Dredging up Doggerland – our own Northern Atlantis
In a short story of mine, 'The Woodsman' one scene depicts a sceptical young man being shown a flute that had been fashioned from the wing of a stork millennia before and latterly washed up from the North Sea.
I thought about this fictional incident as I stood on the beach at Camperduin. Yesterday was a brilliant but bitterly cold day and I pulled down my hood and pulled up my scarf as I stepped along the sand,picking up nodules of flint that had split open to reveal a beautiful glassy interior. A piece of bone – and some unusual shells. And what about those flints over there – are they worked flints, expertly knapped or have they really been worked by water? And are those bones the osseus fragments from a mammoth? In my study at home I already have a foot bone from one of the last mammoths of the Dogger Bank. And what about those shells with unusual colours?
An afternoon’s beachcombing along the North-west coast of the Netherlands doesn’t usually reveal such objects, such artefacts. But through the years, puzzling stuff has been washed up. And certainly, as I walk along the beach now, the sand seems rougher, and pitted with tiny shells.
It is true that the North sea is always coughing up flotsam – whole planks of wood, glassy fishing weights, blue nets, skeletons of seabirds, even the odd cargo of cigarettes – but where I am walking now is the depository of a different treasure. A year ago this place was under water, under the sea.
But this sand wasn’t here a year ago either. It was farther out – right over there where the fishing boats trawl for herring, cod, haddock. Now I know that sand shifts around somewhat underwater and that’s how new dunes are created, But in this case new dunes are being made quite deliberately, by dredging up sand from far out in the North Sea and bringing it to the dike, where it is piled up.
Cast your eyes over to where the great sea dike, the Hondsbosschezeewering stretches from Camperduin to Petten. Time was when the Rekere tidal creek poured inland – but a severe storm in the 15th century caused the sea to break through the dunes on either side, resulting in extensive flooding of the land.
Dikes were built but the present one was built in the 18th century with modifications thereafter and gave me what used to be one of my favourite views. I would stand on the top of the dike and look first to the sea and then to the other side, the land side, much lower down where the brackish lakes drew waders of all kinds. It was a sign of Spring when the redshanks and the black-tailed godwits strutted and pecked over the water.
They still do. But viewing them now is like looking at them from a low cliff. The dike has disappeared. It hasn’t really gone of course, just disappeared from view. If you walk down to the beach at Camperduin you have to walk quite long way to the sea because the sand stretches right out into what used to be sea and a shelf of sand now slopes from the top of the dike to the water.
You see, something had to be done about the sea nibbling away at the sand at bottom of the dike. It was only a matter of time before the hollow space would have become so great that the sea would have slithered underneath and undermined the whole structure. When you live twelve feet below sea-level and not far from the coast, as I do, the situation is something you take seriously.
Now when you create a polder, you built a ring dike and pump out the water from the land you want to dry out. But in this case what they are doing is actually creating a new beach on the sea side of the dike and extending it up and down the coast. And they are making it from land that used to be part of Doggerland.
There is something about this gargantuan piece of imaginative civil engineering that fascinates me. But there is one thing that niggles me. And it’s a more immediate worry than the prospect of waking up one morning and having to swim out of bed.
First, let’s have a look at the history of of the North Sea bed. At the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000 years BC) much of Europe was covered in ice sheets but as the climate warmed, huge areas of tundra were exposed. We’re now talking about a great landmass stretching from Eastern England to Demark and incorporating the Netherlands - in short, where the North Sea is now.
A last ‘cold snap’ around 11,000BC gave way, after some centuries of capricious extremes to a much more pleasant climate, the land becoming inhabitable and worked by hunter-gatherers. As the climate warmed steadily the land became conducive to hunting, fishing and fowling and gathering nuts and berries. It was a river landscape with deeply-cut valleys meandering through rolling hills. It was rich in wildlife and wooded valleys. This was the legacy of the still-melting ice and it was a situation that couldn’t last. But while it did, it was a halcyon time for our Mesolithic ancestors.
If we look at the finds from Mesolithic Star Carr in Yorkshire (from 8000BC) we can deduce a strong culture not only that of basic hunting survival but also of community ties with religious and aesthetic meaning. Finds include the antler masks, knapped flints and worked semi-precious stones.
Imagine the same activities taking place on that vast, undulating, productive plain of Doggerland. In fact the Star Carr people were probably seasonal nomadic hunters and this small place in Yorkshire was just the edge of their territory. They might have had a permanent settlement more to the east.
But the melting ice caught up the Doggerlanders. Gradually, the waters seeped into the land, the rivers grewwider, the land became islands and the islands shrank. Then a catastrophe occurred that speeded up the process. This was the Storegga Slide and it really did for the Doggerlanders.
Storegga, Old Norse for ‘great edge’ refers to the collapse of the continental shelf at the Western coast of Norway. It wasn’t the first landslide to occur but it was the biggest and most serious, resulting in a megatsunami that in one great swell wiped Doggerland off the map. It created the North Sea and the English Channel and these features were here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future.
So all the Star Carr type communities were lost beneath the waves and it is this that makes me a little uneasy when I look at the ships delivering the sucked-up sand of the North Sea to the coast of the Netherlands and when I pick up artefacts and bones and stones I have to wonder.
Are marine archaeologists and palaeontologists involved when the sand is being sifted, as it must be? If so, why not let us know of any finds? Perhaps there is a database somewhere and some researchers are busily writing papers.
The thing is - I really don’t know if the nodules of flint and the presence of other unusual stones are in any way of archaeological interest. I don’t know if bones and artefacts of ancestral Doggerlanders are being dredged up. But it would be nice to hear some comments.
I thought about this fictional incident as I stood on the beach at Camperduin. Yesterday was a brilliant but bitterly cold day and I pulled down my hood and pulled up my scarf as I stepped along the sand,picking up nodules of flint that had split open to reveal a beautiful glassy interior. A piece of bone – and some unusual shells. And what about those flints over there – are they worked flints, expertly knapped or have they really been worked by water? And are those bones the osseus fragments from a mammoth? In my study at home I already have a foot bone from one of the last mammoths of the Dogger Bank. And what about those shells with unusual colours?
An afternoon’s beachcombing along the North-west coast of the Netherlands doesn’t usually reveal such objects, such artefacts. But through the years, puzzling stuff has been washed up. And certainly, as I walk along the beach now, the sand seems rougher, and pitted with tiny shells.
It is true that the North sea is always coughing up flotsam – whole planks of wood, glassy fishing weights, blue nets, skeletons of seabirds, even the odd cargo of cigarettes – but where I am walking now is the depository of a different treasure. A year ago this place was under water, under the sea.
But this sand wasn’t here a year ago either. It was farther out – right over there where the fishing boats trawl for herring, cod, haddock. Now I know that sand shifts around somewhat underwater and that’s how new dunes are created, But in this case new dunes are being made quite deliberately, by dredging up sand from far out in the North Sea and bringing it to the dike, where it is piled up.
Cast your eyes over to where the great sea dike, the Hondsbosschezeewering stretches from Camperduin to Petten. Time was when the Rekere tidal creek poured inland – but a severe storm in the 15th century caused the sea to break through the dunes on either side, resulting in extensive flooding of the land.
Dikes were built but the present one was built in the 18th century with modifications thereafter and gave me what used to be one of my favourite views. I would stand on the top of the dike and look first to the sea and then to the other side, the land side, much lower down where the brackish lakes drew waders of all kinds. It was a sign of Spring when the redshanks and the black-tailed godwits strutted and pecked over the water.
They still do. But viewing them now is like looking at them from a low cliff. The dike has disappeared. It hasn’t really gone of course, just disappeared from view. If you walk down to the beach at Camperduin you have to walk quite long way to the sea because the sand stretches right out into what used to be sea and a shelf of sand now slopes from the top of the dike to the water.
You see, something had to be done about the sea nibbling away at the sand at bottom of the dike. It was only a matter of time before the hollow space would have become so great that the sea would have slithered underneath and undermined the whole structure. When you live twelve feet below sea-level and not far from the coast, as I do, the situation is something you take seriously.
Now when you create a polder, you built a ring dike and pump out the water from the land you want to dry out. But in this case what they are doing is actually creating a new beach on the sea side of the dike and extending it up and down the coast. And they are making it from land that used to be part of Doggerland.
There is something about this gargantuan piece of imaginative civil engineering that fascinates me. But there is one thing that niggles me. And it’s a more immediate worry than the prospect of waking up one morning and having to swim out of bed.
First, let’s have a look at the history of of the North Sea bed. At the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000 years BC) much of Europe was covered in ice sheets but as the climate warmed, huge areas of tundra were exposed. We’re now talking about a great landmass stretching from Eastern England to Demark and incorporating the Netherlands - in short, where the North Sea is now.
A last ‘cold snap’ around 11,000BC gave way, after some centuries of capricious extremes to a much more pleasant climate, the land becoming inhabitable and worked by hunter-gatherers. As the climate warmed steadily the land became conducive to hunting, fishing and fowling and gathering nuts and berries. It was a river landscape with deeply-cut valleys meandering through rolling hills. It was rich in wildlife and wooded valleys. This was the legacy of the still-melting ice and it was a situation that couldn’t last. But while it did, it was a halcyon time for our Mesolithic ancestors.
If we look at the finds from Mesolithic Star Carr in Yorkshire (from 8000BC) we can deduce a strong culture not only that of basic hunting survival but also of community ties with religious and aesthetic meaning. Finds include the antler masks, knapped flints and worked semi-precious stones.
Imagine the same activities taking place on that vast, undulating, productive plain of Doggerland. In fact the Star Carr people were probably seasonal nomadic hunters and this small place in Yorkshire was just the edge of their territory. They might have had a permanent settlement more to the east.
But the melting ice caught up the Doggerlanders. Gradually, the waters seeped into the land, the rivers grewwider, the land became islands and the islands shrank. Then a catastrophe occurred that speeded up the process. This was the Storegga Slide and it really did for the Doggerlanders.
Storegga, Old Norse for ‘great edge’ refers to the collapse of the continental shelf at the Western coast of Norway. It wasn’t the first landslide to occur but it was the biggest and most serious, resulting in a megatsunami that in one great swell wiped Doggerland off the map. It created the North Sea and the English Channel and these features were here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future.
So all the Star Carr type communities were lost beneath the waves and it is this that makes me a little uneasy when I look at the ships delivering the sucked-up sand of the North Sea to the coast of the Netherlands and when I pick up artefacts and bones and stones I have to wonder.
Are marine archaeologists and palaeontologists involved when the sand is being sifted, as it must be? If so, why not let us know of any finds? Perhaps there is a database somewhere and some researchers are busily writing papers.
The thing is - I really don’t know if the nodules of flint and the presence of other unusual stones are in any way of archaeological interest. I don’t know if bones and artefacts of ancestral Doggerlanders are being dredged up. But it would be nice to hear some comments.
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