ON THE LEA VALLEY. 13 



Besides the exceptional facilities for intercourse with the Con- 

 tinent possessed by the inhabitants of this district generally, 

 waterways like the Thames and Lea gave special facilities, 

 two thousand years ago, for local intercommunication, facilities of 

 enormously greater relative importance than they now afford. 

 And the sites of Tottenham, Edmonton, and of old London are 

 such as must have recommended themselves to the earliest 

 settlers in permanent towns or villages, from the water supply 

 obtainable from the gravels on which their houses stand, as well 

 as from their proximity to the rivers. In short this district must 

 have been one in which dug-out canoes became extinct sooner 

 than in any other part of the British Isles. Nor would they be 

 likely to survive even as the coracle of the Severn has done. 

 For, though primitive, the latter is extremely portable, while the 

 dug-out must have been more ponderous than the least advanced 

 of more modern craft, and have had no counter-balancing advan- 

 tage of any kind. Now the explorer Pytheas, about the year 

 330 B.C., found that there was then considerable intercourse 

 between South-Eastern Britain and the Continent, though the 

 intercourse was confined to this part of the British Isles, which 

 he found abounding in corn, and affording every evidence of a 

 settled agricultural condition. 



Among the human relics should be mentioned, in addition 

 to the dug-out and the \'iking ship, a considerable number of 

 tobacco pipes. Those I have found myself were mostly towards 

 the base of the surface loam, but some were in the sand of a 

 disused channel They are not all alike as regards shape, but 

 most of them appear to resemble the pipes of the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries, rather than those of a later date. 



In short, the articles used by man found in these recent 

 river deposits date from perhaps B.C. 500 to the present day. 

 For its seems to me that the available evidence makes the dug- 

 out's date here suggested uiore likely to be insufficient than 

 excessive. Then the Roman pottery, &c., mentioned by 

 Mr. Traill will be by some six or seven hundred years more 

 recent. The Viking ship is not unlikely to have been one of the 

 Danish fleet which went up tlie Lea in A.D. 895, were blockaded 

 there by King Alfred and captured or destroyed in the following 

 year, as narrated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.' And the pipes, 

 as already mentioned, vary in age from the 17th century to much 

 more recent times. 



I Supposing that tuUer examinationlconfirms the view that it is a Viking Ship. 



