The land bridge connecting Great Britain to mainland Europe during the last Ice Age was gradually flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500 BC. It was discovered in 1931 when a Norfolk trawler dredged up an unexpected artefact.



Out from Cromer in an easy sea, Pilgrim Lockwood

cast his nets and fetched up a harpoon.

Twelve thousand years had blunted not one barb.

An antler sharpened to a spike, a bony bread knife

from a time of glassy uplands and no bread:

Greetings from Doggerland, it said.

It’s cold. We answer ice with elk and mammoth, larks

and people like you. We are few. We hunt and eat and walk

and then move on, or fall. There are midges

but you can’t have everything. We fish or fowl;

we stalk carp-fat lagoons with ivory spears.

Our softened swamps are thick with eels. We sing.

Pilgrim felt his feet transparent on the deck, a sailor

treading uplands sixty fathoms back; saw nettled deer tracks

pooling, inch by sodden inch, into a whaler’s channel;

inlands islanded and highlands turned to shipping hazards,

fellsides lessened to a knuckled string; the sly brine

loosing peat from longbones, locking snails into the bedrock.

He turned for harbour, kissed the quoins of every house

and took to hillwalking. Time, he said, was water:

water, time. At neap tides he felt England’s backbone

shift and shiver; saw the caverns fill, the railways rivered

and the Pennine mackerel flashing through lead mines,

the last dove lifting from the summit of Lose Hill.