The Lost World

Most of the known world evidently forgot to mark a major research centenary earlier this year, for it was in February, 1913, that Clement Reid (and Cambridge University Press) published his book, Submerged Forests. For the first time, anecdotal and research information was brought together to make a strong case for there having been, in ancient times, a swathe of land, now submerged, which once joined the British Isles to mainland Europe. It was groundbreaking stuff, and only now, a hundred years later, and thanks largely to oil and gas research, is much more information coming to light.
The lost world of Doggerland was a land bridge to the mainland stocked with trees and streams, grasslands, marshes and rivers. Particularly rivers, some of which may even have framed the land corridors wherein prey and hunters concentrated their movements. Thus some of our present river systems (the Ouse, Thames) can be seen as surviving remnants of earlier systems and tributaries now under the North Sea.
By about 10,000BC Doggerland was already reduced in size, but it was still attractive to wandering Mesolithic groups as it stretched from north of the modern Wash to the Thames estuary, and joined the mainland - via the Dogger Hills - between the Elbe and Rhine rivers. It was also an important larder, for in addition to fish and fowl there were mammoth, red deer, auroch and wild horses among the willow, hazel, and later, pine, oak, elder and elm.
One ancient river flowed north across Norfolk in the Runton and Cromer area, and this was the origin of the Cromer Forest Bed (700,000 to 600,000 years ago) which formed during one of the warmer periods. The residue can still be seen as a black layer at the foot of the cliffs about 200 metres east of West Runton's slipway. The Runton elephant - actually an early mammoth - was one of its denizens. An even larger body of water, the Bytham River, flowed from close to Stratford Upon Avon, north-east towards Leicester, and then east to skirt Stamford and Peterborough. Then it flowed south of King's Lynn and on to Shouldham Thorpe; south-east towards Bury St Edmunds; and north-east again to exit Norfolk north of Lowestoft.
Where did these rivers go? On Doggerland, the old Thames ran into the Channel river and what is now the Rhine; the Ouse was connected to systems which reached as far as the Norwegian Trench; as did the Cromer Forest Bed river, which flowed by Dogger Hills on the way.
Oddly, there is an echo of all this in the occasional debate on the advisability of siting nuclear power stations near sea shores, one pro-voice stating, well, at least we don't get tsunamis here. Actually, we do. Or rather, we have. In about 6,000BC retreating ice sheets and subsequent readjustments of land surfaces caused a mass of undersea material to shift, provoking a huge tsunami. The landslip occurred off the south-west coast of Norway, at Storegga, near the Norwegian Trench.
The Storegga slides were monumental, and the tsunami seems to have hit east and north Scotland and parts of Northern England. In some places the waves reached several kilometres inland, and layers of sand have been identified at 23 locations. It is likely that the lives of hunter-gatherer groups were disrupted, and the tsunami may even have enlarged the Channel which was beginning to open up in Doggerland and which would eventually grow to isolate Britain from the mainland.