Oak Construction

Sacred to many barbarian tribes, the oak was believed to possess great spiritual strength and act as a gateway to the Otherworld. As a shipbuilding material it provided incredible hull strength, which was vital for ships sailing the rough Atlantic waves. Both Caesar and Strabo wrote of the strength of warships built by the Veneti tribe, stating that ramming attacks did very little damage to their strong oak hulls, forcing the Romans to develop new tactics to defeat them.