A short drive up the A1 from Mike’s house in Broom, on the outskirts of Peterborough, lies Flag Fen Archaeology Park. The park is situated on a Bronze Age site which was constructed about 3500 years ago, now incongruously tucked away behind a large industrial estate. The place proved a fascinating and essential visit for Mike and Lance as, aside from the wonderfully reconstructed Bronze and Iron age roundhouses and a small but superb museum, it contains the actual remains of a Bronze Age ’causeway’.
The causeway is essentially a wooden walkway which once ran across the Flag Fen Basin from a dry-land area known as Fengate to a natural clay island called Northey. The Flag Fen Basin is an embayment of low-lying land on the western margins of the fens, a naturally marshy region supporting a rich ecology and numerous species, close the the east coast of England.
The structure is dated to around 1300 BC, its purpose to provide passage over the inundation of the terrain. Originally a causeway and centre platform formed by driving thousands of posts with long tips through the peat and into firmer ground, it covered three and a half acres. Amazingly, the peat and silt deposits and general marshiness of the fenlands have allowed fragments of the causeway to be preserved over this time, the remains of which are now housed in a large containment building, the conditions being carefully maintained to arrest any further disintegration as much as possible.
Peterborough Archeology stresses the importance of Flag Fen:
Flag Fen is scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act. It is deemed that the post alignment and timber platform represents “a class of monument where relatively few examples survive and are well documented. Amongst these it is unique for its scale, completeness, longevity and complexity.”
The marshy conditions of the Flag Fen basin were critical in preserving the massive number of timbers which in most locations would long ago have disappeared.
The significance of the site and the challenge of preserving the exposed timbers were recognised early after the discovery of Flag Fen by the establishment of a dedicated Visitor Centre – a unique insight into north European Bronze Age culture.
(We highly recommend visiting their site, featuring a superbly detailed discussion of the causeway at Flag Fen).
The above video was captured by Lance who, as well as documenting the remains of the causeway, was rather enraptured by the sound of the water echoing in the containment building. It was added to a library of watery sounds that will no doubt feature in an Earthwaves project in the future…
And for good measure here are some sheep.
Soay sheep in particular, a breed of domestic sheep descended from a population of feral sheep on the 100-hectare island of Soay in the St Kilda Archipelago, about 65 kilometres from the Western Isles of Scotland. It is one of the Northern European short-tailed sheep breeds, now resident at Flag Fen. More about these sheep can be found here:
https://flagfen.org.uk/news/soay-lambs-born-this-august-at-flag-fen