Several months later, I began to become intrigued by a place that no longer existed. It was an ancient landscape that now lay far under the North Sea. It was a world called Doggerland. There were teasing little indicators of this world. Small pieces of dark brown organic material could be found on the Norfolk coast that were segments of peat or wood from the submerged forests and fenlands of Doggerland as it had existed as an environment, a place for people to live on and call a home thousands of years ago as the last Ice Age ended.
It was a project that had been stewing quietly away for a while. On my last birthday my old friend Ant had given me a copy of Submerged Forests by Clement Reid. The book had been first published in 1913. I had known of the work but never read it. Clement Reid was another of those Victorians who possessed a wonderfully inquisitive sense of discovery. He had studied geology and biology in the mid-nineteenth century when a biblical-based chronological approach to delineating the ancient world still reigned, forcing the history of human activity on the earth into a six-thousand-year period. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Then there were those emergent theories of geology by figures such as Charles Lyell that had also served to challenge the dating of prehistory centred on biblical interpretation. Yet notions of prehistoric worlds and their human inhabitants had remained constricted by scripture.
In 1913, Clement Reid was near retirement from his position as geologist at the University of Cambridge. Submerged Forests was his summary of work on the ancient landscapes of Britain and Europe, on ‘Noah’s Woods’ – those strange remnants of trees from the past found often with fossilised bones of long vanished animals and lumps of earthy peat or ‘moorlog’, as the local sailors knew this sea peat. These reminders of past forests were dredged from the dark depths along with the bones of the exotic and extinct creatures that had roamed them; not uncommon catches for the fishermen who worked the North Sea. Clement Reid’s Submerged Forests collated the evidence for a vast plain stretching from the Dogger Bank for miles south where now the waters of the North Sea lay. The book also raised questions way beyond matters of geology as to the nature of that landscape and of the peoples who lived there at the end of the last great Glacial Epoch and settled the lands of an emergent Britain.
Reid’s preface to Submerged Forests is a perfect statement on the necessity of interdisciplinary study, the need for a renaissance mindset:
Knowledge cannot be divided into compartments, each given a definite name and allotted to a different student. There are, and always must be, branches of knowledge in which several sciences meet or have an interest, and these are somewhat liable to be neglected. If the following pages arouse an interest in one of the by-ways of science their purpose has been fulfilled.
The obvious difficulty with exploring Doggerland was that it now lay under many metres of cold, dark, rather forbidding sea. At Easter, walking the beach with my daughter Eva seeking small reminders of those submerged forests that existed beneath the waters, I had wondered on the possibility of reaching one of the sandbanks that still rose from the North Sea during a low tide – such as Dogger Bank itself, which Clement Reid saw as the plateau that stood some thirty metres above the northern edge of the vast ‘alluvial flat connecting Britain with Holland and Denmark’.1
I had checked maps. It would mean a journey of some one hundred kilometres out into the sea. My initial plan had been to sail away into the North Sea and jump out on to the debatable sands of Dogger Bank. It now seemed rather fanciful. I didn’t even know how to sail. I had an inflatable canoe. That was it. Even if I could somehow manage to persuade someone to head out into the open sea; even if I reached some semblance of land out there, I would be standing many, many feet above any signs of Doggerland and the people who lived there ten thousand years ago. The plan needed a rethink.
I turned back to the books.
In 1931, a fishing trawler the Colinda was sailing along the Norfolk coast between two raised lands known as the Leman and Ower Banks. It was night when the nets were pulled in. Among the usual odd lumps of peat and a few bones, ship’s captain Pilgrim E. Lockwood had a single piece of moorlog some four feet square. Instead of chucking it back into the dark seas, Lockwood decided to split it open with a shovel. His spade struck something solid. Lockwood broke the moorlog apart. Out fell a prehistoric antler harpoon.2
The harpoon was some eight and a half inches long. A row of barbs had been carved along one edge; there was a sharpened point and a series of notches presumably to secure fastening to a shaft. You could easily imagine someone strolling the shores of Doggerland at low tide, using the ‘harpoon’ to spear flatfish or eels. Here was real evidence of life in Doggerland. The Colinda harpoon was dated to Mesolithic times, the Middle Stone Age; an era when the populace of Europe were still hunter-gathers. The more settled, sedentary farming ways of the Neolithic had yet to arrive. Mesolithic existence apparently consisted of small groups of people living in extended family units, communities able to move about the landscapes seasonally, travelling the lands from one favoured site to another: for food, for flints and for shelter.
I tried to picture a band of Mesolithic folk. It was hard to get rid of cartoon images of The Flintstones from my mind. Would they really be wearing animal skins? I thought for a moment but couldn’t imagine anything else they might be able to wrap around themselves more effectively to keep warm. I needed to get to know the people who lived on Doggerland, to understand something of the ways of the Mesolithic, the people of the Stone Age. And so that was why I was headed to the island of Tiree, off the north-west coast of Scotland. I would get to know the Mesolithic first on those isolated islands of the Hebrides – on Tiree and on Coll – where the land still held fragments, echoes of their lives. I would head to those islands for the summer as the Mesolithic peoples had done many years before. Then I would return south to Norfolk to seek Doggerland.
At Sedbergh, in Cumbria, cloud filled the sky. I was staying with my friends Peter and Susan. After a fish-and-chip supper I joined Peter as he walked Crombie, their Border terrier. We walked along Joss Lane, winding gently upwards as our footsteps echoed beside us. At the five-barred gate into the darkness of the moors beyond, Peter and Crombie turned back. I stepped on. The hills of the Howgills were just visible through the darkness. Storms were predicted for tomorrow.
I looked to the skies and saw only clouds. There would be no meteors tonight. The Perseids would flare and shower across a starlit backdrop but they would do so hidden from me. The only distant lights I could see were those of lone homesteads spaced across the river valley below. A stout footpath sign lit by torchlight pointed to Thorn’s Lane through a copse of alder and over the waters of Settlebeck Gill into darkness. I would not walk that way tonight. Another sign pointed back down to Joss Lane. I followed, stepping over giant slugs as a wooden gate thudded behind me. Rain started to fall. The heavens opened. Heavy drops, lumps of thunderous rain, broke upon my face as I stared up into the heavens; and as the torch lit that sodden sky, the raindrops transformed into celestial shards. I smiled. Light appeared to be pouring from the sky. There were heavenly sparks for me to watch falling to earth. I sent Katie a text.
‘Xx’, it simply said.
It was only a year since we had met.
The next day, I said goodbye to Peter and Susan and travelled north.
I reached the island of Tiree in the late afternoon. A horizon of low, grey, rolling clouds lay just above my head. Rain fell. Wind blew. I had driven off the ferry, turned right at a T-junction and headed east until I ran out of road. I had made a pot of tea with my camping gas stove. Now it was getting dark and I had forgotten how to put up the tent. The poles twisted and turned like the legs of some giant tarantula. Eventually the tent took form, sleek and low against the ground. I sat in the car and looked out across the dusk through the rain to the seas of Gunna Sound, the stretch of water between the island of Tiree and the even smaller isle of Gunna. Beyond, a mile or so away, lay another small island: Coll. Beyond that was the far larger island of Mull and further still Oban on the mainland.
Supper bubbled away. An emerald light flashed: a buoy out in water, marking the channel through Gunna Sound. A green light. I thought of Gatsby.
With darkness came more rain; real rain that drummed incessantly on the outer coating of the tent. I read of Mesolithic times by torchlight. Finally, just before midnight, the rain ceased and all I could hear from within my cocoon were the waves beating against the eastern tip of Tiree.
In the morning, I woke, made tea, packed up and drove back down the single track road, past the low-lying sands of Gott Bay and on down the full length of Tiree to the south-western shore and the perfect, mile-wide scimitar curve of Balephuil Bay.
I wandered the flotsam of the high-water mark. There was only a scattering of modern detritus: fishing line, a few pieces of too colourful plastic and segments of ageing rope that had sheared away years ago and wound up here on these lone and level sands. There were pockets, clusters of stones; pebbles worn to spheroids by so many more years of sea and salt. I looked to the western headland of Ceann a’ Mhara then back to the east and the peak of Ben Hynish, the highest point on Tiree. The hill was topped with a giant golf ball providing radar coverage for civil aviation way out in the open spaces of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet I was trying to get into a Mesolithic mindset. In order to know something of Doggerland, I had travelled hundreds of miles in the opposite direction: north, to Scotland and to this idyllic island of the Inner Hebrides some ten miles long and five miles wide at its greatest girth. There was a reason. Tiree and its neighbouring isles of Coll, Mull, Colonsay and Islay have all revealed evidence of Mesolithic life. As the last Ice Age relented some 10,000 years ago, these Hebridean Islands saw the gradual appearance of hunter-gatherer bands in the region. They came to hunt the deer and wild boar that roamed the inner woodlands. They came to gather the foods of the coasts and the rivers: plants, shells, seals and fish. They came too for the flints which they could fashion into axes, blades and arrow points; into smaller tools, awls and scrapers; into microliths, small slithers of flint stone that could be embedded into wooden hafts to create specialist tools to cut and shred vegetables, to scour skin from hides.
At Balephuil Bay, I headed for the dunes and tucked into a sheltered cove, seeking to turn away from the present, to breeze back through thousands of years of human history until I arrived at a time when the sea level was some six metres higher than today and my eyes would seek out not sea litter on the tide mark but the round nodules of flint which would fit cold and clean into my hand. I closed my eyes and felt the winds on my face, heard the regular pounding of the waves. A moment passed. My eyes opened. The beach looked the same. I felt the same. I glanced about. Nothing had changed. I had only been here a day. It would take a little longer to step back thousands of years into past landscapes, into the minds of the Mesolithic.
I had selected two books to bring out with me that day from the travel library housed in a cardboard box in the back of my car. One was Mesolithic Cultures of Britain by Susann Palmer. The book consisted of many pages of hand-drawn sketches of artefacts, fragments of flints found in various sites mainly in southern Britain. The other was To The Islands by Steven Mithen, which had been fairly recently published and told of Mithen’s search for the Mesolithic of the Hebrides. Surely, this really was ideal. I settled to read in the sand dunes.
The timescales were hard to get your head around. The Mesolithic spanned from around 9600 BC through to 4000 BC. The best way to think of the Mesolithic was as a ‘period of postglacial hunting and gathering’. Before came the Palaeolithic: a period of time stretching from 2.6 million years ago when humans made a more basic use of stone tools.
After the Mesolithic Age came the Neolithic – delineated by the rise of farming as a way of life which had spread gradually west across Europe from the Near East, first emerging from the fertile plains of the Levant. It signalled a slow end to hunter-gathering.
Humans had only been farming for six thousand years. Before that, Homo sapiens had been hunter-gathering for two hundred thousand years. Earlier ancestors had been foraging an existence in Africa for two million years. I read Mithen’s conclusion on modern man:
Consequently, our bodies and brains remain adapted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle rather than to the sedentary urban existence that is so predominant today – one in which we are detached from the natural world.3
I nodded.
I read on and then flicked on through the pages. There was a photo of the very bay I was sitting in: Balephuil. Mithen and his team of archaeologists had been on Tiree. Even better, there was a photo of a site labelled as T1, somewhere here in the dunes of Balephuil, where a prehistoric pebble beach had been exposed by a storm some years back. The site probably dated to the late Mesolithic.
I poured a cup of tea. They were getting closer. All I had to do was to find T1. Then I really could stand on Mesolithic lands. For the rest of the day, I wandered the miles of dunes seeking out T1. The past remained hidden, so I walked the beach scavenging the wrackline before turning to the rock pools on the point where the limpets lived, steadily stepping into the Mesolithic mindset.
In the morning, I woke to find my body was covered in hives: patches of pale, raised skin, with angry red edges, a hand-span width in places. They had begun the day before as though strange insect bites on my legs. Now they had spread, an archipelago of islands had risen on my skin. They didn’t itch but they didn’t look good either. I needed to see a doctor. Oddly, further reading of Mithen’s To The Islands had actually directed me towards a local Tiree doctor who held a fascination for all things Mesolithic: Doc Holliday.
I followed a signpost to The Doctor’s House down a bumpy track to the doctor’s surgery. Doc Holliday was on holiday. I was to wait in the waiting room. A moment later, I was called through to see another doctor who prescribed antihistamine for the hives. I asked of Doc Holliday.
‘Ah,’ she said with a smile. ‘Just ask at the reception when you hand the prescription in.’
The receptionist turned out to be Doc Holliday’s wife. I explained how I had heard of him.
‘If you’re here for the Mesolithic, he’ll definitely want to see you,’ she said. She smiled and wrote his number on a piece of paper. Then she gave me my medicine. Such was the simple perfection of small-island living.
I sat in the car and opened the sunroof. The sun had come out this morning, banishing the grey. Tiree lay flat and green beneath blue skies. I rang the number. Doc Holliday answered. He had a meeting later but would happily meet me in the local museum at Scarnish in fifteen minutes. Perfect.
Doc Holliday drove up in a red car with a green emergency light on the roof. He wore a light grey suit and sported matching grey beard and glasses. There was a quiet, intense intelligence to him. We sat in the museum and he asked what I was after. I talked of seeking the Mesolithic of Tiree, of linking those people to the peoples of Doggerland. He listened attentively; nodded. He couldn’t have been more accommodating. He told me of the Mesolithic sites I was after, marked them on my map for me before taking me into the museum archive and opening a wooden case, one of a stack of antique boxes containing the archaeological collection of George Holleyman, an RAF policeman posted to Tiree during the Second World War. Seven Stone Age flints sat on a bed of cotton wool. All had apparently come from Balephuil. A label stated:
These flints are almost certainly of Mesolithic age, that is made by the hunter-gatherer groups who populated Scotland before the arrival of the first farmers in the 4th millennium BC. Microlithic (small stone) tools like this were used all over northern and western Europe at this time.
Doc Holliday and I sat and talked more of the Mesolithic.
‘You have to imagine Tiree not as it is now,’ he explained, ‘but covered in woodland; trees stunted, twisted by the winds.’
Pollen analysis had shown the extent of the coverage. I asked which species had been revealed. Doc’s eyes stared out before he spoke as though reciting an incantation.
‘Alder, birch, hazel, willow, oak, ash, juniper,’ he said.
There was abundant fuel, readily available.
‘You see, the population would be determined by the worst climate rather than the best,’ the Doc explained. ‘You have to have enough resources to get through winter.’
The Mesolithic would overwinter on Mull or perhaps on the mainland at Oban, tucked down from the storms and the cold in more settled camps. Then they would adopt a more migratory nature once the spring came round again.
‘The entire population of Mesolithic Scotland would only number perhaps five thousand.’
It would be a small collective, perhaps forty or so – an extended group or family – who would head to Tiree in the summer months for flint-knapping. Flint was so vital to the Mesolithic and a seam of flint ran right across the southern tip of Tiree through to Ireland. Doc Holliday traced the extent of the vein of rock with his hand over the map. That was why the Mesolithic came here – for flint.
Nodules of flint would be gathered in places like Balephuil and then worked, knapped. Doc explained the process.
‘First, you take the head off, like an egg.’
His left hand swept over an imaginary flint stone.
‘Then you work the skin off the flint,’ he said, chopping down with the side of his hand. ‘Until you are left with the cortex.’
Flint fragments could then be broken off and retouched to refine edges, points and blades. It was skilled, precise work but essential to produce those tools vital for catching, cutting and cleaning food. Stores of flint blades could be built through the summer for the following seasons.
Doc had to go to his meeting. I had to return to Balephuil. We shook hands and said our goodbyes.
So later that morning, I stood on a Mesolithic beach, two hundred yards inland from today’s high tideline. It was a perfectly warm summer’s day: blue skies and fluffy white clouds. I crawled on a bank of pebbles that ran for twenty yards or so, protected by towering sand dunes ten metres high. I walked barefoot – toe to stone, on all fours, eyes a foot above the ground, peering for flakes of flint. A bumblebee alighted on a golden daisy beside me. I knew immediately – declared out loud that it was a Great yellow bumblebee: a Hebridean rarity.
All day after leaving Doc Holliday, I worked the bank, building a small collection of stone fragments that I laid out on a pad of paper – the larger to the left, smaller to the right, a middle line that might be shell or flint. I smiled at myself, at the ordering, the creation of lines of findings exactly like some Victorian amateur collector. But I had yet to feel the sense that I had truly stepped back into the Mesolithic mind.
I scratched with a broken pencil, scuffing at the surface and pulling out fragments of flint last touched six thousand years ago or so. I pictured a Mesolithic hand holding and dropping. Time had passed. Then my hand had touched and lifted the very same stone splinter from the ground.
It was midday. It was time to leave.
I had been searching the site all morning. It was as I walked away, stepping over the ancient pebble beach, that I saw it.
Grey.
A ghostly grey square of flint sat flat on the surface before me. As soon as I lifted it from that prehistoric beach something shifted. In that moment the cold touch of a past world became tangible – a Stone Age hand touched mine through time. Thousands of years shrank into a second.
It was an arrowhead. An inch or so square, the stone had so obviously been worked away at, carefully retouched to form the sloping edges of the point. The base too had a series of tiny shelves, minute steps where the flint had been delicately chipped away.
That night, as a storm blew in from the north-west, I stared by torchlight at the beauty of that arrowhead. The tent was pitched in the green marram grasses of the dunes, planted between today’s beach at Balephuil and the Mesolithic beach of six thousand years ago.
The next morning, I met up with Doc Holliday once more in the museum to show him my finds.
He was wearing the same grey suit. From the car, he carried a heavy-looking doctor’s bag from which he retrieved an otoscope. He began his examination, lifting his glasses to the top of his head. His fingers picked one of the smaller fragments I had brought along. He inspected the item.
‘Shell,’ he said.
I passed the arrowhead over. Under the microscope and lit by a powerful beam, the flint became almost translucent.
The Doc went quiet.
‘That’s a tanged point,’ he said finally.
Over the next week I stepped further back from the present into the Mesolithic. I walked the coastline of Tiree, scanned the landscape tracing an imaginary line six metres or so above the present tideline where Mesolithic tides would have lapped, then sought out places where people would have sat some thousands of years before to work quietly away at flint. I listened for sounds: for the thin crack of flints being knapped ringing out about the rocky outcrops. Lithic sounds echoed out through time. Click, click, click.
I camped far away from others – out in the machair with the hares, on the edge of the land. I started to learn to shunthe furtive oddity of man. Out in the dunes alone, murmurations of starlings washed over me, startling with their dark shadows, coming out of the summer sun and clouding the skies. I walked prelapsarian lands. A storm blew in and blew out. I crossed to Coll and continued: at night by torchlight scanning the maps, the books for hints of ancient sites, for caves, for places where Mesolithic bodies would have rested. By day, in muddy hollows dotted with hoof marks, I crouched and scratched at the ground. My eyes grew practised at spotting shards of flint in the soil, the sand. Even in the sky, I saw stone. Wandering a hare path one day through the machair at Hugh Bay, a female hen harrier swept over and the pale, flint-white band at the base of her tail stood out clear against her muddy brown coat. In the lee of enormous erratics, I hid from the wind and rain as others had done long before me. Fragments of collected flint chimed in my pockets.
It was during the time I was in Tiree, that I received a letter from the archaeologist Professor Bryony Coles. Some years back, she had single-handedly shifted the scientific community from merely seeing the existence of a prehistoric land bridge between Britain and continental Europe. Instead, Coles had argued, we should recognise a landscape ‘as habitable as neighbouring regions’ that once existed in what was now the North Sea: a place Coles had named Doggerland.
If, instead of focussing on land as bridge, we focus on land as a place to be, we may alter … our perceptions of the North Sea Plain, its significance to contemporary populations, and the implications of its eventual inundation.4
I had emailed her telling of my interest in Doggerland. Her reply told a tale of how she had first become intrigued by the landscapes beneath the North Sea,
I had emailed her telling of my interest in Doggerland. Her reply told a tale of how she had first become intrigued by the landscapes beneath the North Sea,
partly from taking the ferry from Harwich/Felixstowe to Denmark and Sweden, and wondering what lay below …5
I mused over those words. They framed her own academic obsession; her own wondering. Now Doggerland had become mine, too. I could not stop picking flints from the earth. Fragments of flint littered my world. In the kitchen, a tray presented Doggerland finds. In the study, the Hebridean finds were neatly arranged on show in the wooden compartments of an old medicine drawer. I was becoming an antiquarian.
I read all I could on Doggerland.
Since that first speculative article by Bryony Coles, a great deal of energy and effort had been expended into mapping the palaeo-landscapes of Doggerland. Seismic data from oil and gas industry exploration had gradually revealed the nature of the world lost beneath the North Sea. I read how ‘Doggerland was clearly a massive plain dominated by water: rivers, marshes and coastlines.’ To Mesolithic peoples, ‘Doggerland was a rich environment’. There was fresh water for animals, which meant good hunting; good hunting meant not only food but hides for shelter and clothing; and bone, too, for tools. As the Ice Age became an ancestral memory, so the climate warmed. Sea levels rose. The creatures of Doggerland changed:
Whilst the colder, earlier period may have seen reindeer and horse hunted, this gave way to deer, pig, bear, wolf, hare, beaver, dog and many other mammals as the area became temperate.
Woodlands flourished. There were fish and shellfish; wildfowl for flesh and eggs. Fruits, nuts and herbs helped to ensure the diet was varied, rich and healthy. For millennia, Doggerland would have been a veritable paradise for generation after generation of Stone Age people who knew intimately the best sites, seasonally shifting over the landscape, and perhaps permanently living on Doggerland.
Yet it would not last. Ice melt meant ever-rising seawaters. Climate change meant marine encroachment; ever more brackish waters meant dying forests. I thought of the skeletal trees sticking from the sands at Ben Acre on the Suffolk coast. I read on.
Doggerland was always doomed … Sometimes slow then terrifyingly fast, the sea inevitably reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks.6
The parallels to our own age, to our own recognition of climate change in our world, were obvious. I had headed to the farthest edges of our isles to feel the shadow of those past ancestors – in the flint arrowhead I had lifted from that Mesolithic beach; in the shiver as a hare broke from its wild flower cover; as that collective sound of starling wings had swept over me – and yet all along I had shared something else with those Stone Age relations: a foreboding for the future of our worlds.
Bryony Coles noted how in Doggerland as waters rose, so those living there would have adapted their ways:
For people living along the North Sea shores, the encroachment of the sea will have affected their lives over the generations whether or not it was perceptible in the lifetime of an individual.7
I thought of those homes on the North Sea shore today, at Happisburgh and elsewhere, where coastal erosion had wrecked lives. I thought back across eight, nine thousand years to those living in these worlds then.
Less than a week on, I headed to Burnham Overy Staithe in Norfolk with Eva and Molly. It was August Bank Holiday weekend. Katie was busy in London but Mum would be there. My sister Helen would be there too, with her family. We would all squeeze happily enough together into the bungalow, our humble holiday home. Each room would be filled with familial bodies – if not there to collect flints and food for the coming winter months, then at least to gather some of the calm goodness which the Norfolk airs could offer and to store them away for darker days.
I had not seen Eva and Molly for a week. They had been away in Spain with their Mum. It was catch-up time. We chatted our way through the winding roads that took us from Essex to Thetford and on, northwards, to the lands of the North Folk.
Uncle John was up in Norfolk too, staying in his caravan for a two-week sailing holiday. He had agreed that one day the following week, when wind and tide were right, he and I would set sail out into the North Sea – beyond the protective arms of Scolt Head Island and the Point – where we would be sailing over Doggerland.
The next morning, we walked in a meandering line of three generations down the dyke. On the wide open sands exposed by the low tide, I told Eva of Doggerland. As I watched her walking the shore, I saw something of Dad in the flow of her arms, some trace of him in her way. I stared and remembered.
When I was Eva’s age, Dad would take marathon-long runs over these lands – setting out early over the fields to Holkham and far beyond; running the empty shores, the liminal lands of North Norfolk. He would search for sea urchins along the wrackline on the beach; seek those domed skeletons with their green and purple brushes of colour, their delicate ribbed patterns. He would hold his delicate sea treasures in his hands for miles as he ran. Then he would return from each odyssey sweaty, smiling and out of breath at the bungalow door, handing over his gifts – sea offerings to us his offspring.
I joined Eva on the tideline. There were no sea urchins but a few more brown pieces of ancient peat for our collection: all traces of primordial earth, primeval forests.
‘Doggerland!’ Eva cried out as she spotted a brown fragment on the shore, a compressed remnant of that long-lost world. We gathered together a handful of pieces which broke apart as they dried out in the air – crumbling down, turning back to a rich, peaty soil in our hands.
‘Doggerland!’ called Eva to the gulls above as she picked another ancient wonder from the sand.
Three days later, I stood by the water’s edge. The tide was coming steadily in, creeping up the hard. The wind blew in gusty bursts. I had taken Eva and Molly back to Essex after our Bank Holiday break and then returned to Norfolk. Uncle John stood beside the pillar-box red hull of his catamaran. It had been bought for him by his father back in 1967. Grandpa Canton had been a real sailor, escaping Gravesend as a young lad for a life in the merchant navy. He had taught his youngest son to sail. His eldest son, my Dad, had never learnt. Neither had I.
John’s hands worked the rigging, enticing the jib sail into place. He wasn’t alone. It was the first day of the regatta. Dinghies crowded the foreshore in various states of dress. Sailors battled with furiously flapping sails.
Uncle John stood out. Whereas other sailors had smart new wet suits and expensive-looking gear, John didn’t. He wore denim-blue boating shoes and matching denim-blue shorts. Between them shone a pair of porcelain-white legs. I recognised those legs. They were Grandpa’s legs. On his top, John wore a bright-blue anorak secured in place with a banded, orange life jacket. He could have just landed from the 1970s. He looked brilliant.
I watched the mêlée about us. A scattering of Lasers prepared for their race, heading off into the water in drunken, staggering paths. As we prepared to launch the catamaran, a large wooden-hulled boat capsized dramatically just beyond the early-morning crowd of crabbers. Two red life jackets bobbed in the rising seas as four arms reached frantically for their supine boat.
‘That’s a Sharpie gone over,’ someone said.
It was certainly windy; I knew that much. I was trying to keep my head in Mesolithic times even amid the chaos and chatter of sailors preparing their boats. I imagined a collective group preparing to leave a summer camp like south Tiree for the mainland and heard the same sounds of children’s voices edged out by older ones calling orders; emotions swilling as they packed the final parcels of goods in the hull. The shifting of the seasons. Time to set sail.
Uncle John was looking strangely at me.
‘One of the trailer wheels has a puncture,’ he said. ‘So if you could push.’
I was millennia away.
‘Sure, John,’ I said.
I pushed against the varnished hull of the cat, feeling the cold creep as I stepped into the waters of the creek.
‘Right,’ said John. ‘You jump on.’
I did.
Then John joined me, dripping streams of water. And suddenly we were off.
Somehow, he steered a single, straight tack through the flotsam of floundering dinghies down Overy Creek. We raced north. The dyke ran alongside.
‘It’s like sailing on a dining table,’ John had explained the night before in the pub. Now I knew what he meant. The catamaran had no seats, no obvious place to place yourself. Instead, you rather sprawled above the water. It was instantly exhilarating.
In no time, we carved our way into the open waters beyond the marshes, leaving the dyke behind and racing ever faster over the waves. The wind tore in gusts at the sail.
‘Keep it tight,’ called John over the noise of wind and water. As crew, I was positioned by the mast. I was to keep the jib sail taut. I pulled hard on one rope, battling to secure it in the cleat.
‘We should get some speed up now,’ John said.
We turned into the wind, heading towards the open channel.
We were flying now. Waves broke against the bow sending showers of cold water into my face. I crouched low. As gusts hit, the right hull heeled, lifting out of the sea and suspended in air for an age before slapping back down again.
In no time, Gun Hill was beside us. Scolt Head Island was on our port side. We shot through the channel, racing along past a vast green buoy marking our way and suddenly we were truly at sea – in the darkening blue waters.
The wind was a south-westerly. We were in the lee of the island, sailing calmly on now out into that bobbing horizon. The sun had lifted. Lingering clouds had vanished leaving summer blue skies. From my tabletop sprawl I gazed up. The light-mustard of the jib sail splayed against the azure: yellow on blue. I grinned.
We were on a heading for Doggerland.
Later that day, I stood on the sands of the Point at low tide and traced our earlier path in the catamaran. The sun was now setting beyond Scolt Head Island. The green buoy now lay on its side, beached. Wind was lifting the dry, loose sands from the surface of the exposed beaches to form ghostly swirls that whipped about my feet.
I stared out to the sea, thought of Doggerland and imagined the lives of the Mesolithic.
It was a nomadic lifestyle. You migrated from place to place, steering seaways through archipelagos of known islands, kind lands. You followed safe passages first found and forged by persons no longer known, ancestors born many generations ago whose knowledge lived on in the minds of those still walking this world. Learned skills were passed down the line: flint-knapping, sailing, hunting, cutting, curing, cooking. The best sites for fruits, for herbs, for shellfish, for flints were told in tales, in fireside stories for all to remember.
The sun flared white and fell into a bank of cloud on the horizon. As it sank so it lit islands of pale cloud in the sky. The ocean drew gradually back, mysterious and dark, rippling over sandbanks. The sand of the beach shone with that oddly luminescent, golden glow of the low sun vanishing.
In her letter, Bryony Coles had guided me to Margaret Elphinstone’s The Gathering Night, an imagined account of the lives of an extended family group of Mesolithic folk. The book emphasised how central boats would have been to Mesolithic life. There would have been those epic voyages, sea treks from one seasonal camp to another with streams of boats, generations of families together in their migratory trail. And there would also have been the everyday fishing trips over the dark waters of the lochs or out to sea.
In Doggerland, as the sea rose over the centuries so marine travel became ever more essential. Winds and tides dictated all. In the Early Holocene, the extensive plains of Doggerland extended from present-day Britain right across to the continent. Those lands shrank steadily. Freshwater features grew ever more brackish as marine encroachment turned rivers and lakes to coastlines. Land became sea. Doggerland became a scattered landscape: a shifting coastline, an archipelago of islands off East Anglia, the higher ground of the Dogger Hills still prominent further north.
Yet it may have been one event that changed everything for Doggerland. As Bryony Coles stated, ‘single catastrophic events may, literally, have pushed the rising sea over a coastal threshold.’8
One such event was the Storegga Incident.
Sometime around 6000 BC some three hundred square kilometres of rock fell from the side of Norway’s coastal shelf into the Atlantic. The vast submarine landslide sent a series of tsunamis out across the eastern coast of Britain. Storm surges following the Storegga collapse would have swept south through the North Sea, straight over Doggerland. Whether this was the moment when Britain truly separated from the rest of Europe remains speculation. Certainly, the event was a catastrophe for those Mesolithic peoples still living around the remaining islands of Doggerland.
In The Gathering Night, Margaret Elphinstone painted a powerful picture of the scene as the tsunami hit:
The noise was like thunder far away, only it never ceased. It was not above our heads. It came from under the Sunless Sky. I put down my needle, and stared out to sea …
The sea was shrinking. The tide was coming in – but the sea was going out. We saw, but also we couldn’t see, because it wasn’t possible. Out and further out – beyond the lowest tide. Sand we’d never seen before, pale and gleaming. Ripples like stars, and the frightened crabs scuttling over them. Fish flapping, madly trying to swim in this sudden world that had no water.
‘Kemen! The Sea! Look!’
I saw it then, far off under the Sunless Sky. A grey cliff, white-tipped. A cliff made of water. A noise like a mountain falling. My heart turned cold.
And the camp behind us – my mother, my sisters, the children …
The grey cliff roared like a waterfall. Its sound filled the world. It raced towards us.
We froze.
The grey cliff crashing down. Our world ending
‘Kemen, run!’
My body came back to me. We raced back along the beach.
The grey cliff screamed behind us.9
In the gloaming light, I thought of those poor Mesolithic souls out there on the islands of Doggerland as the tsunami struck.
The darkness was creeping in. Sand devils whipped about my legs. Flints flickered in the sand. I turned for home.
On the way back down the dyke, I thought too of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. The book had been published in 1962, the same year that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring announced to the world the true extent of our disastrous stewardship of the earth.
The Drowned World was a strange, dystopic waterscape – an ‘insane Eden’ – where climate change has flooded the world and where Ballard’s anti-hero Kerans travels the tropical waterways by catamaran.10
I walked and thought how it is so much simpler to see climate change in vast, dramatic shifts such as the Storegga Incident, in single catastrophic moments rather than the drip, dripping effect of gradual change over centuries – the steady, inordinate rise of carbon dioxide, of sea levels. We were causing climate change. We could still do something to avert the catastrophe. The Mesolithic had done nothing wrong. They had lived for thousands of years in gentle harmony with the earth, gathering what they needed to live and giving thanks for all they took. They had strived to survive causing the least possible harm to the earth.
In the distance, the lights of the village flickered beyond the dark spaces of the marshes. In one hand I felt the soft contours of a piece of petrified wood found on the shore an hour before, yet another fragment from Doggerland, a splinter from those ancient submerged forests still sunk beneath the waves. In the other, I turned a sliver of flint.