I have heard of boat burials, where the body is placed in a boat, thogh not necessarily set adrift, just placed within. The obvious (possibly too obvious) interpretation is that it's the vehicle to take the person to the next world. Based on nothing at all I wonder if this is a symbolic form of a boat burial.
I wasn't thinking of ship burials (though thanks for the beowulf pointer, I didn't know that, and in returns here's an allegedly eyewitness account of one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_funeral#Ibn_Fadlan%27s_...), but something much smaller and older.
There was a report of a discovered boat burial on doggerland, on land (before doggerland flooded. That would have been at the end of the last ice age). I can't find it now.
Sutton hoo is saxon IIRC. No, the villages/communities you mentioned are the ones that were drowned when the ice melted - before that the UK was much larger and joined to the continent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland. That was the boat burial area I meant. I did dig but can't find it, sorry.
