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The construction of the Viking Link power cable, which connects the electricity grids of Great Britain and Denmark, has led to the archaeological study of a 67 km-long transect across south-eastern Lincolnshire. The results augment the existing picture of the richness of the archaeological record for the Lincolnshire Wolds and within the valley of the River Lymn, but have also led to the discovery of new clusters of activity in previously little-explored parts of the Lincolnshire Marsh and around the northern Fen margin. Small rudimentary farmsteads and field systems of Romano-British date were widely dispersed across the landscape and form the most common type of site, with earlier remains being few in number but including a small worked flint assemblage, Neolithic pits, at least one Bronze Age barrow and several Iron Age roundhouses. The most significant discovery, however, is a small cemetery serving a local community within this part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. This is the first Anglo-Saxon cemetery from the southern Lincolnshire Wolds to have been excavated and fully published in the modern era. The overall value of the Viking Link investigations lies, however, in how the combined evidence sheds new light on the long-term development of the regional historical landscape.

This volume introduces the project and sets out the topographic, historical and geoarchaeological context of the landscapes it crossed. A summary of the excavated sites follows, leading to a discussion of how the data has contributed to research aims relating to the development of the prehistoric and early historical landscapes of south-east Lincolnshire. A second volume contains further details on the most significant of the excavated sites, and presents the results of the specialist analyses of the human remains and the artefactual and environmental data.

The two volumes may be seen as a companion piece to the Wessex Archaeology monograph The Archaeology of the Hornsea Project One Offshore Windfarm Cable Route, a similar and near-contemporary linear scheme in the north-eastern part of the county. Together, the projects demonstrate how recent renewables infrastructure projects have led to major advances in the understanding of the archaeology of Lincolnshire.

Details

Published	Published By	Pages	ISBN
Sept. 15, 2026	Wessex Archaeology	212	978-1-0682716-0-1
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Copyright © Wessex Archaeology. This work is openly licensed via CC BY-NC-ND 4.0