A long time ago Ferriby was a very different place. Long before the Romans (left 440 AD) or Vikings (c. 8-900 AD) came to Britain people lived here. At first the people travelled around in family groups hunting animals and gathering wild plants to eat. Eventually people began to farm the land, planting seeds to grow crops and keeping animals for milk, wool and meat. At this time they began to live in small villages. The houses in these early villages where made from inter-laced stakes / sticks daubed with clay. The houses usually had just one room, there was usually a fire in the middle and a hole in the roof of thatch or sods to let the smoke out. Quite often as many as twelve people would live in the house. They would all have jobs to do. There were no shops to go to so people had to grow their own food, make their own tools and pots and their own clothes. There were no roads as we know them, for carts, let alone cars; only paths and tracks. So transport overland was limited to what people could carry or load on pack-animals. This was why, before the Romans built roads, the best way for moving heavy goods was by water on boats or rafts. Apart from dugouts hollowed out of single trees old boats are very rarely found, hardly a dozen in all of Europe. Large parts of three of these, dating from the Bronze Age over 3500 years ago, have been found at Ferriby.This has led people to believe that Ferriby may have once been a village that built boats and sailed them across the River Humber or going up and down it on the tide.