Brown wrote in his journal that "all the objects shone in the sunshine as on the day they were buried". Gold doesn't tarnish or corrode in the same way as the iron remains of the ship's bolts and other features it came out of the ground looking as it does in the film. Peggy Piggott found the first gold on 21 July, and as digging continued, more and more treasures came to the surface. Brown dashed over, nearly shoving Jacobs to the ground in his haste, and eventually the men uncovered the ship's outline.
He was three days into a dig in the biggest mound on the estate – which, Brown later recalled, "felt rather like digging into a small mountain" – using a coal shovel, pastry brushes and a penknife, his assistant John Jacobs found a rivet.
(Incidentally, there's no evidence that Brown was nearly killed by a collapsing burial mound.) The real dig started in June 1938, and over the next two months Brown and his team explored three mounds and found some interesting bits and pieces: an axe, and what seemed to be iron rivets. She wouldn't have damaged the site before trotting off for a barley water, nor did she turn up to dig in deeply impractical skirts – photographs show her in a boiler suit or in dungarees. In reality, though, she wasn't a klutz who didn't know which end of a trowel to hold, but an experienced archaeologist who'd studied at both Cambridge and the University of London and directed digs herself, even at just 27 years old. Lily James' character Peggy Piggott says that she hasn't "done much actual fieldwork yet" and stomps straight through the top of a barrow. Carey Mulligan (35) plays landowner Edith Pretty (56) while archaeologist Charles Phillips (38) is played by Ken Stott (66) and Stuart Piggott (29) by Ben Chaplin (51), which changes the dynamics between them. The ages of various characters get a bit jumbled up too. Two women who worked as photographers on the dig – Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff – are chucked out of the story entirely, and replaced by Johnny Flynn's love interest Rory Lomax, who didn't actually exist. Netflix Did everyone in The Dig actually exist? So what exactly was invented for The Dig? " John Preston's novel departs from the truth in a lot of aspects and doesn't purport to be absolutely accurate, so the scope for departing from historical accuracy was already there," director Simon Stone told the BBC. It does take some liberties with what actually happened though. What started as a small investigation into mounds on land which had been farmed for centuries turned up the most extraordinary archaeological find of the century in Britain, and added a new set of national symbols to the English imagination.īut how much of The Dig is actually true? It's certainly very true to the local landscape, being shot close to the original excavation sites and taking care to give Ralph Fiennes's Basil Brown a fairly good Suffolk accent rather than talking like your common-or-garden ooh-arr bumpkin. A thoughtful reconstruction of an archaeological dig somewhere in deepest Suffolk feels like quite unlikely material for one of the first big Netflix hits of 2021, but The Dig has turned out to be exactly that.Ĭarey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James and Johnny Flynn feature in the film based on John Preston's 2007 novel, also called The Dig, which follows the excavation of burial mounds at the Sutton Hoo estate in 19.