Tag: Offa’s Dyke

Penda's Dyke?

Silver penny of Offa (from Sixbid.com)
Silver penny of Offa (from Sixbid.com)

I’ve been very interested to follow the recent press coverage of the re-attribution of Offa’s Dyke, said to have been built by the famous Mercian king to keep out the Welsh. Offa’s Dyke runs for 177 miles from Prestatyn in North Wales to Chepstow near the River Severn in the south, much of it following the Wales-England border. It is eight feet high and 65 feet wide in places. It was thought to have been was built between 757 and 796 AD. However, it now looks as though Offa’s claim to be the instigator rests on, well, shaky foundations.

Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust has radiocarbon-dated samples taken from turf at
Chirk, near Llangollen, in North Wales, and the results suggest that the Chirk section, which runs along the Shropshire border, at least, was built between 430 and 652 AD, making the dyke up to 300 years earlier than was thought. It looks as though some of the dyke had already been constructed by the time of Offa (757-796) and that the eponymous king may have simply built upon earlier work.

Whoever was responsible the dyke certainly said something about the power of Mercia. Kings Creoda (584-593) and Penda (626-655) are now in the frame as possible claimants to the honour of having started the Dyke. Paul Belford, Director of Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, is quoted as saying that “It is now clear that it was not the work of a single ruler but a longer-term project that began at an earlier stage in the development of the kingdom.”

The Editorial in The Telegraph today (9th April 2014) asks “Does it matter? Only if visitors feel disappointed that the Devil’s Dyke on Newmarket Heath was not built by Satan, or Wiltshire’s Wansdyke by Woden.” Of course anyone familiar with mural archaeology would have guessed this was unlikely to be true. Wasn’t what we now know as Hadrian’s Wall for a long time attributed to the Emperor Severus?

More in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (9th April 2014). Thanks to Keith Sugden, Curator of Numismatics at Manchester Museum, for sourcing the image of Offa’s penny.