"Little did I suspect that Bede’s story might come to life so vividly"
IN NOVEMBER, AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY was quietly announced by Suffolk County Council: an unprepossessing rectangular structure, marked by post holes in a farmer’s field. Nothing special, you might have thought – but for all who are fascinated by Anglo-Saxon history, it was thrilling.
The find was made at Rendlesham, five miles from the site of Britain’s greatest archaeological discovery, the ship burial at Sutton, featuring Ralph Fiennes’ sly, canny portrait of Basil Brown, the self-taught Suffolk archaeologist who first uncovered the ship burial before the excavation was taken over by the posh ‘professionals’ from London and Cambridge. There were a few jarring notes in the film – not least the relegation of Peggy Piggott to a walk-on part, when in fact she was already an experienced archaeologist by the time of the 1939 dig. However, though fictionalised, the film is a very evocative piece of English pastoral: digging in the Suffolk soil as a Spitfire flies low over the river Deben at Woodbridge, in that last summer before the world changed forever.
