Have you recently arrived at work to find a drone doing your job for you? As in an unmanned aerial vehicle, not a bee. I only ask because it seems to be the pattern.
In areas of conflict they’re taking over from pilots. In areas of recent conflict, they’re taking over from football fans (I’m talking, of course, about Tuesday’s match between Serbia and Albania, where the only flag-waving away supporter to even get into the stadium was a flying robot). Now, in Secrets from the Sky (ITV), they’re taking over from the archaeologists.
To be fair there is one – an actual archeologist, called Ben Robinson – at the controls. Plus Bettany Hughes, also real flesh and blood, is here to talk history. In this first episode they’re looking down, via Ben’s octocopter drone, on Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, for a new perspective on the King Arthur myth.
From above, as well as the medieval castle, the remnants of a much earlier story are visible – defensive earthworks from around the sixth and seventh century, and the footprints of the many buildings a fort might have been protecting. In Truro museum, Hughes is shown bits of pottery of Mediterranean origin, from around AD550, which have been dug up around Tintagel.
All the evidence points to the existence of a centre and trading post of enormous wealth at Tintagel in the dark ages. King Arthur’s? Birthplace of the round table? Well, who knows, but it could certainly be the seed of the legend. Oh, and there’s a fragment of stone, tagged in the sixth century by someone named Artognou, which is a little bit like Arthur. So maybe not a noble king who could slay 940 men singlehandedly, after all, but a graffiti artist.
Fascinating, even if it’s all been known for while. The earthworks and bits of pottery and stone were not discovered by drone: when a fire burned away the grassland in the 80s, they were dug up by archaeologists. The octocopter shows it all very clearly, though, as well as surprising a few tourists. And the north Cornish coast looks gorgeous from up here.
