A History of Ancient Britain (32 page)

Nearly 6,000 years ago Neolithic farmers were at large in the area. Archaeologists have found at least one house as well as hearths that are suggestive of several more. Later the farmers built a
circular monument, possibly a henge, and, later still, during the Bronze Age, a handful of burial cairns – one over the ruins of the house and another over one of the hearths. There is no
obvious reason for the Neolithic and later occupation of the area subsequently used by the boat-builders. What has been found so far simply
indicates the early farmers and
their successors were colonising, exploiting and trying to make sense of their place in the area for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The practice of some kinds of ritual behaviour there, in that part of the Holderness region – monument-building, the burial of the dead alongside possible Bell Beakers and other grave
goods – is made even more intriguing by the general absence of such activity in the rest of that part of Yorkshire.

Archaeologist Robert Van de Noort has suggested it was the building of boats and their use for voyages back and forth across the hostile North Sea that inspired the Bronze Age residents of
Ferriby to bury their dead and think about the ancestors there. In a paper published in 2003 he wrote: ‘Seafaring was imbued with “special meaning”, and as an activity stood
clearly outside the rhythm of daily life.’ (Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, in
Virginibus Puerisque
, in 1881: ‘Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a
better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.’ The part of that thought, about travelling hopefully, has become a virtual cliché. But if Van de Noort and other
like-minded archaeologists are right then notions about the importance of the journey itself began in some people’s minds as early as the beginning of the Bronze Age.)

He goes on to suggest that an elite group at the top of Bronze Age society may have sought further to underline their legitimacy by undertaking perilous journeys across the sea. It was not
enough for such people simply to command and be in receipt of prestigious items from Continental Europe, like bronze axes and swords, and jewellery of gold. Some immeasurable part of the value was
drawn from the hopeful journey itself, the journey to meet the makers and personally collect the items they had made, to benefit from the well of knowledge and experience from which such objects
had sprung.

‘If my suggestions are correct,’ wrote Van de Noort, ‘then the sea was perceived principally as a boundary. This was not a physical boundary, as the sewn-plank boats were able
to navigate successfully across the sea in favourable conditions, but a liminal boundary. Without such a boundary function, the religious, social and political value of goods exchanged over long
distances would have been severely lessened . . . Crossing the boundary may have formed part of a rite of passage essential for young members of elite groups in Britain whose eligibility to rule
and lead could be measured by the time spent away from home and the distance travelled.’

By far and away the most impressive of the sewn-plank boats found to
date, however – and the single most moving and impressive archaeological artefact I have ever
seen – is the so-called ‘Dover Boat’. Given the significance of Dover today as a point of departure, and arrival, for millions of travellers, it is entirely appropriate that it
was there, in the shadow of the White Cliffs, that archaeologists discovered such startling evidence of the sophistication of Bronze Age seamanship.

Dover has controlled the English Channel for longer than history records. It was once known as the ‘Lock and Key of England’ and has been an object of desire for many a would-be
invader – from Julius Caesar to William the Conqueror and from Napoleon Bonaparte to Adolf Hitler. But today, with threats of foreign invasion long past, it is the safe harbour of Dover that
still matters. As well as being a major port for every kind of trade good imaginable, Dover is the busiest passenger-ferry terminal in the world.

It was work to build a new section of road between Dover and the nearby town of Folkestone, in the autumn of 1992, that exposed the Dover Boat to the light of day after 3,500 years. Part of the
job required the construction of a pedestrian underpass and so it was that archaeologists from Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) found themselves slopping around in the cloying, clayey mud at
the bottom of a 20-foot-deep waterlogged hole in search of any exposed evidence of the town’s long history. Steel piles and concrete would shortly occupy the void and the team had just days
to find and record any archaeology before it was obliterated for all time.

They had already carefully revealed, cleaned, photographed and drawn parts of Dover’s medieval wall, then traces of a Roman-built harbour wall, when archaeologist Keith Parfitt began
paying close attention to a piece of wood protruding from one side of the hole. Much to the inconvenience of the road-builders, the timber was quickly identified as part of the hull of a boat and
construction work was initially called off for the day to let the essential work of excavation and recovery get properly under way.

Within hours the CAT team had established they were dealing with another sewn-plank boat, identical in many ways to Ferriby 1 and astonishingly well preserved. After eight frantically busy days
– during which the road company had to absorb an expensive delay and allow for the construction of two coffer-dams to permit the removal of as much of the boat as possible – the team
had done all they could. By 19 October the archaeologists had carefully lifted out between half and two-thirds of the whole vessel – around 30 feet of it. Dr Wright, discoverer of the Ferriby
boats, had been consulted and had recommended the surviving timbers be
cut into sections for easier removal from their tomb, and so in the end it was an enormous 10-piece
jigsaw that had to be reassembled back in the lab.

The first priority was conservation. Three and a half millennia sealed deep underground within mud and clay had protected the timbers from almost all ravages of decay, but as soon as they
returned to the light, the clock began ticking. When the Ferriby boats were discovered in the 1930s and 1940s, conservation was in its infancy – with the result that relatively little has
been saved for posterity. But thanks to more modern expertise, the Dover Boat is now a jaw-dropping wonder of the archaeological world. The timbers were first soaked in liquid wax, which permeated
the wood and so consolidated it and protected it from decomposition. The pieces were then quickly freeze-dried – a process that meant the boat could safely become a permanent exhibit in Dover
Museum, within a huge, purpose-built, air-conditioned and temperature-controlled display case.

You have to go and see it – it is as simple as that. Any attempt at describing the feeling of standing beside those glossy timbers, blackened by their millennia underground, must fall
short of the actual experience. I had known the Dover Boat existed and had seen both photographs and televised coverage of the discovery, but none of that prepared me for the impact of the artefact
itself. While visitors are restricted to walking around the outside of the display case, I was allowed inside. Perhaps it was something to do with stepping from the museum gallery into the rarefied
atmosphere that protects the wood and withies, but as I crossed the threshold and closed the door carefully behind me, I got the unmistakable feeling I was suddenly in the presence not of
something, but of someone. I am an archaeologist, by nature drawn to old objects and likely to be impressed by them. But I can only say that the Dover Boat is different. You would not have to
believe in ghosts to get the sense the thing is somehow haunted – if not by the people who designed, built and used it, then by their intentions. Something tangible of another age, like the
atmosphere within the tunnels and galleries of the Neolithic flint mines at Grime’s Graves, hangs in the air.

And again, as at Goldcliff beside the Mesolithic footprints, and in the company of the bones of the Amesbury Archer, there was that sense of intruding, of seeing something that had been put away
out of sight, entitled to remain there. Like Goldilocks we enter the homes of others and pick
over private things, casting aside those that do not please us in search of
what is just right.

It is believed that when complete the Dover Boat would have been as much as 60 feet long, and part of its power to enthrall is in its sheer size. With around 30 intact feet on display it has an
overpowering presence. Things made and crafted by mankind are utterly unlike treasures and glories of the natural world. To place your hand on a surface worked by another person, the same and not
the same, and thousands of years ago, should be and is deeply moving. Above all, when you look at something as sophisticated and complex as the Dover Boat, you are gifted a glimpse of how people
thought, how they identified challenges and set out to meet them.

The vessel is comprised essentially of four long oak planks, each carefully worked with axes and tools of stone and, of course, bronze. It is thought people who had been part of a tradition of
making curraghs and coracles – by stitching animal hides together with sinew around a wicker frame – simply adapted the same technique so they could stitch wooden planks together with
twisted saplings. In the case of the Dover Boat, those withies survive in the same condition in which their Bronze Age users last saw them. They are humbling – the knots fixing them in place
tied 3,500 years ago by hands the same as ours.

Unlike Clive O’Gibney’s ocean-going curragh, it seems there was no sail in the sewn-plank boats. Instead they were powered by oars or paddles – perhaps as many as nine or ten
pairs. The interior is big enough to permit a fairly large cargo: some passengers as well as a considerable volume of goods like textiles, or metal tools and weapons. It would have needed skilled
handling even in inland waters, and the prospect of taking such a vessel across the North Sea hardly bears thinking about. For one thing, no amount of moss caulking could have kept such a
construction truly watertight. So for the duration of any voyage, some of the passengers and crew would have been required to help in the constant, anxious job of bailing.

The excavators of the Ferriby and Kilnsea boats were generally of the opinion they had been hauled ashore and left on dry land – perhaps with a view to carrying out repairs, or just to
wait for further journeys that were never made. The near-perfect preservation of the Dover Boat, however, enabled archaeologists to imagine an altogether more thought-provoking final chapter for
their own find. A closer examination of the yew withies – the ‘threads’ holding the planks together – showed that
some of them had been deliberately
sliced through. The bow end of the boat revealed a missing section as well – as though some large, perhaps carved and decorated figurehead had been removed too, maybe to be used again.

In short it seemed the Dover Boat had been scuttled. The archaeologists had noticed during the excavation that the vessel’s final resting place had been in the shallows of a stream, one
long vanished and buried beneath many feet of sediments that had built up on top during the intervening millennia (it was that same build-up, in fact, that had so safely sealed and protected the
timbers).

At some point while the boat was still perfectly serviceable someone – presumably the kind of high-status individual who could commission and command such an impressive craft – had
decided the day had come to repay a debt. The same belief that had convinced Neolithic flint miners to return some of their axes to the Earth, from which they came, moved a Bronze Age boat owner to
give back his prize.

People in the ancient past seem to have accepted they were in a constantly evolving relationship, one that tied together their belongings, the landscape in which they lived and also something
unseen. They understood too that that relationship carried an obligation. Death followed life and debts had to be repaid – so that a treasured and priceless bronze axe had, at some point, to
be buried in the ground or thrown into a river; a polished flint mace-head, symbolic of incomprehensible power, had finally to go into a tomb alongside the ancestors; and a perfectly good boat,
crucial for connections to people far away, must one day be put beyond the use of man.

It is hard to understand. Early bronze swords – rapiers really, a foot or so long and tapered to use a minimum of the precious metal – must have been as valuable and as cherished as
a gold pocket watch handed from a father to a son. And yet we find them again and again, deliberately snapped and thrown away, usually into rivers or lakes. Picture the scene, as some warrior or
chieftain led a procession down to a riverside. There on the bank he took his sword from its sheath and, after facing the crowd and holding it above his head, he suddenly turned his back on them.
All at once he crouched, fiercely bent the blade across one knee, repeatedly, until the thing snapped in two. These pieces he then cast into the waters, never to be seen or touched again by man or
woman. This is a glimpse of Bronze Age religion. We know about it only because of the things recovered, but water
was certainly central to it. In England it seems that
rivers flowing into the east were deemed particularly special, perhaps because they headed back towards some ancient homeland of the ancestors. It is from such waters that offerings and gifts are
recovered – swords and cooking pots of metal that, although still prized, had been given back to the world.

By around 1500
BC
, something like a thousand years had passed since the arrival of the Beaker People, with their metal magic. During those centuries Britain had become
home to a wealthy, internationally connected elite. All of the available evidence suggests the rich were few in number and while they sat at the top of society, the practicalities of life had
changed hardly a jot for the vast majority of the population of perhaps half a million people.