It was not long before the decision was made that the tree stumps must be removed to protect both them and the area from damage and so they were lifted out of the sands and taken to soak in a bath of chemicals, until they were strong enough to be put on show in a local museum. The place where they had stood was marked with a pole that can be seen when the tide is really low.
This was a luminous morning with a blue sky that looked as thin and clear as glass; the air was warm, in a spring that has hardly known any warmth. We parked in the main car park and walked to the visitor centre. There were lots of noticeboards carrying pictures of the henge and the coast and its birds, somehow ensuring that the real world with its distances and absences and fuzzy outlines was bound to be a disappointment. The visitor centre café was closed but a woman raced out of the building and said we were parked in the wrong car park which did and did not matter and she was going on holiday the following morning and she really needed the holiday and had only just started to pack and her partner hadn’t even got that far, he was the warden, he was overseeing the cutting down of the pine trees that had been killed by the storm surge of November 2013. It was the trees on the lower ground that had died, their roots standing in the salty water, and now it was thought their branches might fall and hurt a member of the public. She said she knew nothing about the Seahenge and it was a nightmare until they took it away; we should talk to her partner, he was wearing a puffa jacket, he knew everything, he’d lived at Holme since the late 1980s.
We followed a track that led through the pines, the sound of chainsaws getting louder. We spoke to a young man in a fluorescent jacket and a plastic helmet whose job was to make sure that nobody got close to the dead trees that might drop their branches. He also knew nothing about the submerged forest. He had done a degree in zoology, studying pigs and how they responded to more humane treatment, but unfortunately the pigs he was studying kept getting slaughtered and so it was not easy to come to any conclusions. I asked him what sort of work he would like to be doing and he grinned and said paid work would be nice.
We crossed the delicate border between the sand dunes where the trees grew and the coast where nothing grew. The tide was still quite high, and the beach looked as though it had been newly laid out: a great thick layer of pale sand dumped on whatever was hidden beneath.
The sand made a seamless connection with the gentle pull and push of the sea’s edge, but apart from that the sea hardly moved. The blue sky went darker towards the horizon, where those two elements fused. I thought of what Bryony had said about the people who used to live in places like this, one foot on the land and one in the water.
We started walking towards Hunstanton where the uppermost bulge of East Anglia turns a sharp corner and sweeps back into the Wash. A soft wind. Every stone and pebble, every shell and dried wisp of seaweed had its own shadow attached to it, giving even the tiniest things a sort of power and dignity.
As the tide pulled back, the wading birds came. Oystercatchers, hopping as if they only had the one foot to stand on and then launching out together in a perfect formation only inches above the land, their sharp cries like the sound of regret.
A fair number of cormorants were airing their wings; some had white patches on their rumps which is something to do with the breeding season being close and others had the white bibs of juveniles. When they fly, necks outstretched and bodies as determined as a weapon, they seem so ancient, as if they are still connected to their reptile relatives. I looked them up when I got home and although they weren’t flying around in the company of pterodactyls and giant dragonflies, they were present in the warmer interglacials of the Ice Age, as far back as the Middle Pleistocene which means at least a couple of million years.
And then all the bobbing and skittering shore birds whose names I tend to muddle up: sandpipers and sanderlings, dunlin, little stints and turnstones and a redshank or perhaps it was a greenshank.
We drifted a bit inland in the almost too bright sunshine to where a channel of saltwater had looped its way in from the sea, so that eventually it would encircle and cut off a whole chunk of the fragile coast. The nearside bank of this channel was bounded by the palest and finest sand. The wind rippled the clear water, making it seem as if it was a flowing river but in a different world than our own, and I was back with thoughts of the dead and how close they can seem, even though they are utterly beyond reach.
We walked on. I picked up a piece of chalk honeycombed with the pinpricks of some sort of tiny boring animal. I found a strange and rather sinister object, almost soft and almost white, with the look of drowned human flesh. I vaguely knew what it was, but I couldn’t catch it in my memory.
In Hunstanton we stopped in a hotel bar, sitting outside in a curious corral of varnished pine wood and protected from the wind by glass barriers; it was rather like being an animal from another country, held in the compound of a safari park. We ordered cheese and pickle sandwiches on white bread, as soft and odd as that white and fleshy sea thing, and a man wearing a black and shiny leather trilby tilted back to reveal the vastness of his forehead walked past, led by a piebald bull terrier straining at the lead. There was a look of menace in the man, maybe because of the way the dog pulled him forward, or because the hat looked as if it was part of a fascist uniform. And then he said something to the woman who had gone ahead of him and he had a funny squeaky voice which made him seem all the more aggressive, as if he was bound to be angry, having to live with the odd vulnerability of the sound he produced.
On the way back to the car park we met Puffa Jacket. ‘The drowned forest has gone,’ he said, ‘and goodness knows when it will next appear. All you can see for now are those lumps of black peat that get washed up along the shore and they contain bits of the roots of trees, scraps of grass or marshland, alongside seashells and the holes made by piddocks. The trees disintegrate first and then the peat their roots were standing in breaks away and is carried along the beach.’ He explained that under the peat there is a layer of clay from river silt and under the clay there is another drowned forest. He looked surprised when he said this, even though I am sure he has said it many times.
He said Seahenge was a disaster for this area. The clever journalist who thought up the name wrote an article about the mysterious circle of tree trunks with an upside-down trunk at the centre of the circle, with photographs to show how it looked. That led to more photos and articles and suddenly seventeen thousand visitors from all corners of the world, and especially from Japan, began to turn up in busloads. Druids and others who believed in the old gods came to claim the henge as their birthright, demanding it be left where it was so they could worship it. There was quite a bit of aggression and all this in a nature reserve that would never expect more than a couple of hundred visitors on a good day in the summer. ‘It’s nothing but a circle of wooden poles surrounding an upside-down trunk for carrying a dead body,’ said Puffa Jacket, ‘and there is another circle next to the famous one, but because it isn’t called a henge, nobody bothers about it.’
He said the other circle of tree trunks is still revealed when the tide is back far enough. At its centre are two bits of wood, and he stretched out his hands to describe the span of them and they were clearly also meant to carry a corpse. He had also seen the remains of the wattle fence that had surrounded it. ‘You find all sort of things out there,’ he said, ‘fish nets, baskets, Roman stuff.’ As he spoke he kept staring out across the sand and towards the grey sea, with a kind of fondness as well as mystification.
35
Dawn and Rob are professional divers and in 2014 there was a lot of talk and publicity around them when they found a new stretch of forest from Doggerland out in the sea beyond the Norfolk fishing town of Cromer. I went to visit them in their cottage, which is near where I live and next to a very beautiful church where a good friend lies buried.
Dawn led me through the kitchen and into a low-ceilinged r
oom. A black and white cat who carried himself with a lot of authority introduced himself. There was a large and murky fish tank containing two fish on the far wall close to a window and a number of framed photographs of magnified and brilliantly coloured sea creatures.
Dawn and Rob were both wearing jogging trousers and identical Crocs shoes, which somehow gave them a shared identity. I sat in an armchair while they sat convivially side by side on the sofa.
I never quite got around to explaining what I was doing with this book, beyond expressing an interest in Doggerland. I did mention that I had been fishing for mammoth from the Dutch coast and with surprising vehemence Rob said, ‘They don’t just get mammoth, you know. There’s a whole lot of fish come up in their trawling nets, all of them broken and bruised and as good as dead. You can’t fish for bones without catching fish.’
He said the Dutch trawling industry has been a disaster for the underwater environment, because of the use of boom nets which cause every square inch of the bed of the North Sea to be scraped bare. It’s like ploughing a field, taking all the earth away and then sieving it. There are some areas which are known to carry wrecks on them and they are left more or less alone because it is tedious to fish there, but if I am thinking of a landscape beneath the sea’s surface I can forget it. It’s an empty, featureless prairie. The Dutch are supposed to be good environmentalists but all fishermen are the same, they don’t care about nature, they just want to smash and destroy it.
Sitting beside him, Dawn listened and said nothing. Her short pale hair was dyed into a mass of rainbow colours, rather like the soft tentacles and unlikely bodies of the marine creatures in the photographs.
I asked about the forest. They found it early in 2014 and not long after the big winter storms of December 2013 which shifted thousands of tonnes of sand beneath the ocean. Dawn was swimming from Cromer but the water was murky and somehow she got carried further out to sea than she meant to go, to an area where the water was quite clear, and there it was, close to the chalk reef that offers shelter to all sorts of creatures: a forest of trees, flattened and battered, but a forest all the same.
‘It’s very restful underwater,’ said Dawn, like someone who was thinking aloud rather than making conversation. She trained as a microbiologist, but mostly does unpaid voluntary work; she also has a job doing analysis of what are called colonisation plates for the Natural History Museum. Divers all around the country are asked to fill out forms and in that way a database on marine species and seabed types is being built up and can be consulted by anyone who is interested. ‘It’s raw data,’ she said.
I asked if they could identify the fleshy thing I had found at Holme. I described it. ‘Dead man’s fingers,’ said Rob at once and Dawn pottered off to look for one and came back with a biscuit tin filled with lots of smelly bits of shell and seaweed, bone and wood. The tin didn’t contain a dead man’s finger, but she pointed out some hornwrack which looked like a scruffy bit of seaweed; she said it is a member of the Bryozoa family. It’s a colonial animal and each member makes a microscopically tiny square box to live in and the boxes build up to form bigger structures rather like coral, all working in combination together, but still looking like nothing more than a bit of seaweed.
I picked up a white bivalve with a very rough shell. ‘Piddock,’ said Dawn and I realised that although I knew about piddocks making holes in wood and chalk, I had never known until now what a piddock looked like.
‘Some people call them angel wings,’ said Rob and he explained how they work like a drill bit, slowly rotating, pointed tip down, serrated shell-tooth grinding, as they burrow their way into whatever it is they want to enter.
Rob spoke about the forest. It’s half a mile or so out from the shore and it’s lodged among the chalk reef which hasn’t been trawled for the last hundred years or more. The chalk reef is the longest in Europe, maybe in the world. The trees must have spread out across this part of Doggerland, who knows how far, but these are the last survivors, covering an area of some three to four hundred metres. They were hidden under a blanket of clay and the weight of their trunks held them down in its grip and that is why they didn’t bob off and disappear. Everything is in a state of flux, the underwater tides are on the move and one year the chalk has deep crevices cutting into it and the next year it doesn’t; one year a cap of clay envelops all the trees and the next year the clay has gone and the trees are exposed.
Rob switched on the huge television screen so we could watch the films he has made of the forest bed. I see a bulky object like a rolled-up blanket covered in a soupy mud and that is a tree trunk. I see a paradise of sorts, in which strange creatures congregate around the protection of the trees and the chalk reef, their luminous displays like something you might come across in a posh supermarket. There are squirts and hydroids and razor shells, all waving their frothy parasols to catch passing specks of food. There are poisonously coloured starfish and anemones and a fat thing called a sunstar which is a foot wide and feeds on its smaller starfish relatives. Most of the crabs have little waving hydroids growing like cartoon thoughts out of their heads which are also their backs. The mottled grey lobsters with their endlessly enquiring red antennae look sleek and elegant. They come out from under the protection of wood and chalk to watch Dawn in her diving suit, to find out what sort of a thing she might be. A lobster can reach the age of a hundred and a sea bass can be twenty-five years old and more than four feet in length, but few if any of these creatures are able to complete their natural lifespan and so the strength of the entire species is being weakened. Rob told me that fishermen are forbidden to catch tiny crabs but they catch them all the same and stamp on them and use them for bait. The accumulation of sad facts swirls about in my head like clouds of disturbed sediment.
Rob and Dawn can only go diving in the warmer months and when the sea is calm and clear. They usually swim out from Cromer beach and they accompany other divers, to show them the forest. Once they have got to it or to other areas that might contain bits of it, they rarely spend more than three hours underwater, making films and taking photographs and simply looking at what is there.
Dawn, sitting on the sofa, contemplated the memory of all she had seen. ‘It’s very restful underwater,’ she said again and she looked rested, just thinking about it.
36
Tim Holt-Wilson, whose theory of process echoes so closely my own thoughts, said that we should go to Frost’s Common in Norfolk. He said it was a good place to see pingo ponds that were formed during the end of the last Ice Age, and the unkempt wildness of the place might give me an idea of what Doggerland looked like.
So there we were on a warm grey day in December. We parked and entered a rather odd wood, or maybe I mean a former wood because although there were no grand oaks and chestnuts booming on about all they had witnessed over the rolling progression of the centuries, there were lots of dignified and drooping holly trees and sweet-smelling box trees and a mixture of birch and willow and pine in all the stages of their lives.
The land tilted and dipped like a choppy sea and there were no clear paths. We came to the first of the pingo ponds; it was a bright pea-green colour, more big puddle than pond, with alder trees growing straight out of the water. Their trunks looked quite spiky and flimsy but the roots that held them had turned into bulbous islands.
The whole area of Frost’s Common was peppered with pingos and their colour gave them a science fiction look, as if something tentacled and terrifying might emerge and blink its red eye at any intruders. I took a few photographs but wondered if this would diminish the memory of what I was seeing.
We walked on. Still no paths, or at least the vague and inconsequential paths we occasionally followed seemed to have been made by deer or cattle. Each pingo appeared stranger than the last, and in between them there was the scrubby wood and a lot of thick moss growing on tree stumps and anywhere else it could make a cushion of its
elf. Tim discovered a Fuligo septica, a slime mould also known as dog vomit, and he said that slime moulds crawl very slowly from one perch to the next. This one was a fluorescent orange, motionless as far as I could tell and vaguely malevolent.
I saw a frog, which was odd for the time of year, and a tiny newt lying curled under a white stone that I had picked up because it looked like the bone of some vast beast. I saw a deer, slipping between the trees and disappearing even while it was still there, and I stood for a while to watch a stalk of dead bracken caught in a current of air that made its upper half twist and turn in an awkward little dance while everything around it kept still.
We emerged into an open area known as Cranberry Rough, with swampy meadows and shallow expanses of lake water and straggly clumps of alder and willow that don’t mind having their red-tinged roots standing in the water. This was once the site of a large lake, and studies of the lowest level of the lake’s basin found it to contain the silts and sands that had been blown across the surface of the exhausted land when it first emerged from under the ice during the end of the last Ice Age. Scientific studies of the fossil pollens held within a nine-metre-thick basin of mud chronicle the emergence of a sparse covering of pine and birch trees, and as the weather grew more mild these were replaced by thick forests of hazel and oak, alder and elm. The rich finds of worked flints from ten thousand years ago indicate that this was a very important hunting and fishing ground for the people of Doggerland.
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