Programme 1
Caergwrle Boat
- Caergwrle Boat
No ships from the Bronze Age have been discovered in Wales, but there is one fascinating artefact which hints at the kind of boats that were familiar to our ancestors three to four thousand years ago.
In 1823 a workman digging in a bog near Caergwrle, Flinsthire, came across an ornate shale bowl. 18cm long, 11cm across and 7.6 cm deep, the object was decorated with gold inlays, showing zig-zag lines and circles. It was instantly recognised as an ancient treasure, and was dubbed ‘the Caergwrle Bowl’, but it took over a century for the archaeologists to deduce that it was a model of a boat. The zig-zag lines represent waves along the boat’s sides and the round decorations represent shields. Triangular shapes could either be oars or the boat’s ribs. At each end of the model there were “eyes”, as seen in other models of Bronze Age ships that have survived.
- Caergwrle Boat
The best guess is that the Caergwrle Bowl is a representation of a ‘skin boat’, similar to the curraghs that are still built in Ireland. The model was created in the mid to late Bronze Age, possibly in Ireland, the probable source of the gold inlay. It has been suggested that the model was buried in the bog by traders travelling from Ireland to Britain, perhaps as an offering to appease the gods.
9:00PM Tuesday
Repeated on S4C Digidol 9:00PM Saturday
with English Subtitles