Qualla: Wittemoor Timber Trackway

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most prehistory comes with a shrug attached - a century, a range, a give-or-take of two hundred years. The trackway laid across the Wittemoor bog comes with a year. Tree rings in the oak give 135 BCE, which means that in a single season somebody in the marshes south of the Weser felled timber, split it, hauled it out onto ground that would not hold a footprint, and built a road on top of the bog rather than around it. And where that road crossed a small stream, they set up a man and a woman cut flat out of oak planks, one on each bank, with no faces at all.

Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: A Road Laid on Nothing

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographed by User:Bullenwächter, CC BY-SA 3.0. A Bohlenweg - a log causeway, or corduroy road in the American term - is what you build when the ground between where you are and where you need to be is liquid. Timbers are laid crosswise, sometimes on longitudinal runners, and the whole raft floats more than it rests. Dozens of...

Image: Photographed by User:Bullenwächter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: The Two at the Stream

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Six wooden figures came out of the excavations, and two of them are among the very few Iron Age carvings anywhere in northern Europe to have survived at all. They are silhouettes, cut from oak planks only a few centimetres thick, and they are severe. The male figure stands about ...

Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: Fires on Both Banks

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The crossing was not simply marked. It was equipped. Fire sites were found on either side of the track, one at each end of the crossing. Just north of the female figure, two plain cult poles stood surrounded by stones and worked alder sticks, the sort of deposit that usually mean...

Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: Laid Flat

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. When they were found, every one of the figures was lying down. One reading is that they were deliberately laid flat - taken out of service and put beyond reach rather than left standing to be defaced by whoever came next. It is a small detail with a large implication: somebody de...

Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wittemoor Timber Trackway: Why Anything Is Left

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. None of this should exist. Oak in open air is gone within a human lifetime. What preserved the trackway and its figures is the same thing that made the road necessary: waterlogged peat, sealed from oxygen and mildly acidic, in which wood can sit for two thousand years without rot...

Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0