Flag Fen | Last chance to see

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.’