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Alice Roberts travels across the Midlands, looking at the best archaeology uncovered last year in the heart of England.

In a Digging for Britain exclusive, we join palaeontologist Dr Dean Lomax in the middle of the largest artificial lake in the country, Rutland Water. Today, this nature reserve is home to many species of wildlife, but the team here are unearthing evidence of a far more monstrous past. They are painstakingly removing the Jurassic clay to reveal a 180 million-year-old fossil– which they hope will be the largest of its kind ever found in Britain.

Just outside Leicester, Alice joins a team of archaeologists who are investigating a mysterious mound thought to be an Iron Age hillfort, but what they unearth tells a rich story of bandits, religious crusades and connections across the medieval world.

In Cambridge, our dig diary cameras are present to witness archaeologists unearthing an extraordinary array of exquisite artefacts from an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Historian Onyeka Nubia investigates astonishing traces of ancient textiles which have survived for over 1,500 years.

Four years ago, a spectacular dig in the centre of the modern city of Leicester revealed incredible details of the origins of this Roman town. Now, archaeologists share their incredible discoveries in the Digging tent with Alice, including a tiny but exquisite key handle that provides new evidence for the brutality of Roman rule in Britain.

Twenty-five miles outside Coventry, Alice goes to meet a huge team of archaeologists who are excavating a vast and unique Iron Age site. With generations of Iron Age roundhouses sitting next to a Roman-style villa, the site provides an opportunity for archaeologists to investigate the relationship between the two cultures, and ancient artefacts from the site could suggest they were in fact one and the same.