“Dog Bites Man”
The BBC reports on a Viking ship ‘buried beneath pub’.
A 1,000-year-old Viking longship is thought to have been discovered under a pub car park on Merseyside.
The vessel is believed to lie beneath 6ft to 10ft (2m to 3m) of clay by the Railway Inn in Meols, Wirral, where Vikings are known to have settled.
Apparently the ship was originally found in 1938 when the current pub was rebuilt, but the contractor dumped fill over it so the job wouldn’t be delayed.
I think that we can all agree that a pub is a place where you would expect to find Vikings, that parking wasn’t a known Viking skill, but there is no way of knowing if they sang the Spam Song.
8 comments
Re: Spam Song… thanks… I needed that.
Vikings buried under a pub… has anyone thought to test the groundwater? If I were the bartender, I’d worry that the water would compete with the product I sold.
As I’ve probably said before, notwithstanding the elaborate explanations of “viking” as an activity… “let’s go viking,” meaning pillaging and plundering… I believe the word is really a misunderstanding of what villagers said when they saw them coming: “Lookit all them viking warriors!”
There is some sort of a hearing going on, but Vikings are more interesting.
The Vikings whose ship was found may have been dead for a thousand years, but their story is less predictable than the one being told at that hearing.
This is what happens during long, relatively peaceful periods – the military high command becomes political. It has become worse since Robert McNamara decided officers should be managers instead of leaders.
The only officers with the courage to shout “Follow me!” must now be anonymous tipsters.
General Eric Shinseki was right and was forced out. Lt. General John Riggs was right and was forced to retire as a Major General. They have driven every leader with guts out of the military and anyone left is suspect.
We have Lt. Colonels writing op-eds suggesting that flag officers are part of the problem, not of the solution.
The military is broken, just like the economy.
A viking vessel in a pub car park can only mean that the designated rower got drunk too… I hope it’s excavated. It wil be the first intact viking vessel found in Britain
It sounds like a good one, a six-oar preserved in clay. They should be able to get most of it out intact. I’m guessing it sank in a bog after being blown ashore as it is a ways inland.