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DOVER'S famous Bronze Age boat was a rushed job, according to archaeologists who have replicated part of the hull. Toolmarks on the replica, made with careful copies of Bronze Age carpenters' tools, produced a better finish than on the original.

"The original builders were more interested in getting the boat completed quickly than in producing a fine finish," said Peter Clark of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust. "Although the process was largely trial and error, the toolmarks on the reconstructed boat matched those on the original precisely, including parallel grooves running along the base of the boat."

The boat, discovered beneath one of Dover's main streets in 1992, dates to about 1300BC, and is about one and a half times as long as a double-decker bus. It consists in essence of four oak planks, two flat ones forming the bottom of the boat and two curved sides.

About two thirds of the boat was recovered and is undergoing conservation before it is displayed in the Dover Museum. The replicated portion will be shown alongside, making it clear how the boat was built. The bottom planks were, rather oddly, fastened without joints or nails, by ramming wedges and cross timbers through a pair of upstanding ridges along the centreline, and into semicircular hooped cleats left raised on the floor. The side planks were stitched on with yew withies, and the seams caulked with moss.

Massive tree trunk sections were used. For the three-metre replica section, trunks about a metre in diameter were split into half-logs, and these were then sculpted into the four main planks using wooden wedges and bronze axes, chisels and gouges.

Mr Clark said: "The sheer scale of the boat, some 15 metres long, suggests that it was a seagoing vessel: a scrap of Dorset shale found in it suggests that it plied along the South Coast over 3,000 years ago." There is no local river large enough to take the boat and the coastal waters off Dover are sufficiently challenging that sea-going capability would have been needed on all but the calmest days.

Source: British Archaeology No 24:7.

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