Dover Bronze Age Boat

This technique has a long tradition of use in British prehistory; the oldest known examples are the narrower Ferriby boats from east Yorkshire.

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.

It showed signs of having been repaired on a number of occasions before becoming buried, including a split down the eastern side that had been filled with other pieces of wood.

[4] The River 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.

[7] 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 a Time Team Special, broadcast on 7 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 allegedly possesses.

According to 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.

The width of the boat is significant, being around 2 metres wide it is much wider than dugout canoes of the time and can easily seat two people next to each other.

[12][13] The boat was later dismantled and reassembled using Bronze Age materials consisting of moss mixed with animal fat as caulking, and was stitched together with yew lashings.

An almost full-size reconstruction of a sewn plank boat was created in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in 2012–13, launched in March 2013 and sailed round Falmouth Harbour.