DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: A Talk about Ancient Lake-Dwellings

WHEN Uncle John had finished reading, he asked the boys if they had ever heard before of people living in houses with water all round as a defence against their enemies?

“Yes, if you mean a single house,” Dick said, “you told me that your house here once had a moat all round it.”

“Yes,” said Uncle John, “so it had; and though the village of the Lake People was built many hundreds of years before ever there was a house like mine in all the country, yet the notion was the same. In the old days men felt safer with deep water all round them, than when there was only a stockade, or even a wall. The villages by the lakes in Switzerland that I told you of before, were built in that way over the water on piles.”

David wanted to know how the Lake People had managed to support the platform on which the huts were built—was it held up by straight piles, like a table with a lot of legs?

“No,” said Uncle John, “not in Dobran’s village, anyway. I will tell you what I know about it. Some time ago a farmer who lives near here had a boggy place on his farm. It lay in a hollow among his fields, and in winter or after a great deal of rain it became almost a lake. People used to say that once upon a time there had been a lake there, but it had got filled up with moss and peat. However, the farmer wanted to turn it into ploughing-land, so he set to work to drain it; his men dug drains and ran off all the water, and then they saw a large, low mound standing up out of the mud. And when they came to clear the mound away, they found that it was the remains of an ancient lake village that had lain hidden in the bog under the water for hundreds of years. I heard about it, so I went, and stayed all the time, day after day, while they were digging out the remains; and so I got a good notion of how those old people, that we have been reading about, used to make their lake-villages in this part of the country—for in other places they had other ways.”

“What did you find?” the boys all asked.

“Well, we didn’t find any huts; they had all gone to decay long before; but the great platform of tree-trunks was there, and its foundations and parts of what had been the gangway to the shore. And we found the old rubbish-heap, and we picked over and sifted every bit of it; and I will show you an arrow-head and some beads, and some pieces of pottery, that I picked out of the rubbish myself. In this rubbish were great numbers of bones of animals that the people had used for food. The bones were of deer and cattle and sheep and some of smaller animals, and some of birds. But the greatest find of all was a canoe. We found it lying buried in the mud, wonderfully preserved. We could see that it had been made, like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, out of the trunk of a tree, and hollowed out by fire, and hewn with stone axes.

“And the mound was cleared away from top to bottom, and very hard work this was; for it was solidly built of tree-trunks laid in rows like the sheaves in a corn-stack: there were hundreds of trees, though none of them very large. Then there were piles driven in upright to hold the others together, and great stones that had been sunk to keep the beams down: and at the bottom of all were bundles of brushwood and more large stones, which had been put down first for the foundations. And if you bear in mind that the people of the lake-village had had to chop down all those trees and lop off the branches with their stone axes, which, as Joe reminded us, were not the best sort of cutting tools, and bring every faggot and every stone and every beam across the water in their canoes, you will see it must have been a great piece of work for them. The farmer and his men had a stiff job to pull the mound to pieces and clear it away; but these old people, we may be sure, had a much harder task in building it.”

Joe said that, perhaps, they floated out the tree-trunks on the water—that would be easier than putting them on the canoes.

“That’s right,” said Uncle John. “When they had got the foundation of stones and faggots laid, they made rafts of the trees and towed them out and loaded them up with stones and so sank them upon the foundations; and then laid more trunks on these, until they got to the right height above the water.”

“Did you find any other things in the rubbish heap?” David asked.

“We found some bone harpoons for spearing fish, and a number of objects of stone, such as weights for sinking fishing nets, and some that were used, perhaps, as whorls for twisting thread in spinning, and some beads of jet and a number of bone needles; but not many arrows, and only two or three axe-heads, one of which was broken.”

“Why didn’t you find more weapons?” David asked; “I expect the people had many more, hadn’t they?”

“I expect they had,” said Uncle John, “but I’m afraid I can’t tell you why no more were found. Perhaps the people went away to live somewhere else and took their belongings with them.”

“I wish we had been there when you were digging at the mound,” Dick said. “I suppose there isn’t another one anywhere about?”

“No,” said Uncle John. “I’m afraid there isn’t another one.”