Archaeology
A story in autumn 2007 about the possible discovery of a ‘Viking’ boat at Meols, Wirral has been given wide attention in the local, national and international press.
Various aspects of the story as reported in the press are inaccurate, misleading or speculative. Much interest and scepticism has been raised in the region about the reports and there have been a number of enquiries on the subject to Dr Rob Philpott and the Field Archaeology Unit at National Museums Liverpool. This is an attempt to set the record straight and to provide a balanced view of what is actually known about the boat.
The discovery of the boat came to light in October 1991 after a local man visited the Viking exhibition at Liverpool Museum (as World Museum Liverpool was known at the time). This prompted him to write in about his father’s discovery of a boat during construction of the new Railway Inn at Meols.
A section of the boat had been uncovered but his father had been told by the site foreman to rebury it. However he made careful observations of the boat and his son sketched the boat based on his father’s memory. The letter states that the boat lay about 8 to 10 feet below the ground surface of the Railway Inn. A section five to six feet long was exposed and from this his father estimated the length at 20-30 feet. The sketch shows that the boat had a rounded end which measured about 18 inches wide and the boat measured approximately 3 feet wide.
An excerpt from the letter reads:
‘When father discovered the boat, he uncovered one end of the boat which he took to be the bow section. He dug away the grey blue clay until 5’-0 to 6’-0 was visible. He states the boat was in reasonable condition, constructed of wood and clinker built with a good rise to the bow. The bow was not pointed it was quite round at the stem… No details of the inside could be seen as the boat was full of mud’
A copy of the letter was deposited in 1991 in the Merseyside Sites and Monuments Record as the primary source material for the existence of the boat.
There is no direct evidence for the date of the boat. The claimed dating of the boat relies on the report of clinker construction and a rough sketch of the form, with estimated dimensions. The context of the boat, set within blue clay at 8 to 10 feet below the surface, may also provide some indication of date.
While the report of the presence of the boat is undoubtedly convincing, it would be most unwise to attempt to date the vessel on the basis of details of the boat’s construction which were reported after such a long time. Clinker construction, where the planks of the vessel walls are overlapped rather than being set edge to edge, has been found in Britain since the 7th century and has remained in use into the present century.
The closest parallel in Britain for the vessel as initially sketched was pointed out by Michael Stammers, then keeper of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, at the time of the initial report. He drew attention to the similarity with the Kentmere boat, a vessel found in 1955 in the bed of the Kentmere lake, Westmorland (Wilson 1966 [1]). It was a dug-out logboat, to which five wash-strakes had been attached on either side, in a clinker-built extension of a basic logboat. Significantly it was radiocarbon-dated to AD 1320 ± 130 years, centuries after the Viking period in the North West of England. It too was a small vessel, 4.25 m long and 0.61 m wide, and had a rounded stern which closely parallels the illustration of the Meols boat (McGrail 1987, 75, figure 6.15 [2]).
There is one crucial argument against the Meols boat being Viking age, based on the form. Viking boats, including the faering, a small rowing boat of a type found in the Gokstad burial ship and dated to about AD 900, are characterised by a stem or stern post at either end. The drawing and description explicitly state that the Meols boat was rounded, making it of quite different form from classic Viking vessels.
A consideration of the context within which the boat is buried may narrow down the date to some extent. The fact that the boat appears to have been buried in ‘blue clay’ makes it an intriguing find. The deposit of blue ‘clay’ has been observed widely under windblown sand deposits in the coastal margin and is interpreted as a due to marine incursion (e.g. Cowell and Innes 1994, tables 2 and 3 [3]). We do not know whether the boat was deliberately buried, or sank, or was abandoned, on the edge of a wetland area or in an early infilled channel. The area behind the shore south of the village at Meols, known as the Newton Depression, was a major wetland area in prehistoric times. The date of infill is not known and further research is required to determine whether some channels and watercourses still survived within the wetland in the later medieval period in the same way that a complex of dendritic channels survived in Bidston Moss into the 17th century and are illustrated in the 1665 Kingston Viner map (Cowell and Innes 1994, plate 2 [3]).
The recent work on the finds from the shore at Meols (Griffiths et al 2007 [4]) indicates that the medieval village of Meols shifted to its current position immediately to the west of the Railway Inn findspot about AD 1500, as a result of sand dune encroachment.
The balance of probability, taking into account the reported form of the vessel and its location, would favour a later medieval date but this requires analysis of the context to narrow down the date range further.
Media reports have suggested that this is an important discovery which should be a high priority for urgent investigation. However, a properly conducted archaeological survey is an expensive and time consuming undertaking, so before one is started archaeologists need to satisfy several criteria:
Insufficient work has been done to determine the context within which the Meols boat sits or the date of the deposits. We know that there is a boat, as there has never been any doubt over the initial report. A recent ground-penetrating radar survey has apparently indicated a possible boat-like feature. This may confirm the precise position of the vessel but adds nothing to the key question of its date.
The first stage before any investigation is undertaken should therefore be to undertake a non-intrusive study of the context of the boat. It may narrow down the likely date of the boat by producing dating evidence for the context within which the boat is set.
The boat is just one of many new sites are that discovered each year. The Historic Environment Record contains information on thousands of archaeological sites, buildings and findspots. Not only is it impossible to act on all of those to investigate them, it is also far from desirable.
The most obvious time to act is when a site is threatened with destruction or damage through an identifiable threat such as building development, coastal erosion or ploughing when information will be lost unless a site is investigated and recorded.
There is currently no known threat to the boat. The suggestion has been made that the 1938 intervention may have caused degradation to the boat and therefore the correct response is to investigate it. However that could do more harm than good. Raising the boat, even if technically feasible given its location close to a standing building, would be an expensive, multi-million pound undertaking. Any exposure of the boat would expose it to the harmful effects of the atmosphere, which would inevitably cause deterioration of the vessel. Once raised the long-term conservation and storage of the vessel would be complicated and highly expensive.
In Britain and the North West there are no resources to investigate more than a tiny fraction of the known archaeological sites. Therefore before a decision is made to investigate a site for research purposes a number of criteria need to be satisfied:
Nationally important archaeological remains rightly receive the protection of the law to ensure that they are protected and preserved in situ for future generations. Future techniques and methods will improve and yield more information than is possible currently. Such legislation serves to protect the nation’s heritage not only against wilful destruction but also against for example well meaning but misguided interventions which are undertaken for private reasons by individuals.
Many thousands of archaeological sites in the North West and more widely in Britain as a whole remain undisturbed and uninvestigated. We need to have a very powerful argument for disturbing any site. No such case has yet been made that would justify jeopardising the long-term survival of the Meols boat in order to investigate it now.