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Rory McGrath joins archaeologist Paul Blinkhorn as they root around under the country’s greatest alehouses to reveal the big stories from British history. The duo dig through time to expose the carousing, the plotting and the violence that has shaped Britain’s turbulent past.

Rory and Paul travel to the Six Bells, St Albans in Hertfordshire, the only pub within the walls of the ancient Roman City of Verulamium. The team dig through 2,000 years of booze drenched history in search of what could be a major Roman building lurking under the beer cellar.

A building has been on the site of Ye Olde Smugglers, Alfriston in Sussex, for the last 700 years. However, the team have only been granted 5 days by the landlord to dig down to the darker times when the Sussex Coast was part of the Badlands of Britain and Alfriston was rife with organised crime, smuggling gangs and murderers.

Rory and his team also pop into The Commander’s House, Chatham in Kent, a pub that sits on the banks of the River Medway which over the past 400 years has proved to be the most crucial anchorage for both Elizabeth I and Admiral Nelson’s fleet. As the dig progresses Rory and Paul reveal a picture of the sheer scale of the docks and find evidence of the vast warehouses used to store weapons such as canons, muskets, pistols, cutlasses, pikes and poleaxes during Britain's maritime might in the 18th and 19th century.

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