Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to go out on a tour of the Burial Mounds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, UK and what an experience it was. I got goosebumps imagining people and oxen dragging the 90 foot long boat up from the river Deben to the burial site and appreciated just what an effort this would have been for them. The boat had definitely been a working vessel as it was possible to see the marks of where it had been repaired in the plank outlines left behind in the sand, repairs which would not have been required if it had simply been built for inhuming the body in as was believed at one point in time.
Nowadays the site is surrounded by woodland on the river side and a farm that produces turf on the inland side, but back in the early 7th century it would have been much more open to the river so the mounds would have been seen from along the river as vessels were making their way along it.
In later years (8th or 9th century onwards) the site was used as a place of execution, shown by the presence of ‘sand bodies’ of people who had been killed and then placed into the ground in horribly contorted positions, with one even having been decapitated and the head placed down by the feet. It’s possible that there was a gallows at the site and maybe the bodies were even left hanging there for a while to deter other evil-doers. As the guide pointed out ‘To be buried here you were either at the top or the bottom of society!’
The atmosphere and details will definitely be making its way into some future writing!
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