DIGGING FOR BRITAIN RENEWED FOR FOURTEENTH SERIES ON BBC, ALICE ROBERTS STEPS DOWN AS PRESENTER

Professor Alice Roberts has announced she is stepping down as host of hit BBC Two series Digging For Britain. The BBC have confirmed that the series will continue and return for a fourteenth run next year.

Professor Roberts said: "All good things come to an end. I’m kind of sad and melancholy about this but at the same time it’s the right time and this series 13 of Digging for Britain is my last series. I am stepping away. It’s not the end of archaeology on TV for me. I’m looking at fresh new exciting ways of doing that. But it is the end of Digging For Britain for me."

A BBC spokesperson added: "We’d like to thank Alice for her work on Digging For Britain and wish her well for the future. We look forward to announcing exciting new details on future series of Digging For Britain in due course."

Series 13 rundown:

Episode 1: Featuring visceral evidence of a bloody massacre in the Scottish Highlands, one of the largest Roman cemeteries ever found in Britain, Bradford’s first Muslim burial, more finds in Carlisle from a Roman bathhouse, and from the 1970s, Scotland’s first skatepark.

Episode 2: Featuring two incredibly rare finds from an Iron Age hoard, a look inside the UK’s largest and most complex dig in a generation, an Iron Age site perched on the very edge of the White Cliffs of Dover, and the earliest example of an artist’s signature from Roman Britain.

Episode 3: Featuring an 18th-century slipway in the New Forest where Admiral Nelson's favourite ship was built, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery where a host of well-preserved and rare objects have been found, and fascinating finds from Trinity College, Oxford. Plus a remarkable late Roman cemetery that features an intricate bone box and part of a Roman bone flute, and a tangle of delicate Iron Age objects that have to be carefully micro-excavated in Kent.

Episode 4: Featuring the lost estate of the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson, a hilltop fort in Fife with an unprecedented wealth of discoveries linked to the Picts, the medieval ruins of Lindores Abbey, how Gloucester Museum is dealing with a nationwide archaeological finds storage crisis, a completely intact 4,000-year-old cremation vessel and an unprecedented Roman whetstone factory.

Episode 5: Featuring a vast first-century Roman compound, the warhorses that changed the course of history, a medieval murder mystery, the thriving farmstead belonging to Isaac Newton's mother, thousands of animal bones from a Roman farm, and a 300-million-year-old forest that built the modern world.

Episode 6: Professor Alice Roberts returns to uncover fresh archaeological treasures and discoveries.

Digging For Britain is available on BBC iPlayer.