Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.