Thirty-two years ago, a small group of archaeologists gathered for a weekend in Somerset to make a TV programme about a field in Athelney, the site where once, 1,200 years ago, King Alfred the Great rallied resistance to the invading Viking army.
There weren’t many concessions to showbiz glitz. Instead, a group of blokes with unruly hair and a couple of women walked across a field, talked things over in the pub and, at one point, gathered around a dot matrix printer to watch it slowly disgorging some results. The most exciting artefact they found was a lump of iron slag. No soil was overturned.
