DOVER MUSEUM and BRONZE AGE BOAT GALLERY

Dover boasts a modern facility relating to local history and archaeology, the Dover Museum and Bronze Age Boat Gallery. Founded in 1836, this museum, situated in the town center near the Market Square, is one of the oldest museums in the Kent region. Is a surprisingly large museum for a city of Dover's size, offering offers an amazing collection of artifacts and photographs depicting Dover's history and a wonderful set of scale models showing the development of the town and port from the Bronze Age times up to 1990.

The museum's Prehistoric Dover section has one of England's finest Bronze Age displays, complete with a full scale sectional model through a Bronze Age hut, showing how the people would have lived. The Roman collection presents glass, pottery, weapons, and other artifacts from many of Dover's many Roman "digs." In addition, items from the town's Anglo-Saxon days are exhibited, as are items dating back to the Norman conquest and the burning of Dover. Still other parts of the museum are devoted to the history of Dover Castle, the medieval development of the town and port (with an absolutely magnificent portrait of Elizabeth I), the town's Victorian restoration, and its important place in both the First and Second World Wars.

The museum resources also include informative computer displays with games and interactive activities for all ages --- one of the most popular, especially with youngsters, is the chance to practice your Bronze Age boat-building skills of completing a 'yew' stitch. Visitors can also have access to an illustrated database of the museum's reserve collection.

The newest gallery at Dover Museum features the Dover Bronze Age Boat, a reward-wining, internationally important archaeological discovery made in 1992. Radio carbon dating has determined the boat to be some 3,550 years old, about the same age as Stonehenge. It was made of six large parts of oak which were worked to form a hull. The longest timbers excavated measured over thirty feet but true overall length may have been nearer to almost fifty feet.

The timbers were roughly shaped with bronze adzes, with large cleats on the inside, sewn together with ropes of yew, and waterproofed with thin wooden lathes and moss. The two bottom timbers were additionally secured with ribs were tied or sewn to protruding cleats. Experts think this boat was powered by eighteen rowers and of the type used to carry England's first settlers across the Channel. From an archeological perspective, the Dover boat find is very important because it represents an intermediate stage between the log boats and the later lapstrake boats.

After several years "away" for research and preservation purposes, the Dover Boat is back in Dover and on display at the museum. Other parts of the gallery offer a theater showing a film on the excavation of the boat and a laboratory where materials from the boat can be viewed using microscopes.

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