Ancient fish-traps found

THE EARLY English operated a large-scale commercial fishing industry, according to an archaeological investigation carried out off the Essex coast.

An aerial survey of tidal mud- flats - and more detailed investigations carried out by boat - have revealed a massive complex of wooden fish-traps, comprising up to 13,000 timber posts, located half a mile out to sea.

A dozen lines of timbers - some more than half a mile long - have been discovered in the Blackwater estuary, 15 miles south of Colchester, dating from the 7th to 10th centuries AD.

Found by a local amateur archaeologist and boatman, Ron Hall, the remains are being surveyed by Essex County Council's archaeology section, with funds provided by English Heritage.

The timbers were the uprights of wattle fences, the complex containing up to 100,000 square feet (30,500 square metres) of fencing, some of which survives.

The fences - laid out in a series of V-shapes - were used to funnel the outgoing tide, and its fish, into nets at the apexes. They would have yielded several hundred thousand fish per year - far too many to supply a single community, suggesting that the trapping was carried out for commercial purposes. The fish would have been salted, dried and, presumably, sold to communities in south-east England.

Who ran the Blackwater fish industry is, as yet, unknown. It may have been private entrepreneurs or, more likely, a local monastery. Just seven miles away, near Bradwell-on-Sea, stands one of England's earliest, founded in AD 654.