By the start of 1979 our team had finished excavating at Fengate and work on the modern factories that now cover most of Fengate, or the Eastern Industrial Area as it is now known, could begin in earnest. By then I had moved back to England and for two years I immersed myself in the business of writing-up our results, which were published in four reports. [3] We then began a series of excavations in the Welland valley, some ten miles north of Peterborough. Towards the end of those excavations, between 1982 and 1986 we began a series of research surveys in which we carefully examined the sides of newly machine-cleaned Fen drainage ditches, or dykes. [4]
Towards the end of the first season of dyke survey we discovered the timbers of an extraordinary Bronze Age site in a drainage dyke in the middle of Flag Fen. We made that discovery early in November and by Christmas we had revealed several hundred timbers which we found concealed within the sides of the dyke for a distance of about 80m. At one point they were overlain by a known Roman Road which was probably built in the mid-first century AD, and is known as the Fen Causeway. This was very useful as it told us that the road was later than the timbers beneath. But we also noticed there was about a metre of peats and alluvium separating the timbers from the road above them. Now we knew that pre-Roman fenland deposits in the area were being laid-down very roughly at the rate of about 1mm per annum, which would suggest that the timbers were approximately a millennium earlier than the Roman road. This was confirmed shortly after Christmas, when The British Museum rushed us through some radiocarbon dates, which confirmed that the timbers dated to around 1000BC. [5]
The following summer we carried out an auger survey to determine how far the timbers extended back from the dyke. It was hard work, as in those days machine-powered augers were rare, so Dr. Charles French and myself did the drilling by hand. In the end we proved that timber covered an area of about 150 by 150m arranged in a squashed oval. To our surprise, the dyke had only cut through a small part of the platform. We called it a platform, because no other explanation seemed to make sense. Even today we are far from certain about its original purposes.
The next big event in the discovery of Flag Fen took place in the summer of 1989 when the gas-fired power station, that still dominates the site to the east, was built. As part of their work the contractors funded an excavation which we carried out. Many people, some even in the archaeological world, thought it unnecessary as the construction was to take place some 800m east of the dyke where seven years earlier we had revealed the timbers. But we insisted, and to their great credit (and I wonder whether this would happen today?) the power station builders insisted that our work should go ahead - and they contributed generously towards it, too. It was a very hot, dry summer and hardly the best weather to dig waterlogged timbers, but at the end of it all we had discovered the Fengate landfall of a timber causeway which we could now trace right across Flag Fen from those posts we had found back in ’82 on the platform, in the dykeside.
The highest level of timbers to one side of the post alignment
We had been carrying out detailed excavations around the posts in the dykeside because these were the most threatened by drying-out and in the course of that work we had found a handful of finds: a few scrappy pieces of pottery, the odd flint, a bone or two – but that was all. These were sufficient to tell us that the timbers indeed dated to the later Bronze Age – again, that was all. But the power station site changed everything. A detailed metal-detector survey, which was carried out in partnership with a local detectorists’ club, revealed just short of 300 metal objects, the vast majority of which were Bronze Age. Almost everything from the Bronze Age metal-worker’s repertoire was there: swords, daggers, rapiers, spearheads, brooches, bracelets, pins, axes, chisels, awls. And the date range was quite clear too: roughly 1300 to 900BC, with a few finds dating to the Iron Age and even into Roman times. These dates were subsequently confirmed by tree-ring studies.
So far two major reports have been published. The first gives details of our research following the site’s discovery in 1982, up until 1995. [6] The second describes the smaller, mostly university training, excavations carried out between 1995 and 2007. [7]