so it may have reached Southwold through that route.

And here's an oil cap all the way from Germany, found between Dunwich and Sizewell in 2013. It would have had to drift quite a long way south to arrive in Suffolk

Et viola! Creme fraiche apparently all the way from France, in an exclusively French-language carton. This one was found in Covehithe in early 2014. The majority of foreign finds on Suffolk's beaches, though are Dutch. Beachcombing one day in early 2015 between Dingle and Walberswick, about half the items I found whose origin was identifiable were from the Netherlands.

This list of ingredients on a carobonated fizzy orange bottle found in Dingle (above) in early 2014 is in French and Dutch, but four-figure postcode starting with a 9 identifies it as coming from Brakel in Gelderland (southeast Netherlands). Amsterdam postcodes would start with "10", for example.

Typically Dutch: Fresian cows grazing the fens and a windmill feature on this carton of Smeek cheese spread. The Dutch do love their dairy products! This one was on display at the "Plastic Palace" just south of Dunwich Heath in 2013.

There's plenty more where that came from! And plenty more photos. I haven't come across any Dutch rubbish on Suffolk beaches for many months, though. Most of my finds have been in remote stretches of the coast between beaches where people go, or in largely deserted beaches like Covehithe, and off-season, when there are long intervals between beach-cleans. I suspect that many of my finds were left over from various tidal surges that flooded the Suffolk coast, or "overtopping," and I have a theory that Dutch residents along the coast had dutifully put their cartons in the correct recycling bins one winter's night, only for these to be swept out to sea by a sudden tidal surge.

I've also heard the theory that there were "too many bottletops" on East Anglia's coast, that some of the plastic bottlecaps found there in great abundance couldn't have got there by people leaving them on East Anglian beaches alone, some must have come from the North Sea. The same source speculated on whether there's a great graveyard of East Anglian plastic bottlecaps somewhere on the coast of Holland or Germany.

Stichting De Noordzee (The North Sea Foundation), the national charity that help organise beach-cleans up the Dutch coast and on the beaches of "the islands" to the North, has a report from the 2014 and 2013 "National Beach-clean Tours" on its website.

Last year, the most frequently found bits of rubbish were fishing line and netting, balloons with string attached, and little bits of plastic. Based on the 2013 Beach-Clean Tour, they estimated there were around 514,000 bits of fishing line lying around on the Dutch coast.

There was also "a great increase in the quantity of tops of plastic bottles observed." Thousands of plastic tops were gathered during the National Beach-clean Tour, and these were made into a 2.5-metre sculpture named "Capman."

On tourist beaches, there was a lot of packaging for drinks and sweets, cigarette ends and plastic bags. On "non-tourist" beaches, "maritime" items were found: wooden pallets, jerrycans, cleaning fluid and paraffin (containers?) accounted for the biggest share of the rubbish.

I've parked this draft article here as I'm making some pitches - one for a project in Suffolk - possibly a small travelling exhibition or series of talks or activities in schools, or both. I also hope to approach East Anglian print media, as well as print media in the Netherlands, where "the environment" is always a very hot topic.

Watch this space!

Words and images: Copyright Matt Salusbury

Big cats on BBC Radio Suffolk

Update (01/02/15) The show is no longer available on the BBC i-player. Jon Wright promised to let me have some audio clips from the programme, which I'll link from this site as and when I've got them. Much of the material from the programme will be in Mystery Animals of Suffolk, due out late Spring.

You have less than three weeks to listen to me on the I-player talking about big cats in Suffolk on Jon Walsh's New Year's Day show on BBC Radio Suffolk.

The programme is here (UK only, I'm afraid).


Fast forward through the first 41.00 minutes of banter, cryptic clues and travel news.

There then follows music with a "cat theme" (The Cure's Love Cats, The Eye of the Tiger, etc. etc.) You may, if you wish, pause briefly at 34.51 while Jon Walsh makes gentle fun of my big cat investigator's headgear, which is all over by 36.16.

The actual serious chat about big cats, recorded on Dunwich Heath National Trust reserve in December, doesn't start till 41.00 and is over by around 52.00 (timings not exact, sorry!) We chose Dunwich Heath because it's near my home, and also because the area was the location of several sightings - one by a member of staff at the reserve - of a black big cat around 2008, all of which I describe in the interview. As I point out on air, Dunwich Heath's mix of wetlands, reedbeds and dunes is, apparently, the favoured habitat of Britain's big cats - "big cat country."

At 01.09.36 hours the serious stuff about big cats in Suffolk resumes, including some more recent West Suffolk sightings, until around 01.16.20

At 01.38.40 hours into the show, the big cats in Suffolk theme starts again with witness testimony.

Suffolk Wildlife Trust warden Matt Gooch (I'd talked to him on the phone before) phones in with his account of a January 2011 encounter in the snow with a "big black cat-like creature that loped off in the marshes" near Oulton Dyke, which connects Oulton Broad (near Lowestoft) with the River Waveney, in the Beccles Marshes nature reserve. Matt added that a neighbouring landowner said he saw a big cat (Matt told me earlier the landowner didn't want to be named) and that a letter from the Broads Authority had come round earlier stating that a visitor said they'd seen a big cat.

Matt's testimony is finished by 01.56.00.

Next up is Stanley, a former RSPCA inspector based at South Godson near Ipswich in the 1960s, who described a "glut" of lion cubs kept as pets, whose owners sought advice about vaccinating them. Most of these ended up in local wildlife parks. Stanley also said a friend of his had seen "a very large" black cat near Dedham (a very short distance over the Essex border), and that as an RSPCA inspector he'd had to trap many feral and "semi-feral cats", which were generally "slightly bigger" than domestic cats.

Stanley's finished by 02.07.00, and a couple of minutes after that is my appeal for more information on big cats in Suffolk, especially form Mid-Suffolk, Babeargh, West Suffolk, and also for fairy and Black Shuck anecdotes. No ghosts please, except animal ghosts.

At 02.14.12 David in Bury St Edmunds says he's seen four big cats over the years, including one in Barham (near Thetford) while delivering as a UPS driver, and another jumping over Culford School gates in West Stow, which he saw while working as a taxi driver. As a security guard at Fornham All Saints Golf Club, with a German shepherd dog he saw yet another big cat.

Then (at 02.57.00) Charlie Haylock recounts how "eighteen years ago" (around 1996, the beginning of the first big wave of Suffolk sightings), he saw a black cat, a "big'un" a very short distance away from his car ("We were a couple of feet from each other") when he was driving from Stonham Aspall to Debenham. He reported it to the police station at Debenham. Two police officers went out in a car to investigate.

Then an email is read out from Mark Frost, who saw a shiny big black cat while "combining" (working in a combine harvester) in a field at Hemley near Waldringfield. Mark radioed his colleague, who told him he'd seen it 45 minutes earlier field signs were found - a pawprint, scratch marks and a poo that smelt "like nothing else." Msrk's testimony is over by 03.00.00 on the dot. He adds that a neighbouring landowner reported a calf killed by something big.

Finally, at 03.13.21, Kevin Wood from Woodbridge emailed to say he'd seen "a large black cat that looked at him" at about 5am on Hatcheston Road, one day around 1990 5am, before it "bounded away." Another time, Mark saw "a dead one" (a dead big cat) by the road, the body had been removed when he returned (Kevin's testimony finished at 03.13.54).

It'll all be in Mystery Animals of Suffolk, out in late Spring, from CFZ Press. Meanwhile, updates are here or more info via mysteryanimalsofsuffolk@gn.apc.org

Time Team Dunwich sneak preview - discovery of jug handle causes much excitement

TIme Team presenter interviews archeologist at Dunwich Maison Dieu dig, with Flora Tea Rooms in the background, June 2011

Channel 4's Time Team, which goes out a week on Sunday (Sunday 5 February 2012) is from the village of Dunwich in Suffolk, formerly England's third biggest city in the Middle Ages before it started falling into the sea.

The excavation, in a very rainy week in June last year, was in the grounds of the ruined Greyfriars Monastery, English Hertiage's most threatened site - thry expect to lose it to the sea in the next 50 years - and in the car park in front of the Flora Tea Rooms at the beach. Locals in the know were puzzled by the choice of Greyfriars, regarded by many as "archeologically barren", with the last dig in the 1990s believed to have dug up everything there still was to dig up. There were last minute doubts as to whether the Greyfriars dig would go ahead at all.

The dig at the Flora Tea Rooms car park site involved a long, thin trench on the edge of the car park up against the recycling bins and one of the last remaining World War Two pill boxes (the sea has already claimed most of these) and a couple of small trenches right outside the Tea Rooms in front of the tables, avoiding where they thought power, water and gas cables would be.









Long thin trench at the Maison Dieu dig, Dunwich

The Flora Tea Rooms dig was looking for signs of Maison Dieu, a charitable hospital run by a religious order to serve the poor of the then city of Dunwich. There's still at tiny Maision Dieu Hill on the beach, the "hill" is now a patch of eroded ground with a fisherman's shed on it, but it's crumbled away so much the shed's not safe to use anymore.

The village Reading Room served as the HQ, with lots of maps. There are plenty of Medieval surveys of Dunwich. It's in the Domesday Book, with a staggering 15 Frenchmen recorded there within two decades of the Norman Conquest, and a King's Commission was despatched in 1287 to discover why the city's considerable tax revenues had suddenly dried up. (A huge storm had blown down a lot of houses and blocked the harbour with shingle, ending the port's commercial viability, it turned out.) Maps from the 16th century onwards record the ruins in detail.

There was much excitement when Time Team (Wessex Archeology Service, who have a commercial arm, and Suffolk Archeology Service) dug up a jug handle from one of the Flora Tea Room trenches, characteristic of a particular style of Provencal pottery.

Of Maison Dieu itself nothing was found, except that fragments of "posh" ceiling tile, floor tile and dressed Caen stone from Normandy - pulled out of the rubble packing the trench. If these were bits of Maison Dieu, they would have been recycled Maision Dieu rubble used as hardcore for the foundations of a later building on the site.

Meanwhile, up at Greyfrairs, an extraordinary amount of time was apparently spent digging to establish and then stake out exactly where the 1990s dig had been, which seemed an extraordinary boring pursuit. The 1990s dig had resulted in resentment locally, because the finds had apparently been locked away in storage in the Ipswich Museum and never seen the light of day. Dunwich has its own museum (my parents are volunteers in the weekend) which recently got a security upgrade for its exhibition of seals on loan from the British Museum, so there was already lobbying for any Time Team finds to go on display in the Dunwich Museum.












Archeologist (seated) prepares for piece to camera about his exciting jug handle find

On the edge of the Greyfriars site, close to the cliffside wall, there were JCB diggers at work and one archeologist was out in the pouring rain passing a metal detector over the piles of earth they'd thrown up. It was the final day of the dig before the clear-up, and it wasn't looking good. The Dunwich defences, mentioned in chronicles that praised the bravery of the men of Dunwich who withstood a siege by the Earl of Leicester in 1173, was eluding the Time Team.

Soon afterwards, though, I heard that in the final phase of the dig, the Team had found the Dunwich defences - much bigger and much older than anyone had thought. The ditch went down almost five meters, which suggests a pallisade or wall of about the same height, and it has Saxon pottery shards at the bottom.
All these were initial findings, as related to me at the time of the dig, or soon afterwards. We'll have to wait 'till Saturday week's Time Team broadcast to learn of their final conclusions.