Ferriby Boats

The Ferriby Boats are three Bronze Age Britain sewn plank-built boats, parts of which were discovered at North Ferriby in the East Riding of the English county of Yorkshire. Only a small number of boats of a similar period have been found in Britain and the Ferriby examples are the earliest known sewn-plank boats found in Europe.

Ferriby is on the edge of a major estuary into the North Sea, the Humber, so speculation has been made ever since their discovery about whether they 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 achaeologist told the BBC that 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.

In 1937, the first boat, known as Ferriby Boat 1 (or F1), was discovered by Ted and Will Wright, on the shore of the Humber. It was a boat bottom with one end almost complete. What remained was 5.7 feet (1.7 m) wide and over 43 feet (13.17 m) long, the planks mostly 3–4 inches thick. It was part of an oaken three-strake flat rockered-bottom boat which had been stitched together with yew withies, caulked with moss and capped with watertight oak laths. It has room for up to eighteen paddles and has been radiocarbon dated to between 1880 and 1680 BC.

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