Shinewater: Eastbourne’s Remarkable Bronze Age Settlement

An accidental discovery

For around 800 years, the flat, marshy ground between Polegate and Eastbourne — known locally as the Willingdon Levels — had been used as farmland. Then, in 1995, everything changed. Plans for a landscaped park, a new school and major road improvements meant the low-lying land had to be dug out to create flood-storage lakes and ponds. It was during the clearing of one of these lakes that the machines uncovered something no one expected.

A metre beneath the surface lay dozens of upright wooden posts, surrounded by horizontal timbers and scattered with animal bone and broken pottery. Archaeologists were called in, and a rescue excavation began. What they found astonished them: the waterlogged peat had acted as a natural preservative, sealing off oxygen and protecting timber and organic material that would normally have rotted away thousands of years ago. Buried in the Sussex mud was a Bronze Age landscape, frozen in time.

The platform and the trackway

Two great structures emerged from the marsh. The first was the platform — a huge raised timber floor covering an area of at least 2,000 square metres, roughly the size of half a football pitch. It had been built by driving oak posts almost 1.4 metres deep into the soft ground to anchor a framework of horizontal timbers, which was then covered with a layer of smaller rods of wood such as hazel. The result was a solid, dry surface raised above the surrounding wetland.

The second structure was the trackway, a massive timber causeway running west from the platform towards the higher, drier ground around Willingdon. Built from three rows of vertical oak posts holding a framework of horizontal oak timbers, it stretched for a remarkable distance — some reports describe a causeway up to 6 metres wide and over 250 metres long, far larger and more complex than most comparable structures found elsewhere in Britain. It seems to have been a kind of raised road, carrying people and animals safely across the boggiest patches of the marsh.

The extraordinary finds

On the surface of the platform, archaeologists uncovered three hearths set on clay and a layer of debris around 20 centimetres thick, packed with everyday rubbish that tells us how people lived. There was pottery of the Late Bronze Age, huge quantities of worked stone, and animal bone from cattle, sheep and pig — the remains of meals eaten here nearly three millennia ago.

But it was the small finds that made Shinewater truly exceptional. Among them were:

• A small bronze sickle with its wooden handle still intact — a genuinely rare survival, since the wooden parts of Bronze Age tools almost never last. It was carefully lifted in a block of soil and conserved for museum display.
• Three socketed bronze axes, of a type linked to the North German and Dutch coasts.
• Ornamental amber beads, a bronze chisel, a bronze bracelet and part of a shale bracelet.
• Two lead purse-shaped pendants, with parallels in Belgium and northern France.
• Two carved antler pieces and organic survivals including wattlework and rush matting.

Perhaps most poignant of all were the human remains — around fifty human bones, including part of a child’s burial, found on the platform itself. These were not casual losses but appear to have been deliberately placed, hinting that the site held a meaning beyond the purely practical.

Life at Shinewater 3,000 years ago

Piecing together the evidence, archaeologists picture Shinewater as a settled community living on the edge of a rich watery landscape around 800 to 600 BC. These were farmers, keeping cattle, sheep and pigs, working stone and metal, and moving across the wetland on their carefully engineered causeways. The marsh around them would have teemed with fish, wildfowl and reeds — a valuable resource for anyone who knew how to use it.

The scale of the platform and trackway suggests real organisation and communal effort. Felling mature oaks, splitting timbers and driving hundreds of posts deep into the ground was heavy, skilled work that would have needed many hands working together. Whatever else it was, Shinewater was the product of a confident, capable society — and the deliberate placing of human remains suggests it may also have been a place of ceremony and remembrance, not simply somewhere to live.

Why Shinewater matters

Waterlogged Bronze Age sites like Shinewater are extremely rare. Across most of Britain, the timber and organic remains that would tell us how ordinary people actually lived have long since rotted away, leaving only stone, pottery and metal. At Shinewater, the marsh preserved the wood itself — the platforms, the trackways, the tool handles — giving a far fuller picture of Bronze Age life than dry-land sites ever can.

That rarity is why the site is now protected as a Scheduled Monument, placing it in the same legal category of national importance as places like Pevensey Castle. The waterlogged deposits are fragile, and any drying-out of the ground could destroy what has survived so well for 3,000 years, so most of the site is deliberately left undisturbed for future generations and future techniques to study.

Shinewater Park today

The archaeology may be hidden, but the setting that produced it survives as a pleasant green space. Shinewater Park opened in 2002 as the northern section of the wider Eastbourne Park, laid out around the very lakes whose creation led to the discovery. It won a Civic Trust commendation in 2004 and is jointly managed by Eastbourne Borough Council and East Sussex County Council.

Today it is a quiet spot for a walk, popular with anglers, dog walkers and birdwatchers, with paths circling the water and plenty of wildlife on the levels. There is little on the ground to tell you what lies beneath, but it is worth pausing by the lake to imagine the scene 3,000 years ago — the oak platform raised above the reeds, smoke rising from the hearths, and the causeway leading off across the marsh towards the Downs. Some of the finds, including the remarkable sickle, have been conserved for museum collections, and Heritage Eastbourne has worked to record and share the story of the site.

If Shinewater has sparked your interest in the deep history of the town, it pairs naturally with the town’s other ancient chapters — from the buried Roman villa beneath the seafront to the medieval origins of the Old Town.

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