9. Flag Fen: Wood, Wheels and Status

Flag Fen is known internationally because of its wood and timber. Generally speaking this falls into two quite distinct categories: lightweight coppice products, such as wattlework, hurdles and even basketry (I’m thinking here of the fish traps from Must Farm); and heavy-duty items, such as posts and planks, which I’ll discuss in the next section. But there is another, and far rarer group of finds, which one might label fine carpentry and crafts. This group includes axe hafts, bowls, buckets and, perhaps most intricate of all: wheels. Indeed, I’m in little doubt that as early as the later Bronze Age wheels were fashioned by specialist wheelwrights, who possessed detailed knowledge of the different native British trees and their properties.

At Flag Fen the story of this very specialised branch of carpentry begins back in Fengate in 1978, when at the very end of the final season an Iron Age well was discovered. We didn’t know it then, but this well was positioned about 100m from the easterly landfall of the post alignment. We’d discovered prehistoric wells and watering-holes previously, but this one was different because its wattle lining (of woven hazel and willow rods) was held in position by a number of small stakes, which included a split-down piece from a larger wooden object. I suspect it had been split-down in a hurry, using any old wood which happened to have been lying around in the yard. But what made this re-used stake remarkable was a dovetail housing joint, or socket, half-way along its length. It was this piece of wood, and its then unique dovetail joint, which persuaded the now well-known wood specialist Maisie Taylor to continue with the woodworking studies, she had begun as an undergraduate, a few years earlier. At the time, she didn’t know what it had come from, but she did know the dovetail had been very carefully cut. We must now roll the story forward some twenty years to the discovery of part of a wooden tripartite (three-part) wheel at Flag Fen. [14] This wheel was made from three split planks of alder wood which were held together by laths of oak sapwood. The laths were housed in carefully cut dovetail slots, identical in size and profile to the one in the fragment of wood we’d found in the well at Fengate almost twenty years previously. I can’t resist it: the wheel had turned full circle.

One third of the tripartite wheel

 

But this story has a final twist. In 1997 I was directing excavations at a site known as Welland Bank Quarry just north of Peterborough, near Market Deeping (in southern Lincolnshire). It had been a hot dry season, but there had been a sudden thundery shower while we had been eating our midday meal in the site hut. After lunch we were walking back to the trenches as the ground was drying out and I was immediately alerted: these were ideal conditions for spotting very ephemeral traces in the ground. And I was right (or lucky, or both), because there, in a patch of silty ground we could clearly see dark lines. They were vanishing in the hot sunshine, even as we watched. I fitted a fine rose to a watering-can, and sprinkled the ground. Then we all watched, as the marks slowly reappeared. But this time we were ready, and as soon as they were visible, we scratched around out their edges with our trowels.

The plans we then drew showed that a wheeled vehicle had made two passes through the silt patch, and in one spot it had reversed. [15] We could trace them for just under 20m so were able to get a reasonable impression. As the course followed had been curved in one place we could clearly see that the vehicle had just two wheels. They were 1.10m apart and both were almost exactly as thick as the very slightly earlier wheel from Flag Fen. So this was a relatively light vehicle, and not the sort of heavy farm cart we had expected. I’m in little doubt that it was the late Bronze Age (in this instance 600-800BC) equivalent of a Victorian gig – in other words it was a light, single-person transport. I have resisted the temptation to call it a chariot, as the tabloid press would go mad, and besides, we have absolutely no evidence to think it was a military vehicle of any sort. No, the most sensible suggestion is that it would have belonged to somebody of importance. Perhaps it’s worth recalling that the first cars were bought and used by the richer members of Victorian and Edwardian society; they were status symbols. The Model T Ford, which famously brought ‘motoring to the masses’, did not appear until sometime later.

I don’t believe that the discovery of the wheel, with an axle nearby, was a casual find. I am convinced it was placed in the ground deliberately, perhaps during the same rites that saw the deposition of other possessions of wealthy people, such as the swords, daggers and rapiers. In other words, it was a symbol of power and prestige – the Bronze Age equivalent if not of a Rolls Royce, then a Mercedes Benz, or a Range Rover.