Glorious mud

Francis 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 irresistible to archaeologists like him. The peat preserves 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 techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning (Lidar), as well as old-fashioned digging, some quite fabulous wooden 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 affluent periods. The reason is simple: we’ve sat on a great deal of the stuff.

Britain was then at the top of the European commodities market. Welsh copper 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.