Stunning new mural helps brings to life Bronze Age Causeway at Peterborough's Flag Fen

A stunning new mural will form the centre-piece of a new exhibition opening to visitors to Peterborough’s Flag Fen on Saturday (March 15).

The finishing touches have now been put on the art piece, on the site’s preservation hall.

The site of the centre and the exhibition is a 1km long causeway that dates back over 3,000 years to around 1800BC.

A section of the historic causeway has already been excavated and is available to view inside the preservation centre but also, a 15m fully accessible replica of the causeway has been constructed, allowing visitors to walk along it and get a sense of that the fen landscape would have looked like during the Bronze Age.

The walkway leads to the building upon which well-known street artists Nathan Murdoch and Tony Nero have created a scene encapsulating how the causeway may have looked thousands of years ago.

Flag Fen General Manager Jacqui Mooney said: “On the side of the preservation hall, Nathan has painted this absolutely gorgeous fen-scape of what it would have looked like in the Bronze Age.

"On the mural, the causeway drifts off into the distance with people walking on it, so as you walk down our replica causeway, it looks like you are going to walk off into the picture.

“We have an excavated part of the causeway in the preservation hall to look at but what we wanted to show is that actually, this causeway was this huge structure with really high poles on the outside of it. When you walk down it, if feels like you are encased in this warm protected zone across these marshy fens.

“We have produced this to help people understand how monumental it would have looked when it went across; a huge monument going across the landscape.”

The artwork and sculpture project is just the beginning of the causeway project at Flag Fen.

The causeway buried at Flag Fen is in danger of disintegration because the ground is drying out and no longer preserving it in the same way it has done for thousands of years.

Therefore, researchers are in a race against time to research the causeway as much as they can.

Previously, only 5% of the entire causeway has ever been dug and in just that 5%, there have been over 300 finds of items such as swords, rapiers and jewellery which is believed to have been deposited there as part of a ritual.

This has led archaeologists to believe that Flag Fen was a special ritual landscape that was revered by people of the time.

The causeway itself is made up of around 60,000 posts and is expected to hold a vast number of other treasures, based on what has been found in just a small excavated section.

Jacqui added: “Flag Fen was a really special ritual landscape with this huge monument running through it. We’ve only dug so little of it so far that we don’t yet know just how special it was.

"We are running out of time to dig it though so we need to act fast to start finding out the answers to our questions before it is all gone.

“This sculpture and mural has really kickstarted our project to help people understand what it is that we don’t want to lose.”

To find out more about visiting Flag Fen and the exhibition dedicated to the causeway, visit https://flagfen.org.uk/