wreck behind him, which he could see was just beginning to emerge from the waves. Still, he thought, it doesn’t exactly look brassy. He had seen pieces off wrecks before, and somehow this wasn’t right: it was more coppery, and with a strange, red-gold surface sheen.
Gary saw John standing slightly bent forward, with furrowed brows, turning the thing over and over in his hands, and wandered across to see what he’d found. John was always collecting things from off the beach. He was a regular jackdaw. His house a few miles away at North Creek was stuffed full of treasures: shells, blanched bones, driftwood, weird-shaped stones, pieces from wrecks. If he found anything attractive, John would want to take it home.
Gary looked at the piece of metal, shook his head and agreed it was probably something from the wreck. But they had work to do, so they thought no more about it. True to his jackdaw instincts, John slipped it into his back pocket. By now the tide had retreated well beyond the peat, and the timbers of the wreck were fully visible, surrounded by huge expanses of smooth, damp sand. Together John and Gary carried the net out into the shallow water, just above knee-depth. Then they tested it. It worked. In fact it worked well, and is in regular use to this day.
John and his wife Jacqui are special-needs workers, who look after children with particular problems. John has found that taking his charges out in the mini-bus for a trip to the beach can do wonders for them. But they must have something useful to do when they get there, or they soon get bored, and mischief is never far behind. Towing a shrimping net and then sorting through the catch is ideal. And once the work’s over, the small brown shrimps are delicious for tea.
During the next four weeks, John visited Holme beach regularly, seeking crabs and shrimp. He would often return to the spot where he had found the metal object, which he was becoming increasingly convinced had nothing to do with the wreck. The more he looked at it, the more certain he was that it was an axe. With its crescent-shaped blade, he reasoned, it couldn’t be anything else.
It was a week or two after finding the object that he first noticed a large tree-trunk, with two strange-looking branches, like the stumps of amputated arms. It was close to the spot where he’d made his discovery, and was the same colour as the peat beds around it. But it looked odd. As he told me later, he couldn’t put his finger on why it looked so strange, but it did. Just like the metal object, there was a simple explanation, but it didn’t seem to apply. Holme beach was the site of a prehistoric ‘forest bed’ of tree stumps. And that’s what everybody said: his odd-looking stump was just part of the old forest. But John wasn’t happy with that explanation.
The peat didn’t actually touch or cover the strange stump, but stopped three or four paces short of it. John noticed that as the tide swirled around it, the water wore the sand and mud from around the trunk. Soon a natural trench began to form, and he was able to feel well down into the grey mud that lay directly below the beach sand into which the tree was embedded. He knew that not even the deepest roots of the forest trees went down this far.
The weeks passed, and John couldn’t stop thinking about that peculiar metal object that now sat on the mantelpiece at home. The more he looked at it, the more he became convinced that it had nothing to do with the wreck, which was less than a century old – the remains of a freighter that used to ply a regular route from Norway to King’s Lynn, carrying ice. Besides, he knew what a ship’s fire-fighting axes looked like, and this bore no resemblance to them.
One evening he took it down from the shelf and examined it, long and closely. Various things struck him as odd: the clear casting line where two moulds had once joined together; signs of hammering at one end, and at the other the smoothly crescentic cutting edge. It was certainly an axe, but it wasn’t like any axe he had ever used. For a start, there was no hole for a shaft. And besides, it was made from bronze or brass, not from steel. Then he had a bright idea. A friend of his in Fakenham was a keen metal-detectorist, and took all the magazines. Maybe he’d know what it was.
The next day found John in Fakenham with a cup of tea and surrounded by dozens of magazines. He leafed through them. There were stories about horse brasses, about Roman coins, about merchants’ tokens, about buckles, about everything under the sun – except axes. Then he struck lucky: in an article about Bronze Age metalwork he found a picture of a three-thousand-year-old bronze axe that looked fairly similar to his. It was by no means identical, but it was certainly close enough to set his mind racing.
In the days that followed he couldn’t let the matter rest. Again and again he thought, if it was a Bronze Age axe, then how on earth did it get there? Was it from an ancient wreck, or what? The more he pondered, the more curious he became. Eventually he phoned the Castle Museum at Norwich and described the object. The voice at the other end sounded interested. Could he bring it round to them?
The axe was at the Castle Museum for about four weeks. They were in no doubt that it was Bronze Age, and had been made around 1200 BC. They couldn’t find a local axe in their collections that was anything like it. Their best guess was that it may have been made in Ireland.
While he waited to hear from the museum, John returned to Holme beach several times. He noticed that the tide was slowly wearing away the surface around the strange stump. Then one day, a few feet away, he spotted the top of another stump. The next day he found another one. And then another. By the end of the week he could clearly discern a circle of stumps around the much larger central tree. The stumps had been hidden below the sand and mud, and as the tides swirled around the central tree they were gradually being exposed to the air.
John studied the smaller stumps closely. The circle was positioned on the seaward side of the peat beds; close to them, but not beneath them. Were they all tree stumps from a drowned forest? He knew that was the explanation for most of the wood found on the beach. But a circle? How could that be natural? Surely that had to be man-made?
By now John knew he had found something important. But how could he get somebody ‘out there’ interested? He lost no opportunity to talk about his discovery, but nobody seemed to take him seriously. John and his axe and his stumps. He began to feel that people were starting to laugh about him behind his back. Eventually someone came out from the museum to have a look at John’s circle. The expert pronounced that it was probably a fish trap or a salt pan, then walked over to the old wreck and spent the rest of the afternoon photographing that. John told me later he could have exploded with frustration.
In August, two weeks after the visit from the museum official, John received a letter from him in which he was told that, far from being unimportant, his find was causing great interest in the museum world. Next, he was contacted by Mark Brennand and Dr Bill Boismier, two members of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit, the team of archaeologists whose job was to investigate new discoveries in the county. They came to Holme beach to have a look, and John showed them the circle of stumps and the strange-looking tree at their centre. Mark and Bill took one look and stood back in silence, thunderstruck. Words seemed superfluous.
John was desperate to know more, but Bill wasn’t willing to commit himself. A man of few words at the best of times, he was not going to raise any false hopes at this stage. His field of expertise was the effects of tillage processes on artefact distributions in the ploughzone. Tillage processes had nothing to do with prehistoric religion, but in their hearts Bill and Mark knew what that circle of ‘stumps’ was. And it certainly wasn’t something as mundane as a fish trap or salt pan. As they drove back to the Unit, they could talk of nothing else. Was it really what they both thought? Could it be? They must get some further opinions. That evening, the phone lines from the Norfolk Archaeological Unit hummed.
ARCHAEOLOGY
