WHAT strikes Tony Robinson more than anything else is that you can take a whole village out of the British countryside and lose it. The diminutive TV personality, presenter of Channel 4's Time Team, is squatting on the perfectly-manicured turf in front of the west wing of Castle Howard. He's clutching a muddy trowel and gesturing excitedly. Just behind him, a deep trench has been cut in the pristine lawns and a team of archaeologists are busy scraping at the exposed soil.

Tony and his team are searching for the 'lost' medieval village of Henderskelfe - and, as usual, they have only three days to find it.

They do have some help, however. There's an old map of the area, drawn in 1694 just before the present Castle Howard was built, which clearly shows the village church, the moated manor house that was pulled down to build today's mansion, and the village street, lined with houses, stretching away to the west. Precisely beneath the area where we're sitting, in fact.

There is also a second, more accurate map drawn in 1700 and initialled by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the architect who designed Castle Howard with John Vanbrugh.

By juxtaposing the two ancient maps with a modern OS map, and combining the result with a bit of 'geophys' wizardry which involves using modern equipment to look for tell-tale changes in moisture levels beneath the surface which could indicate buried archaeological features, Tony and his team had a good idea of where the church and some of the village houses might lie.

Nothing in archaeology is ever quite that simple, however.

"If you think about a village today, it's a pretty big thing," Tony says. "Even if you lose it, there would be foundations. But finding them in an area the size of four to five playing fields has proved enormously difficult, even if very exciting."

There's no secret, at least, about how the village of Henderskelfe came to be lost.

The village's name means 'Place of a Thousand Springs' in Scandinavian, a fact which, taken together with a mention in the Domesday Book which dates Henderskelfe back to at least 1066, gives archaeologists reason to think at one time it was a Viking village. That theory is confirmed when the Time Team unearth shards of Viking Age pottery dating from the 10th century.

By the end of the 17th century, it was a thriving medieval village. Then the Third Earl of Carlisle decided it was the perfect spot for his magnificent new castle.

The only problem was the village houses spoiled the view - so the villagers were relocated, many to nearby Coneysthorpe, and the village was demolished.

Archaeologist Richard Kemp, Castle Howard's new head of visitor services, spotted the potential for a piece of archaeological detective work.

The former director of attractions at the Jorvik Centre in York was intrigued by the existence of the 1694 map, and by the shards of medieval pottery that kept turning up in Castle Howard's grounds. Then there were the 'lumps' and 'bumps' in the lawns to the west of the house, which reminded him of those which revealed the existence of the medieval village of Wharram Percy.

He put the evidence together and, with Simon Howard's permission, invited Tony Robinson and his Time Team.

Which is why we're all here today. Finding the lost village has not proved easy, however. The 'lumps and bumps' Richard had been struck by have turned out not to be medieval at all, but 19th-century rubble.

One of the problems the Time Team have had is with the scale of the old Hawksmoor map. "We couldn't work out what the scale was," Tony Robinson says, in that voice familiar from almost 100 Time Teams. "We know it's not in kilometres or miles, but what was it in? Then somebody worked out it was in English paces - literally, the pace a surveyor would make."

By the morning of the third day, the team has made some real progress. One small trench to the north of the house, on the site where the medieval church is believed to have been, has uncovered the foundations of an old wall, which could have belonged to one of the church's outbuildings.

In a trench to the west, there is evidence of another wall which could have belonged to one of the houses. And in a bigger, much larger trench hidden away in an old walled garden even further west, there is what Richard Kemp describes as 'paydirt' - a large collection of buried stones that might be the foundation of another wall.

"It could be the western wall of a house going in that direction," he says, gesturing expansively, "with the village street going over there."

It may not seem much but part of the joy of archaeology, Tony says, is piecing together shards of seemingly ephemeral evidence to recreate the lives of people long dead.

Even so, with just three days at hand, the Time Team dig has been able to do little more than give an impression of what might be here to be found, Richard Kemp admits. He plans to continue the excavations on a smaller scale over the summer and beyond, maybe for several years. And he even hopes to open up an archaeology 'activity area' in the walled garden where the best evidence for the lost village has been found, so that visitors can try a little hands-on archaeology for themselves.

It's an idea that excites Tony Robinson. "It is part of Richard's long term strategy for bringing alive the exterior of Castle Howard," he says. "I have watched hundreds of people pour into Castle Howard to revel in its interior. But I have become aware that there is just as much archaeology and interest in the gardens and landscape around it.

"I hope we have done a bit to bring that to life."

The Time Team at Castle Howard programme will be broadcast next spring.

Updated: 15:44 Friday, April 26, 2002