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 Viking 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 more 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 the 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.1 And the pipes,
as already mentioned, vary in age from the 17th century to much
more recent times.
1 Supposing that fuller examination confirms the view that it is a Viking Ship.