The Ferriby Boats are three Bronze-Age British sewn plank-built boats, parts of which were discovered at North Ferriby in the East Riding of the English county of Yorkshire. Only a small number of boats of a similar period have been found in Britain and the Ferriby examples are the earliest known sewn-plank boats found in Europe. History Ferriby is on the edge of a major estuary into the North Sea, the Humber, so speculation has been made ever since their discovery about whether they went to sea and sailed to the Continent. There is plenty of evidence that there was cross-channel communication, but it is not known what kind of boats actually sailed across. Keith Miller, a regional archaeologist told the BBC that Ferriby boats would have been used to cross the North Sea, though prudent modern mariners scoff at such suggestions. By modern standards, such vessels as these are considered suitable only for sheltered waters. Nonetheless, the Ferriby Heritage Trust describe Ferriby Boat 3 as Europe's oldest known seacraft. The BBC television programme Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath Pt 2, broadcast on BBC Two in September 2014, describes the boat as seagoing and describes the tons of cargo it could have taken across the Channel. However, the Dover Museum consider that the Dover Bronze Age Boat is the oldest seagoing boat known, at only 1550 BC, as the lack of a rocker bottom and pointed prow on the Ferriby boats is deemed by some to have made them too unstable for sea crossings. This is contested though: The Oakleaf reproduction of the Ferriby boats (pictured) was given a pointed bow and the Ferriby boats are described by the museum that houses them as having curved rocker bottoms, which qualifies them as similar to the later Dover boat in their seagoing abilities. Ferriby Boat 1 In 1937, the first boat, known as Ferriby Boat 1 (or F1), was discovered by Ted and Will Wright, on the shore of the Humber. It was a boat bottom with one end almost complete. What remained was 5.7 feet (1.7 m) wide and over 43 feet (13.17 m) long, the planks mostly 3–4 inches thick. It was part of an oaken three-strake flat rockered-bottom boat which had been stitched together with yew withies, caulked with moss and capped with watertight oak laths. It has room for up to eighteen paddles and has been radiocarbon