Following in the footsteps of our prehistoric ancestors on a 5,000-year-old trackway

One morning in 1970, a peat digger called Ray Sweet was working in the waterlogged wetlands of the Somerset Levels. While cleaning out a trench, Ray spotted something poking from the inky-black peat: a piece of timber. A plank, in fact. It was muddy, but miraculously not rotten, its structure preserved by the anaerobic environment of the peat. Even to Sweet’s amateur eye, it looked old.

Curious about his discovery, Sweet reported it to his boss, and a piece of wood was sent to John Coles, an archaeologist based at Cambridge University. As soon as he saw it, John knew it was important — but even he couldn’t know just how important at the time.

In fact, Ray Sweet had unearthed a piece of the oldest manmade trackway ever discovered — a track that was built nearly a millennia before Stonehenge.

Between 1973 and 1989, John Coles and his partner Bryony unearthed the secrets of this ancient pathway, along with around 40 others criss-crossing the Somerset Levels. Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) dated the timber with pinpoint accuracy to the early spring of 3,806 BC, which means the tree from which it was cut was felled nearly 6,000 years ago. It was named after the man who discovered it: the Sweet Track.

The path was built as a causeway between two high points, the Polden Hills and the island of Westhay, spanning two kilometres of wetland, fen and reed-bed. It was built by Neolithic farmers who were beginning to move from a nomadic lifestyle to settled agriculture. But its purpose wasn’t just practical; it seemed to be spiritual, too. Precious items were deposited in the water alongside the track as offerings: pottery bowls, wooden troughs, flint axes, bows, arrowheads, yew pins and, most surprisingly of all, a polished jadeite axe-head that had somehow travelled here all the way from the Alps.

The Sweet Track became a Scheduled Monument in 1976. To celebrate its anniversary, I’ve come back 50 years later to retrace its story. Outside the Avalon Marshes Centre, on the edge of the Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve, I meet Dr Richard Brunning, senior historic environment officer for the South West Heritage Trust.

‘The Sweet Track provides some of the earliest evidence we have for early farming communities in Somerset,’ Brunning explains, as we trudge along the road from the visitor centre. ‘It shows they were living here for extended periods of time, not just seasonally. It gives us an insight into their culture, the kinds of tools they used, the materials that were important to them. Making a path like this requires knowledge, co-operation and sharing of skills.’

We turn off the road onto a muddy track, shaded by weeping willow, oak, hawthorn and hazel. We follow the trail through the trees, and then Brunning stops and points at the ground. ‘Believe it or not, you’re walking along the Sweet Track right now,’ he announces. ‘Actually, it’s three feet to your left, to be precise.’ I scan the earth for signs of the path. There’s nothing — and there’s a reason for that, Brunning explains.

‘The minute we take the wood out of the peat, it degrades quickly,’ he says. ‘The best thing we can do is to leave it where it is.’ Peat is an amazing preservative, he explains. Its dense, waterlogged structure prevents oxygen from reaching the timber, stopping decomposition and preventing organisms — such as mould, fungi or boring insects — from damaging the wood. As long as water levels stay constant, artefacts, including natural materials, can remain preserved for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Amazingly, the peat has even preserved evidence of running repairs, including the remains of old timbers and post holes, as well as pollen, seeds and nuts from the springtime of its construction.

Two sections of the track were removed for research. One is now on display at the British Museum; the other at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. The rest remains right where its makers placed it, now buried under several feet of peat.

To demonstrate how the track would have looked to its makers, a replica has been built nearby, using the same materials Neolithic people used. Brunning leads me along another path, emerging beside a watery meadow where the replica trackway is suspended a foot above the peat-brown water, snaking off into the head-high reeds.

It’s an ingenious design. Pairs of hazel stakes are driven in at 45˚ angles to make V-shaped cradles. Split planks of oak and ash span the braces. Willow mats made the trackway comfier to walk on. Carefully, we teeter our way along it, windmilling our arms like tightrope walkers: the planks are narrow, only eight to ten inches across, so it takes concentration and balance to avoid slipping off.

‘The brilliant thing about the design is that it allows for fluctuating water levels, which would have been an issue for them, as it is for us today,’ Brunning says. Indeed, the landscape of the Levels has changed remarkably little since the trackway was in use: the boggy, flood-prone ground of the Levels make building and intensive agriculture impractical. ‘For me, that’s what makes this place important,’ Brunning says. ‘The landscape we see today is broadly similar to the one our ancestors experienced. So we’re walking where they walked, seeing what they saw. That’s powerful, I think.’

We head back towards the visitor centre. Overhead, swifts screech past. Reeds rustle like paper in the breeze. Water gloops and trickles. Across the marshes, the boom of a bittern echoes out. It’s strange, a little spooky, to realise these are the same sounds our ancestors would have heard nearly 6,000 years ago.

Back at the visitor centre, we meet John Ette from Historic England, the man responsible for caring for the Sweet Track, along with Britain’s 6,000 other Scheduled Monuments — including those that don’t yet exist. ‘The Sweet Track is the oldest ritual monument we have in Britain,’ he says. ‘It may not be as visually impressive as Stonehenge, but we should afford it the same importance. It gives us an insight into how our ancestors interacted with the landscape on a human, practical, everyday level. It brings them closer to us.’

Scheduling is the UK’s oldest form of heritage protection, dating back more than 150 years to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. The Schedule now encompasses everything from Cornish fogous and Iron Age Forts to Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, Georgian engine houses and Second-World-War anti-aircraft batteries. Sites are selected for their archaeological or historical interest; scheduling prevents development, preserves archaeology and ensures the sites will still be around for subsequent generations to enjoy. Theoretically, anyone can nominate a new monument, Ette explains, if they can make a valid case for its inclusion — although the bar is high. ‘Unfortunately, like many organisations, we don’t have the resources to include all the places we might like to,’ he says. ‘We have to take tough decisions on what to include, and what not to.’

Recently scheduled sites include a smelting mill in Northumberland, a menhir in west Cornwall, a Bronze Age farming site in Cambridgeshire, a Neolithic henge in Norfolk and an 18th-century shipwreck in the middle of the Solent. ‘But every day there’s a new suggestion on my desk, a new site to visit. That’s what makes my job interesting.’

And, Brunning adds, there may well still be more trackways to discover. Not long after the discovery of the Sweet Track, a second, even older path — the Post Track — was discovered underneath it. It was built perhaps 30 years earlier, but only fragments of it survived. Brunning thinks there may still be other trackways buried under the peat, preserved in the dark until they see the sunlight once again.

‘Who knows?’ he says. ‘Some of them could be even older than the Sweet Track. All we have to do is find them.’