One of the most important Bronze Age sites in Britain lies just a few miles outside of Peterborough. Yet despite its international importance, Flag Fen is in real danger of disappearing forever due to the fens - and funds - drying up. Can we really allow such a magnificent monument to vanish? Stuart Barker steps back in time some 3,500 years to unravel the mystery of Flag Fen before it’s too late.
The room is cold and dark and has a strange, damp feel, the atmosphere moist and clinging. The sprinklers are activated automatically every half hour despite there being no immediate threat of fire. The water they produce falls onto a bed of gnarled, twisted timbers protruding from a dank mud, their tortured shapes glistening under the regular dowsing.
The moist air, deadened sound, and low light make for an other-worldly atmosphere that couldn’t be more appropriate. That’s because, once your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, it becomes apparent that you really are looking at another world; a world that existed 3,500 years ago. A world of paganism, religious rituals, offerings to the gods, sacrifices and mysticism; a world that we know very little about. A Bronze Age world. The world of Flag Fen.
There’s no shortage of Bronze Age sites in Britain. From Avebury stone circle to the iconic Stonehenge itself, but those sites, and most others that have survived, are made of stone. What makes Flag Fen so unique is that it boasts a wooden structure; a wooden structure that has been preserved for three-and-a-half millennia and, since Sea-henge has now been moved indoors to ensure its preservation, Flag Fen can boast of being the only ‘in-situ’ wooden Bronze Age structure in Britain.
And it’s big. Really big. A mile-long wooden causeway stretches across the site, made up of some 60,000 vertical timbers and 250,000 horizontal timbers, every one of them bearing the distinctive marks of being worked and shaped with primitive tools. The causeway was constantly added to and enhanced over a period of 400 years, from 1350-900BC, evolving from a relatively simple structure with two rows of posts and a walkway, to a much grander one with five rows of posts and a wattle fence at its northern side. It’s been estimated that over two million trees were felled for use in its construction.
At the centre of the causeway is an even more impressive structure – a wooden platform the size of Wembley Stadium, though, sadly, this is not currently visible as an artificial lake has been built over the precious timbers to preserve them. And it’s just as well, because Flag Fen, this marvel of the ancient world, is under serious threat. It may have withstood the rigours of time for three-and-a-half millennia but it’s unlikely that anything will remain of it for our grandchildren to see. ‘The site is drying out’ Francis Pryor says. ‘Certainly there won’t be anything left there in fifty years time, except the platform under the lake. But outside of that, the whole site is drying out.’
Francis Pryor is a well-known face to viewers of Channel Four’s Time Team programme. One of the country’s leading archaeologists, he has also presented his own television series, Britain AD: King Arthur’s Britain, as well as writing many books on archaeology and the making of the British landscape. Pryor discovered Flag Fen in 1982 and knows more about the site than any man alive. He explains the extent of the problem facing the Bronze Age site. ‘There’s a huge dyke which runs through Flag Fen and that’s taking the water table down. It was originally constructed in the middle ages but it was significantly enlarged in 1976 and then again in 1982. It was while it was being enlarged for the second time that I spotted Flag Fen. You can’t flood the dyke – which is what I’d like to do – because eastern Peterborough would flood if there was a sudden major rainfall event. That dyke is actually a reservoir to take flood water from eastern industry in Peterborough. The river authorities have been very co-operative and they do maintain the dyke as high as they can but the problem they’ve got is that I don’t think very many people would thank us if eastern industry flooded after a thunderstorm.’
And there lies the rub. It’s a conflict of interests between the old and the new. What’s more important? Preserving a 3,500-year-old wooden monument or providing jobs and power for the local economy?
Certainly, few people in the Peterborough area seem to know, or care, much about Flag Fen as voluntary acting site manager James Beatty explains. ‘We have people coming from as far afield as Japan and America just to see the site. Archaeology is a global thing – it’s telling a global story, the history of mankind, and Flag Fen is an important archaeological site. Why do so few local people know about it? Possibly because it’s right on their doorstep. We get an amazing amount of school visits but they’re mainly from schools outside of the Peterborough area, because on a school trip you usually hire a bus and go somewhere. So Flag Fen is almost too convenient for local schools – you don’t hire a bus just to travel a couple of miles.’
It’s astounding to learn that more people in the USA seem to be aware of Flag Fen and it’s archaeological importance than here in the UK. Certainly, if Flag Fen was in America, it would no doubt be one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions and millions of dollars would be thrown at it to maintain it and improve the visitor experience. But it isn’t in America, it’s right here on our doorstep, and with the current financial climate, this marvel of the Bronze Age world is in danger of being neglected. In what is a cruel parallel, it’s not only the land around Flag Fen that has been drying up, it’s funding too. ‘Most of the income comes from visitors paying to enter the site’ says Francis Pryor. ‘We do get small grants of money from various people – Anglian Water have been particularly helpful over the years – but it’s going to need something in the order of £100,000 a year to operate.’
Lack of funding has forced some drastic measures over the past year, including the closure of the site to the general public during weekdays. ‘We used to be open to the public six or seven days a week but that meant paying front of house staff’ Beatty says. ‘There was also a paid general manager, a paid education officer, and I was a sometimes-paid park manager. Unfortunately funds dried up so we’ve only been open on weekends since Spring last year, although we’re still open during the week for schools because we can plan ahead for that as all the trips are pre-booked. There’s a possibility that we might be able to open full-time again later this year but we don’t know for sure yet. The sad thing is that not many people even know we’re open at weekends at the moment because we have no budget for advertising.’
From a legal point of view, there must be a minimum of four volunteers staffing the site if it is open to the public. Despite having some 50 volunteers on the books, meeting this requirement can still pose problems as most of those volunteers also have normal jobs to hold down, and paying staff is no longer an option. ‘The problem is, you can get grants for specific projects but it’s very difficult to get grants to pay for basics like the day-to-day running of the site – to pay wages and so on’ Beatty says. ‘We’ve had help from the National Lottery, Barclay’s Bank, and others but we’ve still had to cut everything right back to a minimum just to ensure we stay open. We simply couldn’t survive without the volunteers.’
Beatty shakes his head when he thinks back to how different things were when he joined the team ten years ago.
‘Gone are the days when we received £600,000 of Millennium money through PECT (Peterborough Environment City Trust) to build our visitor centre! That was back in 2001 but we live in a different world now. It’s a fantastic building but the problem was that it doubled our overheads!’
There does appear to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, should recent developments within Vivacity come to fruition and Flag Fen become part of Vivacity’s Heritage Service later this year. The not for profit organization already looks after other attractions such as Peterborough Museum, the Key Theatre and many other culture and leisure facilities in the city.’ Francis Pryor thinks the takeover can only be of benefit to the site. ‘Vivacity’s involvement is going to be a good thing, without a shadow of a doubt. Peterborough’s tourist attractions cannot survive on their own. Whether Peterborough likes it or not, it’s now nationally known for Flag Fen and it is unique – other cities have cathedrals but no other city has a Flag Fen. It makes sense to me to have the museum and Flag Fen run by the same organisation. Many years ago I was chairman of the Peterborough Tourism Group and we put together a joint leaflet for all of the attractions in Peterborough and it worked very well. We sold Peterborough as a weekend out and I think that’s the way we’ve got to go – we have to sell Peterborough as a weekend destination. Everyone knows that York is a weekend destination yet Peterborough is closer to London and there’s just as much to see but it’s not known for that, it’s known as an industrial city.’
Much remains to be discovered at Flag Fen – only 10% of the site has been excavated. Sadly, that situation isn’t about to change any time soon. ‘In the present economic climate I don’t think there’s any possibility of raising money for further digs’ Pryor says. ‘I personally don’t have any plans to dig but I think archaeologists should be addressing it quite urgently. I’m retired from archaeology now and if I were to dig I wouldn’t want to spend another ten years writing up the findings! I’ve done my bit. But I am aware that other archaeologists are worried about the fact that it’s drying out. And that’s the first step to doing something about it.’
And something does need to be done. If Stonehenge were under such threat, there would be a public outcry; not so with the seemingly unloved, though equally important Flag Fen. ‘You can’t give it a definitive ranking’ Pryor says, ‘but it is certainly one of the most important Bronze Age sites in Britain because the preservation is so astonishingly good. It’s probably the most complete Bronze Age waterlogged site in Britain, and certainly one of the largest.’
Can we really allow a site of such national, and international, importance to disappear forever? Surely then, every offering made to the gods at Flag Fen all those thousands of years ago would have been in vain.
FLAG FEN TIMELINE
The wooden causeway and platform at Flag Fen was built between 1,350BC and 900BC and was thought to be in use for 1,000 years after its final construction. These are some of the major events that took place during the useful lifespan of the Flag Fen causeway.
1324BC: The young Egyptian pharoah, Tutankhamun dies. 1250BC: The city of Troy is destroyed by Mycenaean Greeks. 1200BC: Stone tablets, engraved by Moses to signify God’s Covenant with his people, are placed in a sacred chest – the Ark of the Covenant. 960BC: Solomon, the king of Israel, builds the first temple in Jerusalem. 776BC: The first athletic contest at Olympia is staged. 753BC: The founding of the city of Rome. 750BC: The warrior society of the Spartans is established. 689BC: The Assyrian king, Sennacherib, destroys the city of Babylon. 650BC: The earliest known coins are minted in Ephesus. 513BC: The Chinese become the first people to work with iron. 500BC: The Celts, moving west from central Europe, settle in France and northern Spain. 480BC: The last stand of the 300 Spartans against the Persians at Thermopylae. 447BC: The Athenians begin building their famous Parthenon. 424BC: Gautama Buddha preaches his first sermon. 356BC: Alexander the Great is born. 320BC: The greatest library in the world is established at Alexandria. 312BC: The first Roman road, the Via Appia, links Rome with Capua. 300BC: The Celts move into Britain from France and soon become dominant. 218BC: Hannibal crosses the Alps with his elephants to begin the second Punic War. 200BC: The mysterious Nazca lines are created. 100BC: The practice of acupuncture is first described in a Chinese text. 55BC: Julius Caesar makes the first of two invasions of Celtic Britain. 37BC: Marc Anthony and Cleopatra marry in Antioch.
1: Christians decide (long after the event) that this is the year of Jesus Christ’s birth and make it AD1 in the Christian chronology.
And it’s big. Really big. A mile-long wooden causeway stretches across the site, made up of some 60,000 vertical timbers and 250,000 horizontal timbers, every one of them bearing the distinctive marks of being worked and shaped with primitive tools. The causeway was constantly added to and enhanced over a period of 400 years, from 1350-900BC, evolving from a relatively simple structure with two rows of posts and a walkway, to a much grander one with five rows of posts and a wattle fence at its northern side. It’s been estimated that over two million trees were felled for use in its construction.
There does appear to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, should recent developments within Vivacity come to fruition and Flag Fen become part of Vivacity’s Heritage Service later this year. The not for profit organization already looks after other attractions such as Peterborough Museum, the Key Theatre and many other culture and leisure facilities in the city.’ Francis Pryor thinks the takeover can only be of benefit to the site. ‘Vivacity’s involvement is going to be a good thing, without a shadow of a doubt. Peterborough’s tourist attractions cannot survive on their own. Whether Peterborough likes it or not, it’s now nationally known for Flag Fen and it is unique – other cities have cathedrals but no other city has a Flag Fen. It makes sense to me to have the museum and Flag Fen run by the same organisation. Many years ago I was chairman of the Peterborough Tourism Group and we put together a joint leaflet for all of the attractions in Peterborough and it worked very well. We sold Peterborough as a weekend out and I think that’s the way we’ve got to go – we have to sell Peterborough as a weekend destination. Everyone knows that York is a weekend destination yet Peterborough is closer to London and there’s just as much to see but it’s not known for that, it’s known as an industrial city.’
Much remains to be discovered at Flag Fen – only 10% of the site has been excavated. Sadly, that situation isn’t about to change any time soon. ‘In the present economic climate I don’t think there’s any possibility of raising money for further digs’ Pryor says. ‘I personally don’t have any plans to dig but I think archaeologists should be addressing it quite urgently. I’m retired from archaeology now and if I were to dig I wouldn’t want to spend another ten years writing up the findings! I’ve done my bit. But I am aware that other archaeologists are worried about the fact that it’s drying out. And that’s the first step to doing something about it.’
