(Arriving at Beauport Park)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Of course, to enjoy leisure time you have to generate wealth. And the Romans quickly set about developing the province as a money-making proposition. Evidence of their industrial activity has turned up in some unlikely places.

(With Gerald Brodribb in the woodland)

Gerald, I think I could be forgiven for saying this just looks like an ordinary wood.

GERALD BRODRIBB
Oh it's far more than. We're walking here on the top edge of a gigantic slag heap which was found by the Victorians about a hundred and twenty years ago.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now what's slag and why is there a slag heap here right in the middle of the wood?

GERALD BRODRIBB
Well, slag shows that there must have been iron working here, because slag is the residue after the iron has been extracted, and it was just thrown away creating an enormous heap.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Gerald Brodribb is an amateur archaeologist, now in his eighties. Nearly thirty years ago he stumbled on the remains of a remarkable Roman industrial complex. Using divining rods he's uncovered a whole network of hidden Roman supply roads, and found slag from the iron workings stacked in huge heaps through the woodland.

GERALD BRODRIBB
Well you walk along with them, and then suddenly they cross over. They can find anything - I mean, they can find stone walls. But rods are very good with the metal. It's the metal. They go bang straight away. How, I don't know. I don't want to know.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Iron was an essential commodity in the expanding Empire, used for weapons, tools, ships, building and much more. Amazingly, what Gerald stumbled across at Beauport Park is reckoned to be the third largest iron working site in the whole Roman Empire.

(By the slag heap at Beauport Park)

We always think of the north as being the industrial heartland of Britain, so it's quite a surprising discovery to find out that down here in Sussex was the industrial heartland of Roman Britain. They've got this amazing slag all over the place. This heavy dark, black material, which is all that's left of those Roman ironworks. This stream actually cuts right through the middle of that huge slag heap.

On this particular piece you can even see the bubbles which have been caused by the heating and then cooling process. And it's a really useful reminder of how this place was once right on the edge of frontier existence. This was a mining town, a mining settlement, where life would have been hard and probably very short, with smoke and furnaces and thousands of slave workers all over the place. It reminds us of how Britain had been absorbed into the machinery of the Roman empire.

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