When the weather and the wind force the crew and the ship to lie in foreign harbours for many days, waiting, creative thinking is often needed to help pass the time. In Lowestoft, many of the crew considered the time off a gift because it turned out that there was a famous and very old collection of burial mounds from the Bronze and Iron Ages less than hour from the English coastal town – at Sutton Hoo. A bus was hired for transport.
It is believed that the Anglo-Saxon warrior king Readwald was buried in his 27-metre-long ship in the most prominent burial mound in the area. In 625, the ship was dragged 500 metres from the river and placed in a burial mound, raised well above the surrounding countryside. This is a so-called ship grave. The ship was clinker built using oak and therefore has some features in common with the Sea Stallion. All that was found was the impression of the ship in the soil. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde has previously been asked for advice and assistance because there have been plans to reconstruct the ship.
The burial place was found in 1939 and excavated. But after the excavation and photo documentation were finished, everything had to be covered up because of the war and the military activities in the area were quite harsh and destructive to the burial site. It was not even possible to measure the impression before everything had to be covered up.
The ship was re-excavated and measured in 1965–1971. An attempt to make a glass fibre cast of the impression failed. The measurements showed a strongly deformed ship.
The English were nevertheless successful in building up a small but very well functioning museum beside the burial mounds on the very beautiful ridge with a broad view across the river.
The burial mound is a monument from the time from just before the Viking Age – an interim period from when the Romans were forced to leave England in 410 to when the Anglo-Saxons streamed in. These were people from the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia, so the people in the north already saw possibilities for expansion in England before the Viking Age.
The Sea Stallion’s current first mate, Vibeke Bischoff, is a boat-builder with great experience of reconstructions:
“The Viking Ship Museum received an approach several years ago and I was therefore given the task of helping assess the possibility of reconstructing the hull form of the Sutton Hoo ship. I also had to make a proposal for the method, time and budget involved. So I travelled to London to go through the material. That was all the preserved iron nails that lie in drawers at the National Museum in London, excavation plans, photos, etc,” she says.
“The task of reconstructing the ship is difficult because the measurements were taken after the ship had become deformed. The area was used as a training ground for tanks during the war. The reason I was involved was partly because I had previously reconstructed a ship-find from the Viking Age, the Ladby ship, where the situation was also that it was only the impression of the ship and all of its iron nails that were preserved,” Vibeke Bischoff adds.
“My conclusion with regard to the English project was that the best one could do was to reconstruct the form on the basis of all the many photos that were taken during the excavations in 1939, when the ship’s impression was quite clear and striking in the soil. The project is at a standstill because the English have not yet been able to raise the money for it,” says Vibeke Bischoff.
