Posted on 03/20/2004 5:50:52 PM PST by blam
Experts hail rare find of medieval logboat
Well-preserved remains may reveal secrets of ancient environment A thousand years ago it split asunder and could no longer be used to work the marshy waterways of East Yorkshire.
Alexandra Wood
But rather than let it go to waste forever, workers built part of the medieval logboat into the side of the trackway over the soft ground – and there it remained until a few days ago.
Archaeologists discovered the stern of a boat, made out of a single hollowed oak trunk, while construction work was being carried out at Welham Bridge on the A614, between Holme upon Spalding Moor and Howden.
An Iron Age logboat – now a star attraction at the Hull and East Riding Museum – was only found a couple of miles away and archaeologists were keeping a close eye on work near the River Foulness.
A digger bought the remains of the medieval boat to light, wedged up against an ancient trackway apparently laid down over the muddy ground leading to the river bank.
These days the River Foulness valley is a flat agricultural plain, but in the Middle Ages it would have been a marshy area of small rivers and streams, where water transport was vital. Two men would have worked the boat, punting it along.
The head of fieldwork at the York Archeological Trust which led the excavation, Dr Patrick Ottaway, said it was a rare find.
"What we think is the boat split at some point down the grain which renders it unusable, and they wedged it to support the trackway," he said.
He added: "It is an exciting find because it is so rare to find this sort of thing preserved in the ground. The waterlogged deposits that might preserve them are very rare. It is beautifully made, the stern is beautifully shaped and the workmanship is so even and smooth. It's lovely."
The stern piece measures around five metres (16ft) and looks similar to the Iron Age logboat, which dates back to 300BC.
But details of the pegs that held it together suggest the Welham Bridge boat was Anglo-Saxon or medieval. Samples of the trackway and the boat fragments have now been taken to the trust's conservation laboratory where they are being preserved and studied by experts. The peat will also be studied to help identify pollen and plant remains to allow a recreation of the natural environment on the river bank when the trackway was in use.
Before removing the trackway, it was scanned using the latest laser technology by members of the Hull Immersive Virtual Environments team at Hull University, to enable a 3D virtual reconstruction to be produced. Dr Ottaway said it had been an excellent example of good co-operation between East Riding Council, contractors Mowlem and archaeologists.
In 1963 enthusiast Ted Wright discovered a 4,000-year-old plank boat on the banks of the Humber near North Ferriby.
Two months after his death in 2001 it was finally confirmed as being the oldest of its type ever found in Western Europe.
20 March 2004
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