Land Before Time

Doggerland recreated                                                                       National Geographic Channel

Like ashes the low cliffs crumble,

    The banks drop down into dust, 

The heights of the hills are made humble,
    As a reed's is the strength of their trust;
As a city's that armies environ,
    The strength of their stay is of sand:
But the grasp of the sea is as iron,

            Laid hard on the land. 

So writes the English poet and novelist Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) in By the North Sea. Could he have imagined what we now know, that the North Sea was once Doggerland, a bucolic and beautiful strip that connected the United Kingdom with the European mainland? Rife, apparently, with marshes, rivers, and lakes, Doggerland was a hunting and fishing paradise for the hunter-gatherers of the region. All that ended, however, with the end of the last ice age. Water from the melting glaciers slowly drowned the land, whose inhabitants, it is surmised, had already traveled to higher ground. The final insult was a mega-tsunami caused by a terrific undersea landslide: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730301-000-travel-back-in-time-to-a-paradise-lost-under-the-north-sea/
   Swinburne's poem about the North Sea is long but evocative. There is a reason he was, in his time, considered by many to be the successor to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/swinburne/northsea.html