Colin Welch of Research Resource Archaeology talks about the dig to uncover what’s left of a V2 rocket that exploded in Westerham in 1945
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We're looking at a V2 rocket at Westerham in Kent that came down on the 11th of March
00:071945, 10.03 in the morning. We knew beforehand where it had come down because we've studied
00:15aerial photographs, we've got a lot of archive resources, we've plotted every V1 and V2 that's
00:20come down in this country, 1944 and 1945. So before we got here we had a fair idea where
00:28the thing was. We took a scrape off the surface and found the most extraordinary spherical
00:34crater shape in the topsoil. We slot trenched the excavation this time at the end of the
00:40trajectory which meant that we could control the material that was coming out of the trenches
00:47in context. So they've all gone to the finest trays that are labelled. We found some extraordinary
00:53evidence but the amazing thing is that it's all at a shallow depth. This is the first
00:59site that we've investigated where there were casualties. There were many people injured
01:04from the impact and sadly one person died.