Slip Slidin' Away 
The Shape-Shifting History of Doggerland 

Travel to the north-east coast of England and, if time and tide are just right, you’ll see the remains of a forest of dead trees just off the shore. Reduced to stumps, these weird relics are known as ‘Noah’s Woods’, and they stand as our last terrestrial remnant of a land that was once the size of the British Isles, spanning the North Sea. If you had walked into these woods in around 10,000 BC, you would have been able to begin a journey of several hundred miles to what is now the Netherlands. 

Passing through the woods of oak, elm, hazel, pine, and birch, you would have entered into valleys and gently sloping hills, around wetlands populated with birds, insects, beavers, and otters, until emerging onto wide, open plains. Across this grassy expanse roamed mammoth, rhinoceros, and sabre-tooth cats, whilst herds of reindeer and horses nervously migrated with the seasons. Humans were everywhere; hunter-gatherers could exploit this land to the best of their ability year-round, moving as it suited them. Settlements would have sprung up also in the latter years as humans made the transition to agriculture. It was the most productive land in Europe, being resource-rich, and possibly the most densely populated. 

We know little of the culture of this place or what name it would have been given by the people who lived there (if they gave it one at all – it’s worth considering that it was not just an extension of Europe, it was Europe). The name today is Doggerland. Doggerland – a certainly odd, slightly flippant-sounding name, deriving from the Dogger Bank, an area so-named because it was frequented by Dutch dogger fishing vessels (themselves deriving their names from an unknown source, but possibly an old Dutch word for cod). These fishermen had long been confused by how they kept finding spear tips, harpoons, mammoth bones, and peat in this lonely part of the North Sea, inspiring Sir Arthur Keith and Clement Reid to paint the first lucid pictures of Doggerland and its people at the start of the twentieth century. Bryony Coles revived the concept in the 1990s. 

The hills, valleys, plains, and wetlands are all gone now. Where did they go? It is first worth understanding that there is a reason so many disparate cultures, from the Aboriginals to the Cheyenne, have ancient flood myths. As the glacial period ended, sea levels rose globally. Ancient landscapes were submerged as glaciers melted, uprooting communities of humans and animals who were forced to search for higher land. Probably many died in various tsunamis caused by glacial collapses. It was not all apocalyptic – rising sea levels could open up new advantages to those willing to exploit the changing environments around them – but to many people it was a time of great stress. Piecing together how this all affected Doggerland, and the exact timeline of events, is difficult. 

The golden age of Doggerland would have been around 10,500 BC, when the melting of the ice and tundra had opened the land for colonisation by flora and fauna, but the sea levels and climate remained relatively stable. This balanced situation, if it existed at all, could not last forever. As the earth continued to warm, sea levels would have gradually risen. The Doggerlanders would have been comfortable with the changing nature of much of their landscape; the great estuaries, and perhaps some of the coastline, would have been constantly shifting. The gradual but unstoppable rising of the sea, however, might not have been perceptible to individuals living on the North Sea coastline. There would have been sudden events: the breach of land leading to the inundation of a traditional camping ground; the year when migrating birds suddenly stopped arriving at their usual place; the sudden destruction of coastline landmarks. It is inevitable that the loss of food and materials would have put them into a state of disarray, perhaps forcing conflict or collaboration between groups. But whether the people of Doggerland would have been able to connect the dots from murky oral histories and work out that the sea levels were rising is hard to ascertain. 

But to them, it may have stopped mattering. Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures, and to the coastal Doggerlanders, change would have become a way of life. We look at sea level rise from the perspective of a relatively sedentary lifestyle, when the encroachment of the sea threatens houses and infrastructure. But to the hunter-gatherers of the coast, it simply opened up new opportunities. New wetlands and hunting grounds would have appeared as much as disappeared, and at times the sea even could have receded temporarily in places. 

Those who did not adapt faced a far greater struggle in the changing landscape. The people of the interior, set in their old ways of hunting and foraging on dry land, found themselves in particular trouble. From the north came the coastal-dwellers, forced southwards by the retreating coastline. From the south came the farmers, whose new way of life was mutually exclusive with foraging. Caught in a three-way struggle, these interior foragers would have to pick a side and adapt. It was, writes Bryony Coles, probably the coastal foragers who won out; adaptive to change, more numerous (for now), and willing to absorb outside groups. It seems this would have halted the otherwise progressive rise of farming. 

With the tide rising, several tipping points were reached. At some point Doggerland was divided from mainland Europe. The ability to travel to Britain started to be limited by the tide, until around 6,500 BC when access was permanently severed. 

Around 6,200 BC, Lake Agassiz in the Americas would have burst, causing an enormous sea level rise of around two metres over just a few years. About the same time, the Storegga landslides occurred near Norway, causing a wave of between three to five metres in the northern part of Scotland, where the water penetrated 18 miles inland. Thousands would have died. Woodlands would have been swept away, animals succumbing en masse to the waves. 

Culturally traumatised, thrown into disarray, one wonders at this point whether those stubbornly clinging to what was now Dogger Island would have realised that the game was up. Their oral histories would perhaps have preserved melancholy tales of when the land stretched into the distance. For the first time they no longer had the numerical advantages over the mainlanders, and when moving to join them, they might have struggled to assimilate with the now numerous and still expanding farming communities. Their system of coastal subsistence may well have collapsed, or – more hopefully – they would have continued their tradition of adaptation and learnt to live alongside, or themselves become, farmers. Coles suggests their traditions might have lived on as they became “fishers and fowlers in the Rhine-Meuse delta, or inhabitants of the East Anglian Fens”. 

Whatever their eventual fate, the cultural memory of that time seems to be gone. If it lived on at all in England, the stories and oral histories would have naturally faded over time, and both the Romans and Anglo-Saxons would have gone a long way to finishing them off. But whispers do echo around northwestern Europe that recall cities and kingdoms lost to the waves. In the Scilly Isles, the tale of ‘Lyonesse’ – an ancient kingdom, swallowed by the sea in a single night – is thought to come from a memory of several thousand years ago when there was a single large island there. Even if we dismiss such tales, we should at least seek to learn from the past that we know. Our culture is one that no longer has the excuse of being unaware or unable to explain the vast climatic events going on around us. One would hope that, somehow, we have retained the Doggerlanders’ tenacity and capacity for change.

Thomas Bachrach has recently completed a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.