Prof Steve Harding's Viking Wirral

New pub being built behind original Railway Inn, 1938 In 2007 a planning application was made to construct a patio extension at the Railway Inn, Meols. The assessment that routinely followed by the County Archaeology Office revealed a document reporting a vessel of unknown antiquity that had been buried underneath. Potentially an archaeologist’s dream: a major find under a pub! In 1938, when the Railway Inn was being knocked down and rebuilt further from the road, the site of the old pub being made into a car park, workmen had revealed part of a clinker vessel from under the waterlogged blue clay 2-3 metres below the original pub. A clinker has overlapping planks, a style which originated from Scandinavia over 2000 years ago  – mastered by the Angles and Vikings and characteristic of all their shipping – and a style of boatbuilding so successful it has subsequently been used through the ages and is still used today. The foreman on duty ordered the workmen to put all the clay bac...

The Vikings became legendary for their seafaring skills and their navigation methods have long been  a subject for speculation. The following is based on an article Steve wrote in “The Conversation” in  2016. Ancient records tell us that the intrepid Viking seafarers who discovered Iceland,  Greenland  and eventually North America navigated using landmarks, birds and whales, and little else.  There’s little doubt that Viking sailors would also have used the positions of stars at night  and the sun during the daytime, and archaeologists have discovered what appears to be a  kind of Viking navigational sundial. But without magnetic compasses, like all ancient sailors,  they would have struggled to find their way once the clouds came over. However, there are also several reports in Nordic sagas and other sources of a sólarsteinn  “sunstone”. The literature has sparked decades of research examining if this might be a reference to  a more...