Archaeologists have uncovered a prehistoric woodland “time capsule” buried in Exmoor’s ancient peatlands. The finding, filled with beetles and plant fragments, gives a time-frozen snapshot of the creatures that lived there – and could help restore the area to the richly boggy, carbon-sequestering, tree-filled landscape it once was.
The discovery was made during a peatland restoration project at the Holnicote Estate in England’s West Somerset.
Researchers uncovered a buried area of prehistoric woodland, which included remains of sedge, rushes, willow and alder trees. Evidence of late neolithic and bronze age insect life and plants that lived in the bog about 5,000 years ago include ground beetles, dung beetles, rove beetles, moss mites and water scavenger beetles – all of which can still be found in healthy wetlands, experts said. Peat contains very little oxygen, so submerged wood and other organic material – including human bodies – can survive, preserved, for thousands of years. The finds included a segment of willow tree dated back to the beginning of the neolithic period: 3940 to 3650 cal BC.
“The most stunning bit [of the discovery] is how perfectly preserved everything is and that we now know there were trees in what is [now] a treeless environment,” said Basil Stow, a National Trust ranger working with the project.
“The fact we found tree species in such good condition is especially important because it will help us find out how peatland habitats formed in the first place, many thousands of years ago.” That means, he said, “we can kickstart those processes again to capture more carbon and restore the landscape”.
“We are not trying to recreate the bronze age landscape,” he added, “but we are using the knowledge we have gained about the natural processes that first formed the habitat” to inform how the area is managed in the future.
Replanting of new willow, birch and alder trees has already begun, he said.
The South West Peatland Project, as the restoration initiative is known, aims to transform the damaged peatland into the damp, diverse environment it used to be. The project involves the National Trust, Natural England, South West Water and Exmoor national park authority. Keeping the water in the peat will also help the land absorb more carbon and better withstand the ravages of climate change, their experts say.
Restoration techniques include slowing drainage, to create a stable water table that keeps the peat wet, helping reduce carbon emissions and protecting archaeological remains.
As well as the carbon storage and nature benefits, Stow said the restoration works will help mitigate flooding risks which affect downstream villages like Porlock and Allerford.
“In this site, there were a lot of manmade drainage ditches to make the land more productive for agriculture,” Stow said. The draining lowered the water table and dried out the peat, which stopped it absorbing carbon.
“Our hope now is that living willow dams will hold the water back in the peatland so it can stay wet and not run off,” he said.
Stow said it was difficult to quantify how much carbon the wetlands might hold. But “we do know peat can hold a lot of carbon; it’s one of the major terrestrial storages. And we know that keeping the peat wet can stop carbon leaving the soil.”
Sander Aerts, an environmental archaeology manager who works with a team from Wessex Archaeology, has been investigating the findings in a bid to describe what the landscape looked like “back when the peat was starting to form, probably in the late neolithic to bronze age … about 5,000 years ago, and how it has developed over time.”
Aerts said the most important finding so far for him was a ground beetle species, Agonum fuliginosum. “I analysed the insect remains and it always baffles me that you can look at something like this, that has been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years and yet it looks like it died yesterday,” he said.
The beetle is “very characteristic of wet woodland, so it really summed up the essence of our research [and what the peatland environment should be]”, he said.
“It was all there, in one beetle.”
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