This chapter is offered to Barry Cunliffe as a token of the respect that I have for his immense contribution to studies of the European Iron Age. Our research interests have sometimes overlapped, at the Glastonbury and Meare Lake Villages for example, but in general we have pursued different lines and areas of enquiry. Yet he has been unfailing in support of numerous projects undertaken in foreign Welds and none, perhaps, more foreign than the study of rock carvings in northern Europe, a long way from his beloved Atlantic lands. In 2003 an important documentation on north European late first millennium BC boats appeared, ably assembled and in part authored by Ole Crumlin-Pedersen and his collaborator Athena Trakadas. The boats, dated to the Pre-Roman Iron Age of the north, have been named after a famous discovery at Hjortspring, on the island of Als in southern Denmark. Here, in 1880 or thereabouts, fragments of planking were revealed by peat-digging, along with iron and bone spearheads; all were either burnt on the spot or discarded by the finders, and there the matter rested until a local antiquarian heard of the discovery and alerted the authorities. This led in the 1920s to a remarkable excavation, far ahead of its time in the technical recovery of the surviving evidence, in the documentation of stratigraphy and context, and in the conservation procedures devised. The history of the Hjortspring boat and its huge array of equipment need not delay us here as it is well set out in the primary report (Rosenberg 1937), in a recent analysis (Randsborg 1995) and in the book noted above (Crumlin- Pedersen and Trakadas 2003).What has intrigued me, and I hope will intrigue Barry, is the location of the Hjortspring deposit, the boat lying not by the present or the Iron Age seashore of the island of Als, but near one of the highest points on the island, and well inland. It was deposited in a pond, now a small peatbog some 50m in diameter, about 40–45m above sea level, and some two km from the eastern seaboard and about five km from the Als Fjord on the west.