Fifty-five to thirty-five million years ago,
when the clays, sands and gravels
of the London and Hampshire basins
were being laid down in shallow seas,
birds in Britain became more plentiful,
their forms close
to what we know today.
The line of evidence was broken
by ice and time
until some two million years ago,
and here come eagle owls and snowy owls,
large auks since vanished;
and the North Atlantic albatross,
found in the Red Crag of Suffolk,
also gone.
During the coldest periods
of the Pleistocene
sea levels fell one hundred metres,
revealing an expanse of land
not wholly obscured by ice:
dry and vegetated,
forested in places,
with small lakes and swamps,
good for Arctic water fowl
among others.
The bodies of birds
that died in the open
tended to be destroyed
by predators or scavengers,
but a few bones have survived
in the sands, gravels and clays
from rivers, swamps and lakes,
while the remains of owls and rock doves,
swifts and swallows,
starlings, jackdaws and red-billed choughs
have been found,
embedded in the thin layers of soil and debris
on cave floors.
Other birds which did not live in caves
but were carried in to be eaten,
might leave a scattering of feathers
or fragments of bone:
delicate relics
of their passing.
The Cromer Forest Beds
hold the story of birds
from around a million years ago;
the summers were a bit warmer then:
fresh water in fens and rivers,
open grassy areas,
mixed woodlands,
and, among the trees,
blackbird and ring ouzel,
song thrush and redwing,
nuthatch,
starling and jay.
Based on The History of the Birds of Britain by Colin Harrison, Collins, 1988. In the preface the author says, ‘I have tried to put the birds of Britain into their long-term context. All too often we look at them as though they were a mainly twentieth-century invention, with a few honoured by a passing mention in our written history. In fact, although we only see them within our own brief span of time, they are an assemblage of species that in slightly varying combinations has existed within a continuity stretching back at least a couple of million years.’
6
I made a visit to Jerusalem in 1996. It was before the first Intifada, although things already seemed to have reached breaking point. I was there with a friend and we were staying on the Palestinian side of the city and people kept thinking I was a Palestinian returning to my homeland after a long absence and I liked that for the sense it gave me of belonging in a country I did not know.
One day we went exploring among the back streets and came to a rectangular pool of water cut into the fleshy white marble on which Jerusalem is built and the pool was fed by a spring carried in a carved trough that came out of a tunnel.
A man came up to us and said, ‘Do you want to see where Jesus performed the miracle of the blind man?’ and we both said yes, because of course we did. ‘Take off your shoes and trousers,’ he said to my friend. ‘Take off your shoes and roll up your skirt,’ he said to me and we were instantly obedient, partly from surprise.
He led the way into the tunnel, our bare feet treading on the side of the watercourse. The wall was rounded and smooth, cold to the touch. We walked into complete darkness, our eyes irrelevant, only the feel of the hand on the stone to guide us. And then all at once the shape of the wall changed as it formed a soft scoop, big enough for the three of us to stand in a group instead of a line. ‘Turn around!’ said our guide. ‘Here the blind man could see!’ We turned and in the far distance there was a tiny pinpoint of light which was the mouth of the tunnel and that was the miracle.
* * *
—
Back to February 2015 and a young man called Jonathan found the jaw of a rhinoceros embedded in the hard mud of the Cromer Forest Bed. This stretch of the bed is just a two-minute walk from the beach car park in West Runton and the tea shop where you can buy plastic buckets and spades and seriously sweet cake and strong tea and you can look at a laminated sheet of paper which tells the story of the discovery of the almost complete skeleton of a mammoth, who stood four metres tall at his shoulder and was twice as heavy as a mature bull elephant. That was in 1999 and most of the mammoth is now on display in the local museum although a section of it was too difficult to dig up and still lies in its original grave, covered by a slab of concrete to stop fossil hunters trying to get hold of a few more bones. Other laminated sheets explain a lot about how flint and chalk are formed and why this particular area is so important for what it holds of the past.
The freshwater beds are the remaining scraps of the muddy banks of an ancient and extinct river from the days when the sea was land and the land was thick with all sorts of life. The evidence of the continuation of this river’s journey now lies under the sand of the beach and stretches out for some distance beneath the sea’s surface. Where the sea has not yet encroached, patches of the river bank survive as a cliff of very dense clay, some forty metres in length and reaching to a height of around three metres. The clay is heaped up in smooth mounds like sleeping beasts and it looks as though it might have been dumped there by a builder’s merchant, until you notice the white scraps from broken shells, marking the lines of time passing.
Jonathan knows how to find fossils. It’s as if he sees them in the darkness where they lie hidden, as if they call out to him in a voice that only he can hear. He goes in search of them very regularly, every day if the weather has been rough. One late-winter afternoon he discovered the jaw of a rhinoceros. He would have continued with the gentle excavation but he was booked on a holiday to Tenerife early the next morning and so he phoned his friend Martin and Martin took over the work of protecting the bones overnight with a tarpaulin and in the morning he covered them with that stuff called scrim and then with a layer of plaster and then he dug out the lump of river bank that held them and managed to get it on to a hand trolley and into the boot of his car. I saw the wrapped-up lump in his back garden, but since then it has been moved to the Norwich Museum. Apparently the rhinoceros was eating hawthorn shortly before it died and bits of broken twig got stuck between its molars, which will be useful for identifying a more precise date of its death.
Jonathan is in his thirties, the same sort of age as my children. He first became interested in fossils when he was eleven. He was living quite close to Covehithe and he would walk along the beach looking for things and even then he must have realised he had a sort of dowsing rod in the mind, a special knack for examining the sand and the cliff edge in a sort of trance of concentration that allowed him to see what other people would not notice. I had made an appointment to meet him and his mother in the West Runton car park at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. The day was fine and clear: scudding clouds, the milky blue of the sky, and a slight sense of the approach of winter.
The two of them were walking down the concrete ramp that leads to the sea and they knew I was me because I had said I would be wearing a blue beret. Jonathan’s mother said she had to give the address at a funeral and I said I would bring him home when we had finished looki
ng.
I liked him immediately; the quiet of him made me feel quiet. We started walking the short distance to the freshwater beds and I told him I had picked up a bit of a mammoth only yesterday, at Happisburgh where the footsteps were found in the mud. I asked if he knew how those footsteps had survived for some nine hundred thousand years and he didn’t and neither did I and so we were none the wiser. I said I had always found fossil hunting to be like a meditation; you don’t imagine what it is that you might find, but you allow your mind to go blank, an instrument for looking and nothing else. He said it was true; he always felt very relaxed looking for fossils.
He was carrying a white plastic bag and in the bag he had a delicate little trowel, something a plasterer might use. He explained that the sediment continued under the beach and out to sea, where the far bank of the river had been destroyed by the tides, and there were the remains of ancient forests out to sea, but they only emerged when the tides were pulled far enough back.
I crouched beside him and watched him begin his work. He looked at the cliff like a sculptor might look at a lump of rock he was about to transform into something else. He stroked the surface and paused. He used his trowel very lightly, just enough to approach a smudge of darkness that might be a pebble or a fragment of burnt wood. He talked a bit as he worked, telling me that the bank was divided into four layers and the upper layer was around 450,000 years old, while the base, which was a yellow colour and more gravelly, was around two million.
‘I hope we’ll find some bones,’ he said and not long after he lifted a tiny curve of shiny blackness from out of the clay and this was the front incisor of a shrew. He placed it in the palm of my hand, no bigger than a nail clipping, and told me I could keep it. I wrapped it in a paper handkerchief and put it in a pencil case and thanked him.
We stopped at the place where he had found the broken sections from the antler of an extinct variety of giant deer. They were at the back of a wet cold fissure at the base of the bank of sediment where they had been lying out of sight for the last two million years; he had put his hand into the fissure and had touched the edge of horn turned to stone. At this level the sediment was rich in iron deposits and so when he brought the antler out, piece by piece, it was stained a dark ochre red.
A bit further on we came to the patch of sand out of which the West Runton mammoth had emerged, more or less complete in its bulky entirety; the area containing the hip bone and part of one hind leg are still covered in an ugly dollop of cement. And here, just a few steps further on, was where Jonathan had found the rhinoceros jaw. He planned to come back, to look for more of it after the winter storms had begun to do their work.
He was often silent and soft-spoken in between the silences. He found several bits of bone within the river clay and I worked next to him and found nothing, not even another shrew tooth. He said that people who didn’t understand the process sometimes came with pickaxes and hacked off whole chunks of cliff, but that way they never found anything and were causing a lot of damage with their casual impatience.
It took us over two hours to cover maybe a hundred yards and then it was time to go back. As he stood up to leave Jonathan suddenly said, ‘I am interested in happiness and what makes people happy or unhappy,’ and then he said he thought it didn’t matter what you did with your life, just so long as it made you happy. He said he found a single god difficult to imagine, but he liked the idea of God being present in all sorts of aspects of the natural world.
When we reached his house two Clumber spaniels in the kitchen gave us a rather vague welcome. We went into the sun room, in which there was a sofa and an armchair, a table covered in old newspapers and a view of the back garden. Jonathan brought me a mug of tea and then bustled off to fetch one of the many drawers containing his fossil collection.
A chorus of voices. One drawer held the jaw of a wolf, the teeth a milky blue colour and still energetic in their snap and snarl. Then the jaw of a giant beaver, from when they were building their dams across the sweep of the vanished river, the blackened front incisor as long as the span of my hand. Another drawer held the upper section of a rhinoceros skull, brightly white and worn smooth of all detail so it was like a mask a man might choose to wear in a dance, turning himself into some other creature, the flickering light from a fire increasing the transformation.
There was a similar sense of metamorphosis in the ankle bone of a horse that looked for all the world like the torso of a man: the belly stretched and taut, the shoulders strong, the top of the thighs just visible. I could suddenly understand how such an object made the overlapping connection between being human and being animal, between being dead and being alive. It was a perfect sculpture, small enough to hold and yet enormous in the authority of its presence, if you placed it somewhere where you could stare at it and allow it to occupy your mind.
When the Clumber spaniels announced the return of Jonathan’s mother from her work at the church, I thought it was time to go and after thanking both of them I took my leave and said I would come back on another day.
7
I met Tim Holt-Wilson at a conference about Doggerland that was being held at the arts centre in my local town. The conference was organised as an attempt to bridge the gap between science and the arts. The main speaker was Professor Vince Gaffney, who, along with a team from Birmingham University, has been working for several years on mapping what is left of the drowned country of Doggerland: its hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, making use of the complex depth-analysis graphs that are produced by the oil industry as part of their search for more underwater oil fields ripe for exploitation.
Gaffney explained that the first suggestion of the existence of a submerged landscape had begun to take shape in the early twentieth century when the new design of deep-sea trawling nets caught not only the bones of mammoth and other extinct beasts, but also the bones of more familiar animals from the Holocene, which started a mere 11,500 years ago. Then in 1931 a fishing vessel working above the area known as Dogger Bank scooped up a dark lump of terrestrial vegetable matter known as moorlog, and lodged inside it was a harpoon carved from the antler of a deer. The harpoon was not worn or damaged in any way and had clearly been lost or intentionally deposited in this particular place, at a time when Dogger Bank must have been a fair-sized island or even part of a much larger mainland.
Using a series of computer-generated maps alongside other images, Gaffney described Doggerland when it first emerged from under the weight and cold of the last Ice Age and then took shape and flourished as one of the most densely populated areas in a much larger Europe. He then followed its slow inundation as sea levels began to rise and its final disappearance when the entire area vanished and Britain was separated from the land to which it had been joined.
c. 18,000 BP
The conference also included a display of paintings by my friend Jayne Ivimey: gentle images that seemed to look through the surface covering of water towards the rippled land that lay beneath it, still marked with the footprints of birds and humans. There was a series of photographs of the battered and changing East Anglian coastline as it now is, a recitation of a sequence of poems evoking the people who had perhaps lived in a country that no longer exists, and a film made among the sand dunes and marshlands, imagining these same people fleeing from the encroaching sea. A singer sang a wistful song about what it means to be banished from a place where you once belonged and then Tim, who knows a great deal about the geology and history of East Anglia, somehow managed to straddle the worlds of science and the arts when he spoke of places he had visited along the east coast and all over Eastern Europe, in his search to find out how Doggerland might have looked.
Throughout the day, the audience was very attentive and the atmosphere was curiously intense. It was as if everyone felt personally involved in the loss of a country which is so near, even though it cannot be seen or entered, alongside the loss of the
animals and the human beings who had chosen to live there.
At the end of the conference I spoke briefly to Tim and told him I was maybe going to write a book about Doggerland, although I had no clear sense of what sort of shape such a book might take. He said he would be happy to help, if he could.
So there I was, several months later, visiting Tim. He lives in a low, red-brick Victorian building that is part of an old ancestral estate. It might have been a gamekeeper’s cottage, although for that there should be more small windows at funny angles for catching sight of approaching poachers. I lived in a gamekeeper’s cottage once, in the middle of a wood not far from the drowned town of Dunwich, and it was those oddly placed windows that I remember most vividly; that and the damp in the walls which could turn a pair of leather shoes blue with mould in just a few days.
The garden around Tim’s house had a nice ramshackle air, as if it gets on with its own life but doesn’t welcome interference. He heard my car and came out to meet me. He is very tall, so he needs to bow his head to pass through his own front door. He led me into a sitting room filled with books that inhabited bookcases, but had also established themselves in heaps and little towers on the floor and on other pieces of furniture. There were paintings and photographs on the walls and on shelves and lots of mysterious objects scattered haphazardly around; the same sort of things that I tend to collect, but here, because I did not know them, they all seemed to be waiting to have their names called out, so they could step forward and identify themselves. Tim said that the bright white bone on the lower shelf of the bookcase was a rhinoceros vertebra, and next to it was a flint scraper that looked like nothing at all until I picked it up and it positioned itself perfectly in my hand, the cutting edge ready to strip meat from a carcass. A broken Greek head, a lump of twisted wood, a piece of medieval carving, all jostling together in each other’s company.
Tim is not so well. He explained briefly that his immune system has collapsed and I didn’t want to intrude by asking what the implications of such a collapse might be, but there was something about the quiet of him which made it seem as if he has needed to learn to keep one foot in this world and one in the next. I sat on the sofa and he sat in an armchair and the talk was surprisingly easy, even though the subject matter was sometimes quite complex. He is interested in what he calls process, a belief that every animal, every human, trees, earth, stones, even a crystal of sand, or a filament from a spider’s web, has its own life in the world, its own process. This process does not begin with birth or end with death, it is a trajectory in which there is no finite end. The skull of a dead man is part of the process of that man’s life, even when it is nothing but a scattering of dust. A lump of flint is its own process and so too is the fossil of a shell it contains imprinted into itself.
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