Glorious mud

Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat and boring’ had given him five quid. Yet these million acres of water-logged land making their way from Lincolnshire through Norfolk and towards Cambridge have one quality that makes them irresistible to archaeologists like him. The peat preserves wood perfectly for thousands of years in a way that happens almost nowhere else in the country.

As a result, and although few of us are aware of it, ‘some of the most imaginative and technically advanced excavations in the world are taking place in the Fens at the moment’. Using new archaeological techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning (Lidar), as well as old-fashioned digging, some quite fabulous wooden artefacts from the Bronze Age have just emerged. The most spectacular is ‘Seahenge’, the mortuary ring with an upturned oak at its centre which was first revealed after storms in early 2014.