Saturday 11 March 2023

Lost, and found again: the Graveney boat and me.

 

By my reckoning, I was seventeen. Reverse the digits and you’ll arrive at my age on my next birthday. I was, in a great many respects, another person; a person who so easily might have chosen, or have stumbled through a doorway other than the one I actually took, ending up who-knows-where.

A model of the clinker-built late ninth century ‘Graveney Boat’ displayed within the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham – almost on my doorstep, but only visited recently in the company of my teenage grandsons (who are ‘collecting’ the fifty or so small independent museums in our region … as one does.) When I saw this tiny model in its display case I couldn’t help but smile; read on to find out why.


I’ve mentioned serendipity – perhaps that ought to be providence – many times in my posts (e.g. in the first post of a short series reflecting on my career as a scientist, here) but a recent visit to the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham provided a rather joyful reminder of its potential. Back in the day, I used to volunteer my weekends as a helper on local archaeological excavations. We’d be picked up early in the morning and driven to wherever there was a need for ‘emergency archaeology’, by which I mean the desire to uncover artefacts and learn as much as one could in the limited time before a developer’s bulldozers moved in. Some years would elapse before such sites/finds were afforded protection under law (see here and here) so it really did feel like a valuable and an exciting thing to do. Also, I was a seventeen year old with zero interest in sports – chronic asthma at a time when treatments were limited, two left feet and distinctly bookish tendencies coupled with a well-developed inferiority complex – but with the usual innate need to be doing ‘something’. Volunteering in this way fitted the bill perfectly: an inexhaustible excuse for reading, small groups of like-minded people and working outdoors in out-of-the-way locations. As a bonus, my dad was a bricklayer and so the instruction to bring your own pointing trowel was easy to follow. What’s not to love?

Pursuing archaeology as a career appealed to me a great deal. At this distance from the person I was back then I cannot begin reliably to reconstruct the thought processes that steered me towards studying physics and then beginning chemical physics research. The existence of radiocarbon dating techniques and the later introduction of geophysical probes like resistivity and magnetometry would only serve to heighten my interest, but by then archaeology had become an armchair hobby overshadowed by my fascination with the physical sciences. (The line became blurred a little during the final years of my professional career when I was able to use my chemical physics expertise to make a small contribution to heritage/conservation projects: see here, here and here.)

I only volunteered for one season in 1970 (maybe a little in 1969? – other priorities, like final school exams and university applications, squeezed it out thereafter) but the joy of taking part has stayed with me ever since. Having said that, you may be surprised when I admit that, somewhere along the line, I forgot the associated details. I could always have told you that our mentor in this voluntary work was enthusiastic archaeologist Mr. Jim Bradshaw (who died in 2001); he was a good person to learn from as I recall. I also remember that the two multi-weekend digs I took part in during this period were poles apart in their nature: well-drained flat farmland abutting an oil depot which was hiding a Romano-British residential/industrial site, and mud-up-to-the-armpits marshland which revealed a ninth century boat. In one case, the land would return to being farmed and the other was in the way of a major drainage channel.

The Romano-British site (see the 1990 aerial image below, with links) had apparently been known about for several decades, with bits of pottery being turned up by the plough now and again. More excavations were conducted nearby in the decades following my involvement and within a much better framework of legal protection than the one I was a part of. (These later digs were as a prelude to the deserted oil depot’s removal in favour of housing.) I remember exposing a hearth – a flat patch of hard reddened soil in essence – and being shown how to distinguish ‘random’ chunks of flint, found in abundance in the region, from the remains of an ancient drystone wall or a well-constructed path. However, the highlight was exposing a small but whole clay jar. I had Mr. Bradshaw and a few others clustered around me as I was talked through the safe way to excavate and lift it. The best guess at the time was that it had once contained perfume.

This aerial image of the location of the Wye Romano-British site was taken in 1990, before later development and the excavations that preceded it. Further information may be found in reports submitted by Mr. Bradshaw and by those making reference to his work: here from 1970 in Section II, here from 2016 from 2016 and here in paragraph 2.2 from a national archive.

As you’ll no doubt recall, what prompted this post in the first place, and the online research undertaken in order to write it, was the happy accident of finding mention of ‘The Graveney Boat’ during my extended exploration of Faversham’s Fleur de Lis museum. (The Graveney Marshes, I ought to explain, are sited between Faversham and the North Kent coast (UK); there is also a village of Graveney.) None of the images I could find do justice to the mud; nor do they convey the camaraderie that coping with it engendered. However, I’ve included one below along with a slew of links to associated news items and formal reports; this was, without doubt, a big deal. Whilst at the museum I had a brief conversation with someone working there during which I asked about the fate of the boat. She informed me that The National Maritime Museum, who had taken overall charge of the project and had all the recovered material sent to them at the time, still retained the excavated timbers. Apparently, it’s still being stored under water as there are no funds to conserve it further – let alone to repatriate it to the nearby Faversham museum. Having been involved in a small way with the conservation of Henry VIII’s famous warship ‘The Mary Rose’ (here) I must admit that I felt very sad that funds didn’t exist to allow the excellent marine conservation resources in Portsmouth to be brought into play. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The images above are both taken from a 1971 paper in a publication called ‘Antiquity’; there’s another paper, less easy to access, published the following year in ‘Studies in Conservation’. Perhaps the feel of the place and the excavation work required is better conveyed in this (pre-HD) video, available via the Fleur de Lis museum’s web site.

All-in-all, I’ve had a pleasant trip down Memory Lane and had great fun piecing back together again the details of my season in the field as a volunteer archaeologist – a career path never trodden.