Stanwick Lakes: Bronze Age log boat build reaches halfway point

Lorena Boquete Vilarino wears Bronze Age style clothes while using ancient techniques to carve out the boats

Building Bronze Age-style log boats using replica tools and fire has revealed "how long and how much effort" it was to make prehistoric vessels.

Ten volunteers are hoping to get two boats afloat at Stanwick Lakes nature reserve in Northamptonshire next year.

It is part of a £250,000 Heritage Lottery project to connect the site to its ancient past.

Heritage officer Nadia Norman said the boat build began in June and volunteers had devoted 500 hours to it so far.

Ms Boquete Vilarino is an experienced Bronze Age re-enactor but jumped at the chance to extend her skills "with proper tools"

The team is creating the boats from a fallen lime tree donated by Boughton House, near Kettering.

They include Lorena Boquete Vilarino, 35, an experienced Bronze Age, Iron Age and early medieval re-enactor, who is currently the only woman volunteer.

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She said: "I do a lot of crafts such as weaving and spinning, which are manageable on your own, but you don't get many opportunities to work with the proper tools on something as big as a boat.

"This is a massive project and a lot of physical work and it has really helped me understand how long it takes and how much effort to carve out the boats."

Ten volunteers have taken part in the boat build, many of whom have woodworking or engineering backgrounds

A post-doctoral researcher in cancer biology from Cambridge, she has also found it "really amazing" to use the bronze replica tools.

She said: "When you think of bronze, you think it's going to break or lose its sharpness - but it's really resistant."

Fellow volunteer Aidan Phillips, 61, who helped cast the tools earlier in the year, agreed they are standing up to the work, unlike their wooden handles, or hafts.

They include Aidan Phillips (left), who has just begun a part-time archaeology degree, and Andy Dyks (right)

Mr Phillips is leading on burning out one of the boats, which will eventually be finished off with tools

Despite being an experienced woodworker, "the biggest challenge now is the haft, I'm on my sixth one and I've just broken that, it is literally one a month - some lasted a day," he said.

Mr Phillips, a digital learning co-ordinator for Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue, said: "I've been leading on the boat burn on the smaller of the two and trying to perfect the technique for the right burn.

"But it starts you thinking, it's quite possible that in the past they would have had someone tending it all night and they would cook breakfast on the fire - otherwise the burn would have been a wasted resource."

Ms Norman said the team was now more than halfway through building the log boats, based on those found at "Britain's Pompeii", the burnt-out 3,000-year-old village at Must Farm quarry, Cambridgeshire.

The volunteers aim to create boats with flat ends like the one above and have them ready to try out on the water by next year