The buried ship found on an English estate
Image credit: Alamy
Netflix's The Dig tells the story of the Anglo-Saxon longship that was unearthed at Sutton Hoo in 1939. It was an extraordinary find in more ways than one, writes Neil Armstrong.
They began at first light. The strongest of the king's guard, sinews straining, rough ropes chafing, hauled the heavy oak ship from the river on to the shore. And then, with the rising sun slowly burning off the chill morning mist, they heaved the vessel over the plain and to the foot of the hill. The crowds on the slope watched silently as they inched it up to the summit and the graveyard reserved for royal descendants of the one-eyed god. When the craft had been manoeuvred into the trench prepared for it, mourners laid the grave goods in the burial chamber in its centre. Then a mound was raised over it. And there the ship lay, moored fast in the East Anglian earth but journeying through time until, 13 centuries later on the eve of World War Two, a man called Basil Brown discovered it.
Source: BBC Written by Neil Armstrong