On a sunny afternoon in late July, sleek logboats slipped smoothly past whispering reeds and splashed into the water below. Their determinedly paddling passengers propelled the dug-outs swiftly across the lake, in a scene that would have been a common sight in the wetlands of the Nene Valley 3,000 years ago. This was no prehistoric journey, however, but the culmination of the Big Bronze Age Boat Build, a community archaeology project that has been running at Stanwick Lakes Country Park in Northamptonshire for the last two years.
This initiative (supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund) represents only the latest chapter in the area’s long and illuminating archaeological story. Today, Stanwick Lakes is a 750-acre nature reserve managed by the Rockingham Forest Trust, but its tranquil environment belies a rather more industrial recent past, its landscape shaped by extensive gravel quarrying between 1985 and 2004. These extraction works prompted one of the largest archaeological excavations of its time, investigating c.160 acres and uncovering remains spanning 5,000 years of human history. Discoveries ranged from a Neolithic long barrow and Bronze Age burial mounds to an Iron Age settlement, a Roman villa adorned with geometric mosaics, Saxon structures, and a deserted medieval village (see CA 75, 97, and 106).
When the landscape was flooded to create the nature reserve, many of these sites vanished from view, but for the last 12 years Heritage Fund grants have enabled a number of projects at Stanwick Lakes to help bring the area’s archaeological significance to light once more, and to encourage visitors to interact with some of its centuries-old stories. Early initiatives included the creation of a heritage trail around the lakes, and establishing a small museum within the visitor centre, showcasing some of the 1980s finds, including a Roman mosaic and a late Saxon stone grave cover. (The remainder of the artefacts are currently stored in the county’s publicly accessible archaeological archive – the Northamptonshire Archaeological Resource Centre, or ‘ARC’ – on the nearby Chester House Estate; see https://chesterhouseestate.org/history/the-arc.) More recent work has seen still-visible features cleared and consolidated; the establishment of a Heritage Barn for sharing and teaching traditional crafts; and innovative archaeological reconstructions, many of them developed and built by an army of eager volunteers (see box ‘Living history’ below for more details).
