The Dig

"The Dig" is the eighth series' most atmospheric hour — a story about a Viking curse, an archaeological dig and the suggestion, held carefully at arm's length, that some places really are haunted. The dig is on Bournelid, a headland owned by Hungerford, who has let a team of archaeology students excavate in search of the burial site of a Viking, Bjorn Hlyd. The locals are against it: Eli, an old islander, calls it a site of local interest; his son Martin, who drives the students up on his tractor, refuses to take them all the way; and nothing grows on the land, the seagulls will not land there, and salt is scattered for luck.

The trouble begins with Hungerford collapsing in pain, for no reason the doctors can find — the x-ray shows nothing, though he insists it hurts. A student, Alice, is attacked by something unseen, covered in cuts, and describes an attacker the size of a tent with wings and claws. Another student, Eleanor, disappears from the rocks with a scream and is found drowned, tangled in a fishing net. The feather Bergerac finds in the bushes is from a raven — normal size from a wing, the size of a cart horse from the belly, as Eli explains with a perfectly straight face. John Collee's script, directed by Geoffrey Sax, keeps the supernatural on the surface and the human answers underneath, exactly as the series always had.

Tony Doyle plays Eli with a weathered, authoritative gravity, and the Viking inscriptions he shows Hungerford — the symbol of the Eagle Belly, where chests were cut open and hearts pulled out — give the episode its eerie spine. The explanation, when it comes, is human: the flapping wings are ravens, the attacks are engineered, and the curse is a device to drive the diggers off land whose secret someone wants kept. The episode's final act resolves the mystery with a rational explanation, but not before the series has had its fun letting the audience believe.

It is a competent, slightly unusual hour that shows the eighth series could do atmosphere as readily as procedure. The dig gives it a contained setting and a closed cast, and the question — whether the Viking dead can reach across a thousand years — is left open just long enough. Bergerac, as ever, refuses to believe in the curse, and he is right. But the ravens stay on the phone lines, watching. A quietly eerie entry that proves Bergerac could do folk horror without ever quite believing in it.