BOOKS & ARTSGlorious mud
Hugh Thomson
The Fens: Discovering England’s
Ancient Depths
by Francis Pryor
Head of Zeus, £25, pp. 352Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man
if every person who told him that the Fens
were ‘flat and boring’ had given him five
quid. Yet these million acres of water-logged
land making their way from Lincolnshire
through Norfolk and towards Cambridge
have one quality that makes them irresist-
ible to archaeologists like him. The peat pre-
serves wood perfectly for thousands of years
in a way that happens almost nowhere else
in the country.
As a result, and although few of us are
aware of it, ‘some of the most imaginative
and technically advanced excavations in
the world are taking place in the Fens at the
moment’. Using new archaeological tech-
niques such as ground-penetrating radar and
laser scanning (Lidar), as well as old-fash-
ioned digging, some quite fabulous wood-
en artefacts from the Bronze Age have just
emerged. The most spectacular is ‘Seahenge’,
the mortuary ring with an upturned oak at its
centre which was first revealed after storms
in early 2014. It was built in exactly 2049 BC
— wood, unlike stone, can be dated to within
a year.
Finds like these matter because we still
know remarkably little about the Bronze
Age, despite it lasting so long — almost two
millennia, from around 2500 BC to 800 BC —
and it being been one of Britain’s most afflu-
ent periods. The reason is simple: we’ve sat
on a great deal of the stuff.Britain was then at the top of the Euro-
pean commodities market. Welsh cop-
per mines, Cornish tin and the lead of the
Somerset Levels allowed us to produce far
more than anyone else. Bronze was not just
a material but a currency, with bronze axes
used for barter, so we were in effect printing
money. This glorious age, symbolised by the
fabulous Mold Cape made of beaten gold in
the British Museum, spurred a demograph-
ic explosion. The British population rose to
a level archaeologists are continually having
to revise upwards as they make fresh discov-
eries, but by 1000 BC may have been as high
as two million — an astonishing figure con-
sidering that the rural population today is
not much more than five million.
The whole way we view the Bronze
Age has changed, and Pryor has been at
the forefront of this investigation. His
work at Flag Fen near Peterborough was
one of the first excavations to show how
developed life in the Fens had become for
prehistoric man.
A local farmer as well as an archaeolo-
gist, Pryor has a pragmatic and refresh-
ingly jargon-free approach. He has spent
most of his professional life working in
the Fens and this book is a distillation of
everything he has learned, not just about
the archaeology but the historical chang-
es that have occurred since their drain-
age, when it was realised how fertile
the resulting soil would be. His enthusi-
asm is infectious, whether he’s glimpsing
Ely cathedral from a train, coming across
John Clare’s grave or counting the bricks of
Tattershall Castle.
He’s the sort of archaeologist who can
drive his own digger, and being a farmer he
recognises why Bronze Age man might want
to separate cattle into pens — not for ‘ritual-istic’ reasons, but simply to prevent inbreed-
ing with neighbouring herds.
Pryor describes the dramatic moment
when he first saw the ends of some wooden
posts sticking out of the mud and realised
that they were split oak, so could form part
of a Bronze Age enclosure. This was at Must
Farm Quarry which has since seen some of
the most revelatory discoveries being made,
with the largest assemblage of prehistoric
wooden boats in Europe. The presumption
has to be that many thousands more are still
buried in the Fens since the Wash provided
a sheltered harbour for all the trading that
took place along the coast and across the
North Sea. Together with the boats came
fish and eel traps in the form of big willow
baskets, and votive offerings of fine bronze
swords and spears, tossed into the river in
perfect condition.
That said, the story of the Bronze Age
contains a nasty twist. The arrival of the new
technology of iron in around 800 BC, far
from being an advance, prompted the big-
gest recession in our history, one that lasted
almost two centuries from 800 to 600 BC,
beside which any 18th-century bubble or
recent financial crises pale. Iron had been
developed in the eastern Mediterranean
and it was not a commodity with which Eng-
land was particularly blessed. Nor were we
good at being early adopters. Whole burial
caches of bronze axes have been found, dis-
carded like Weimar currency as no longer
worth anything.
Many writers would baulk at splash-
ing through thousands of years of mud and
peat to find the shards of evidence which
reveal life in the Bronze Age; that Pryor
has made such a success of it, both in life
and in this book, is a testament to his bound-
less enthusiasm.The Bronze Age
timber circle
of Seahenge at
Holme-next-the
Sea , NorfolkALA
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