Dover Bronze Age Boat
Dover Bronze Age boat is one of fewer than 20 Bronze Age boats so far found in Britain. It dates to 1575–1520 BC, which may make it the oldest significantly intact boat in the world (older boat finds are small fragments, some less than a metre square) – though much older ships exist, such as the Khufu ship from 2500 BC. The boat was made using oak planks sewn together with yew lashings. This technique has a long tradition of use in British prehistory; the oldest known examples are narrower types from Ferriby in east Yorkshire. A 9.5m long section of the boat is on display at Dover Museum, in the south east corner of the United Kingdom.
Little is yet known about the boat in use as few clues were left with it. According to the UK television programme, A History of Ancient Britain, the boat was laid to rest, still in good condition, in a smaller channel off the Dour river and the yew stitches were deliberately cut, leaving it unusable. It was preserved by being covered quickly in silt.
On 28 September 1992, construction workers from Norwest Holst (who were building the new A20 road link between Folkestone and Dover), working alongside archaeologists from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, uncovered what remained of a large prehistoric boat thought to be 3,500 years old. This would place its origin around 1500 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age in England.
The boat was buried under a road and the burial site stretched out towards buildings. It was decided that it would be too dangerous to dig too near the buildings, so an unknown length of the boat has had to be left under the ground.
Previous attempts to remove such boats whole have been unsuccessful, so it was decided to cut the boat into sections and remove it and reassemble it afterwards.
After nearly a month of excavation 9.5 metres of the boat was eventually recovered. Depending on different views of the true size of the complete boat this 9.5 metres could be up to two thirds of the full size of the boat.
The Dour leads straight into the English Channel, so speculation has been made ever since its discovery about whether the Dover boat went to sea and sailed to the Continent. There is plenty of evidence that there was cross-Channel communication, but it is not known what kind of boats actually sailed across. Keith Miller, a regional archaeologist told the BBC that the older Ferriby Boats would have been used to cross the North Sea and certainly the Ferriby Heritage Trust describe Ferriby Boat 3 as Europe's first known seacraft. The BBC television programme Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath Pt 2, broadcast on BBC Two in September 2014, describes the boat as seagoing and describes the tons of cargo it could have taken across the Channel. However, The Dover Museum consider that the Dover Bronze Age Boat is the oldest seagoing boat known, at only 1550 BC. They are backed by a different channel and programme from the BBC- Neil Oliver in the Bronze Age episode of A History of Ancient Britain . They are also backed by the Time Team Special, broadcast in September 2014 on UK Channel 4, which stated that to be a proper sea-going, cross-channel vessel the boat would have to have the curved 'rocker' bottom and the (unproven) pointed bow that only the more modern Dover boat possesses. Confusingly, the Oakleaf reproduction of the Ferriby boats was given a pointed bow and the Ferriby boats are described by the museum that houses them as having curved rocker bottoms, which sounds much the same as the Dover boat.
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