#446: Doggerland

Doggerland is the name given to an area which is now submerged beneath the North Sea. 

The higher sections of the land are known as Dogger Bank: a fishing ground.

The National Geographic has explored the area.

At the end of the last ice age, Britain formed the northwest corner of an icy continent. Warming climate exposed a vast continental shelf for humans to inhabit. Further warming and rising seas gradually flooded low-lying lands. Some 8,200 years ago, a catastrophic release of water from a North American glacial lake and a tsunami from a submarine landslide off Norway inundated whatever remained of Doggerland.

There have been many items dredged up by trawlers from this area, or found on beaches along North Sea coasts. Doggerland was home to Mesolithic peoples.

Origin of the name:

Doggerland was named by University of Exeter archaeologist Bryony Coles in the 1990s after the Dogger Bank, a stretch of seabed in the North Sea in turn named after the 17th century “Dogger” fishing boats that sailed there

From Archaeology.Org.

The floor of the North Sea is now recognized as the largest well-preserved prehistoric archaeological landscape in the world. It would have been a paradise for the bands of hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice sheets into the region to settle there. They, however, were not Doggerland’s first inhabitants. Millennia prior to their arrival, the North Sea basin had belonged to Neanderthals, who lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. During the last Ice Age, between roughly 125,000 and 15,000 years ago, Doggerland was part of the cold and dry mammoth steppe. Because vast quantities of water were trapped in glacial ice sheets, the North Sea was around 450 feet lower than it is today. It was a mostly treeless, grassy plain that attracted mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses as well as herds of reindeer, horses, and aurochs.

This would be a potential case study for the proposed theme on landscape change.

#126: Natural History Reading List #10: W.G. Hoskins and 'The Making of the English Landscape'

In his pioneering work The Making of the English Landscape (1955), William George Hoskins (1908-1992) claimed ‘to those who know how to read it aright, the English landscape is the richest historical document we possess’. 

William Hoskins (1908-1992) was born in Exeter, Devon, the son of a baker. He won a scholarship to St Hele’s School and later studied at the University of Exeter. In 1931 he became a lecturer at the University of Leicester, where he founded the Department of English Local History in 1948, which went on to pioneer the study of people in their landscapes. In 1951 he was appointed as Reader in Economic History at Oxford University. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1969 and became a CBE in 1971. He wrote and edited many books including The Midland Peasant, Local History in England and Two Thousand Years in Exeter. In 1972 he made a television series for the BBC, based on his best-seller, The Making of the English Landscape. He was also president of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and was elected onto the City Council, to help preserve its historic fabric.

The book demonstrated the profound impact of human activity on the evolution of both rural and urban English Landscapes, introducing a brand-new source of primary information for scholars of various disciplines. 

Over the subsequent decades, Hoskins’ work has had profound impact on the work of historians, geographers, archaeologists, planners and conservationists, transforming their approaches to local, regional and national studies.

My version is the Little Toller Books version with cover photography by Fay Godwin.

From the page here, you can read a new introduction by William Boyd.

This is one of the books that will be in my GCSE Natural History library which is taking shape nicely.