A drowned forest

Under the waves lies a drowned forest. At the end of the last Ice Age, this forest stretched all the way to mainland Europe. Birch and beech, oak and alder where now the North Sea bucks in the winter winds. Once it was the haunt of wild boar, wolves, bears. Then the seas rose.

The drowned forest is only visible at extreme low tides, a tangle of roots, stumps honed to spikes and blades by the wash of saltwater and sand. Chunks of petrified wood wash up on the shore. Some are small enough to fit in my hand. Others are slabs of dark peaty brown, Swiss cheesed with holes.

It’s haunting, this forest that now lies under the sea. It’s a reminder of the shifting sands of time, of the fluid and ephemeral realities that suck out the ground beneath us. Things change in huge and dramatic ways, often so slowly that we don’t notice.

So we stand at the water’s edge, and our imaginations raise the trees to their full heights once more. A forest. The leaf canopy full of the wind’s ocean roar. Ghostly paths through the understorey. Owl call, raven call, the eerie howl of a distant wolf.

Here we are, on the edge of all this.

We walk slowly back across the beach. And here, in this treeless place where there was once a forest, I find a solitary beech leaf on the sand.