For those of you who don’t know, yesterday was the
Oxford/Cambridge women’s boat race (Oxford won). Whilst this event had
traditionally been held at Henley-on-Thames, this year bad weather caused the
event to be relocated to Dorney Lake (and from 2015 it will be held on the
Thames with the men’s race).
Dorney is a purpose-built rowing lake, around 2200m long,
which took 10 years to fully build (completed in 2006), and it was used as the
Olympic rowing course during London 2012. However, before they were allowed to
build a lake, archaeologists excavated the area over a period of 18 months in
order to ensure no valuable archaeology would be destroyed during the
construction process.
The lake is a stone’s throw away from the current course of
the river Thames, but this course has changed several times since the last Ice
Age, and this has left damp soil in its wake – good for preservation of certain
types of archaeological evidence, meaning that it was possible to construct a
good site sequence.
Although the area was woodland in the distance past, it has
been used for settlement since, although in more modern pre-lake times only
fields existed (it would have been hard to get permission to build a rowing
lake on top of someone’s house, obviously). The above image shows the full
diversity of archaeology found at the site.
The chronology of the site was phased from radiocarbon dates
of timber structures (bridges amongst the features found), and human bones
found there. A prehistoric field system was visible from the air, as a series
of rectilinear enclosures, trackways and pits. These features were concentrated
where the main body of the lake is today, so are no longer visible. However,
Bronze Age barrows are still visible (image from Google maps below) now,
between the lake and the river.
In
more modern times the area was used as a ‘Starfish’ bomb decoy for the nearby
town of Slough. The
starfish worked by the detonation of controlled explosions during an air raid
to simulate the effects of an urban area being targeted by bombs – making the
bombers think they had hit their target when in reality they were bombing only
empty fields.
I
haven’t even touched on the wealth of artefact evidence found at Dorney, but
one of the highlights of the finds was the oldest scythe found in Britain. It
is interesting to think what archaeologists 2000 years in the future might make
of the remains of the lake, especially if rowing no longer exists as a sport
like it does now.
[1] Parker et al. 2008
“Late Holocene geoarchaeological investigation of the Middle Thames floodplain
at Dorney, Buckinghamshire, UK: An evaluation of the Bronze Age, Iron Age,
Roman and Saxon landscapes” in Geomorphology
101 pp. 471-483.
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