Experimental Archaeology at the Viking ship museum in Roskilde. The Saxon river boats would have been much smaller, but similar principles apply
Saxons on Sulby Road
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I cycled southwards, along Sulby Road. An ancient Road, which centuries ago was chosen as the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, taking up the role temporarily abandoned by the rivers Welland and Avon. Sulby Road in fact crosses the watershed between the two. At the time of the embryonic Saxon shires, or shares of land, the Midlands were an area of dense and near-impenetrable woodland. Boat travel along rivers was the principal and often only means of transport across country. Travel West-East at this point would have meant hauling a boat out of the Avon and dragging it on sleds and rollers over the watershed and into the Welland. Sulby Road, then a track in the woodland, may have witnessed the tortuously slow progress of such boat-haulings. Did Offa and the other Mercian kings pass this way as they traversed their Saxon realm.
Having passed through Welford, I headed towards South Kilworth, dropping down the steep contours of Downtown Hill from 554 feet at the roadside trig point, to 52 feet in the Avon Valley below. After first crossing the Grand Union Canal, the next bridge is over the River Avon. Were the Saxon’s boats dropped back into the water here after the long haul from the Welland, or did they manage the feat higher up at Welford? What does remain of the Saxons here is the county boundary between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, a duty falling upon the Avon, as fulfilled by the Welland over the other side of the watershed.
To the left of the bridge over the Avon, the river has been dammed back as Stanford reservoir, named after the nearby village.The reservoir was built in 1928 and, as the Leicestershire & Rutland Ornithological Society tells us on its website, lies on an imaginary line drawn between the Wash and the Severn, a proven ‘flyway’ for migrating birds across the centre of England.
That proven flyway follows the same trajectory as the proven waterway followed by the Saxons, the Welland flowing from the Wash in the East, the Avon flowing to the Severn in the West, but with this arduous overland connection up and over the watershed.
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Living thought as Logos
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