Is it true that Offa didn't build his famous dyke

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A.� Possibly not. Evidence has just emerged that the history of Offa's Dyke - the largest man-made structure in Britain - is not what we previously thought.< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

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Q.� Conventional view

A.� The earthworks, 30ft tall in some places and running for 169 miles along the border between England and Wales, were constructed by King Offa of Mercia (757-796) during the second half of the 8th Century. The wall and ditch run north-south from the Irish Sea, west of Chester, across the Welsh Marches to the Bristol Channel. It is bigger than the Hadrian and Antonine walls combined.

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Alfred Smyth, a professor of medieval history and director of research at Canterbury Christ Church University College, said of the dyke: 'This is a monument of colossal proportions that makes the construction of the pyramids look like small beer. It suggests a threat commensurate with Armageddon.'

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Q.� Why was the dyke built

A.� Offa is famous for uniting England south of the Humber into a single Anglo-Saxon kingdom. The the dyke was to defend his territory against the unruly Britons in Wales.

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Q.� So what is the new theory

A.� Smyth believes Offa's Dyke was built 300 years earlier, in an even more war-torn period - soon after the Roman legions withdrew from Britain in 410. It was built not to protect against the Welsh - but the Irish.

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Q.� And why couldn't Offa have built it

A.� Smyth says it couldn't have been King Offa's brainchild. It was too big and too remote for Mercia's resources. 'Even if it was completed in three or four years, it would have been a huge drain on their resources and the taxation burden would have been enormous,' Smyth said.

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He also believes that Offa's made problems were with the unruly kings of Kent, not the Welsh, who were 'mainly cattle rustlers'.

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Q.� Is there any archaeological evidence for this

A.� Some 150 excavations have been made on Offa's Dyke, but they have yielded no radiocarbon dating. That means its age is officially unknown.

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Q.� In that case, why is it known as Offa's Dyke

A.� Smyth believes that the Anglo-Saxons who took over Mercia in the late 6th Century discovered these defences and named it after one of their heroes - a much earlier King Offa. He was a Danish ruler celebrated in the poem Beowulf and famous for building a boundary between Denmark and Germany.

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Q.� So who did build the dyke

A.� Romanised Britons abandoned by the legions, according to Smyth. 'We now know that Roman Britain survived long after the legions left. There was a Romanised aristocracy that would have been anxious to keep the wild men in the Welsh hills from destroying their villa culture. [This aristocracy] still commanded enormous resources... There were also large numbers of Irish pouring into Wales, which the Romans had tried to counteract.'

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Q.� But this is all guesswork

A.� No. There is one piece of irrefutable evidence. At the top of Offa's Dyke, on the eastern side, runs Wat's Dyke, almost parallel for 38 miles and almost certainly part of the same defensive complex. In 1997, an archaeological dig discovered the remains of a workman's fire under the dyke at ground level. Radiocarbon analysis produced a rough date of 430 - the period that Smyth suggests.

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Steve Cunningham