Doggerland

The country with no surviving story

Doggerland is not a name carried out of prehistory. Archaeologist Bryony Coles coined it in the 1990s from Dogger Bank, and the bank took its name from Dutch fishing boats. The country was reconstructed from trawled bones and peat, seismic surveys, sediment cores and archaeology. A recent scholarly review could describe it precisely as a lost world “not known from myths and legends.”

That absence does not prove that nobody told stories there. The communities that lived on the plain moved, mixed and changed languages many times before anyone wrote their words down. It does tell us what the surviving evidence can bear. No British flood tale may simply be labelled a memory of Doggerland because it mentions land under water, and no general European deluge may be moved onto the North Sea without a place-specific link.

The filled points therefore sit where the possible postglacial traditions put them: west of Doggerland in Ireland, Wales and the Hebrides, and south along Cornwall, the Channel Islands and Brittany. The four hollow points on the North Sea coast belong to a different clock. They are securely recorded local legends of later loss, useful because they show what memory looks like when the drowned place remains inside written history. The empty space over Mesolithic Doggerland is not an omission. It is the finding.

A stone’s throw to Scotland

A visitor to the Isle of Man collected this in 1834 and printed it two years later — what people at the northern end of the island told him was that the Mull of Galloway, over in Scotland, had once been near enough to throw a stone to. The Point of Ayre is a long shingle spit, and standing on it you can see Galloway on a clear day, which is presumably why the saying attached itself there and stayed. It is a strange thing to have said. Nobody claims to have thrown the stone. There is no story about the sea coming in and no explanation of why the distance changed. A stone’s throw is all there is. Nobody drowns in it and nothing happens in it.

The ground under that sea makes the comparison a reasonable one. Patrick Nunn, who has spent years collecting traditions of this kind and setting them against reconstructions of the sea floor, models the drowning of the connection between Man and Scotland at roughly 10,680 to 8,550 years ago. Before that there is no forty kilometres of water to cross. There is land, and then a narrowing neck of land, and then finally a channel that a strong swimmer might have managed before it widened past all argument.

What the saying preserves, then, is the last moment when the two places were neighbours. Not the flood — the neighbourhood.

The woman who hunted where the sea is

St Kilda lies sixty-four kilometres out into the Atlantic beyond the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and it was about as isolated as inhabited land in Europe ever got — the last islanders left in 1930. The people who lived there told a story about a woman who hunted deer between St Kilda and Harris. She would loose her greyhounds on St Kilda and send them at the deer running toward the islands opposite. On Harris the same vanished country is called the hunting ground of a princess.

Take that literally for a moment, because the tradition means it literally. It describes a woman standing on what is now a scrap of rock in the open ocean, watching dogs chase deer over eighty-odd kilometres of ground that is now under a hundred metres of water. Deer need a great deal of country. The story is not describing a beach or a sandbar; it is describing a hunting range.

Nunn, Axel Creach, Pierre Stéphan and their colleagues read this as a recollection of a lower sea, and calculate that the saddle between the two would have had to be very deep indeed — deep enough that they note in the same breath that later slope collapse or scouring may have taken it down further since. So the date here is looser than the Manx one. What is not loose is the shape of the memory. Again there is no flood. There is a hunt, and the hunt has nowhere left to happen.

Why the crosser had to be a giant

On Arran, in the Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland, Fionn mac Cumhaill keeps house at Drumadoon and lays stepping-stones over to Kintyre. The old people of the island, according to a survey of Arran published in 1807, said he went from the one land to the other in a few steps.

Arran and Kintyre are about eight kilometres apart across Kilbrannan Sound. At the lowstand they were joined. Nunn and his colleagues set the tradition against that connection, and Nunn has argued more generally that giants are one of the ways a crossing survives in memory after it stops being possible. A community that goes on saying “you could walk to Kintyre” long after nobody can walk to Kintyre is saying something that is manifestly false. The correction that keeps the tradition alive is not to drop it. It is to enlarge the walker. Fionn does in a few steps what people used to do in an afternoon, and the statement becomes sayable again.

The same figure does the same work on the other side of the North Channel. Fionn sets out to confront Benandonner in Scotland and builds a causeway over the sea to reach him — running, the tradition says, to Staffa in the Inner Hebrides, where the same basalt columns rise out of the water again; seeing the size of the man, he abandons the job, or in the other telling Benandonner goes home pulling the stones up behind him. The basalt columns at the water’s edge in County Antrim are the visible stump of the road. Nunn and his colleagues are careful here, and they are right to be: the Giant’s Causeway and Fingal’s Cave are spectacular pieces of geology, and a good deal of the story has been fitted to them after the fact by people explaining the rock in front of them. But the thing being explained is still a road that used to go somewhere and now stops in the sea.

The toll-house at Coutances

The best detail on this entire map is Norman. People on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, and on Jersey in the Channel Islands, said that you could once walk out from Normandy to Jersey, crossing one small stream on the way by a bridge, and that you paid your toll at Coutances.

That is not a myth. That is an itinerary. It has the three things a person who has actually made a journey remembers: the obstacle on the road, how the obstacle was got over, and where the money changed hands. Nobody inventing a legend of a drowned country puts a toll-booth in it. The other Norman version remembers a forest running from Mont-Saint-Michel to Cherbourg that the sea afterwards swallowed, and submerged forests are in fact exposed along that coast at low tide.

Nunn and his colleagues set these traditions against post-glacial islandisation of the Channel Islands. The dates usually attached to the severance in the older literature — AD 565, AD 709 — are historical rationalisations, later writers reaching for a year because a story seemed to want one. They cannot be right; the Channel between Jersey and France was dry, then marsh, then shallows, then sea, over thousands of years. That mismatch is normally treated as a strike against a tradition. Here it is the reverse. The dates are the part somebody added. The road, the bridge and the toll are the part that was handed down.

The cities that were put on top

Not every tradition on this coast is as bare as the Manx saying. Several of them have a full story, with a named king, a sin and a punishment. Cantre’r Gwaelod, the Lowland Hundred, lies below sea level behind gates in Cardigan Bay; Seithenyn has the keeping of them, is drunk at the feast, leaves them open on a high tide, and the sea takes the country. Off the Breton coast Ker-Is stands behind its dyke, and the king Gradlon wears the key to the gate on a chain around his neck until his daughter Dahut takes it, for a lover who asks her for it, and opens the gate at night.

These are the famous ones, and they look like a different kind of story: a moral tale about drink, or lust, or pride, of the sort that could be attached to any coast anywhere. Look at what is underneath them, though. In both cases the thing the audience is actually being told is that the sea is sitting on inhabited ground, and in both cases the tradition names features you can go and see. The sarnau of Cardigan Bay — long stone reefs running kilometres out from the shore — are pointed out as the causeways of the drowned hundred. Off Borth the stumps of a submerged forest come out of the peat at low tide, black and waterlogged, standing where they grew.

The moral apparatus is bolted on, and the texts show it happening. The Black Book of Carmarthen has Seithennin and the drowning of Maes Gwyddno and no sluice gates at all; the drunkenness and the forgotten floodgates arrive centuries later, and Nunn notes that the Welsh and Breton versions may have converged only after Hersart de la Villemarqué’s Welsh journey of 1838. It is easy to see why: a country that goes under for no reason is unbearable, and a country that goes under because a drunk man forgot the gates is a story you can tell children. What is not bolted on is the claim about the ground. Nunn and his colleagues model the submergence in Cardigan Bay and in the bay of Douarnenez and put both within the Holocene. No city has been found under either, and the medieval kings in both stories are far too late to have seen anything. The kings are the drunk steward’s problem, not the coastline’s.

Off the Cornouaille coast in southwest Brittany — Finistère, not Cornwall — the same tradition runs without the king. The Glénan islands, they say, were one land, and the ways across it are named — which island you could walk to, where the ground ran that is now channel between them. The Glénan sit on a shallow platform that was continuous dry surface into the Holocene. It is the cleanest case on the map: a real drowned floor, a tradition that specifies footpaths across it, and no morality tale in the way.

What the North Sea did remember

Rungholt is the control case. The North Frisian settlement was lost in the storm flood of 1362, close enough to written history that its drowned fields and buildings could not be mistaken for Ice Age ground. By 1587 it had a punishment story. Revellers made a mockery of the sacrament with an intoxicated sow; a priest fled after a warning; the storm took the town. Later versions let the towers appear and the bells ring under quiet water. The archaeology belongs to a medieval cultural landscape. The myth explains why it deserved to drown.

Across the Dollard in Groningen, two tales make the same landscape into opposite lessons. One farmer pulls a herring from a freshwater well, understands that the sea is moving underneath him and sells before the autumn storm. Tidde Winnenga refuses to help his neighbours strengthen the dike; it breaks and the sea washes away Reiderland. One man reads the warning. The other breaks the rule of communal defence. Neither tale needs eight thousand years to become useful.

At Staithes in North Yorkshire, an escaped mermaid says the sea will reach Jackdaw’s Well. The tradition was first printed in 1924, after the well itself had disappeared from an eroding fishing village. On Fanø, a Danish Wadden island made of shifting sand, the creation story is also a prophecy: water and sand made the island, and “from the sea it arose, and into the sea it shall sink again.” N. M. Kromann recorded independent witnesses and nineteenth-century continuity. These are excellent North Sea traditions. They are also emphatically not Doggerland memories, which is why their map points are hollow.

The smell of the thyme

Ireland is different again, because it was cut off early — early enough that a land bridge is at the outer edge of anything tradition could hold. What Ireland has instead is islands that went down and kept their names.

In Liscannor Bay in County Clare, Stuithin’s fort stood on its island until the fighting of the three sons of Turrolbh, and then it went under. It is seen once in seven years, standing in the water. And boatmen passing over the place where it was, according to the antiquary T. J. Westropp who wrote the tradition down in 1908, said they could smell the thyme off its fields.

Nunn and his colleagues model the relevant shoreline at fifteen to thirty metres below the present sea and get a minimum age of somewhere between about 7,830 and 10,000 years ago. Nothing has been found on that floor. But consider what the tradition chose to preserve. Not the battle, which is the sort of thing that gets invented. The smell of a herb growing on cultivated ground. That is a detail from the surface of somebody’s farm.

Further south, in Ballyheigue Bay in Kerry, the Cantillons buried their dead on an island offshore, carried out at night by their own ancestors, until a man broke the rule against watching it done and the island was sunk. Cantillon’s Rocks are where it was, and fishermen say the chapel walls are down there. Nunn and his colleagues give seven to fifteen metres of submergence here, and a minimum age between 5,000 and 7,450 years ago. The Cantillons are a late Norman family whose name has been fitted to an older loss. It is the island that is doing the work, and the island went down.

The wave with no surviving story

About 8,150 years ago a piece of the Norwegian continental slope the size of a small country let go and slid into the deep Atlantic. The Storegga slide sent a tsunami into Shetland, Orkney, the east coast of Scotland and the last low islands of the North Sea plain. It ran more than twenty metres above the tide line on Shetland, and three to six along the northeast Scottish coast. It is one of the best-dated catastrophes in European prehistory, it happened inside this Atlas’s window, and there were people on those shores when it arrived.

No well-attested tradition has been tied to it in Shetland, Orkney, Scotland or the North Sea basin. The accounts occasionally offered are modern, and work backward from the geology to a piece of later folklore that happens to mention the sea. The same evidentiary blank sits over Doggerland, the great drowned plain in the middle of the North Sea: people walked, hunted and lived there for thousands of years, but no surviving story can be securely placed on that ground.

This is the most interesting fact in the region, and it points directly at what the surviving traditions are made of. A tsunami is a pure event: enormous, brief, and over. It is exactly what we assume oral tradition is for — the great catastrophe, remembered and retold. And it is precisely what did not survive. What survived instead, all along the Atlantic coast, is the dullest possible content: where you could walk, what the crossing cost, where the deer were.

What a road can carry

Read the twelve filled points together and the pattern is unmistakable. From Man to Brittany the end of the Ice Age did not survive as a deluge. It survived as a lost route.

The reason is in the nature of the thing being remembered. A catastrophe is told; a road is used. A community that walks to the next island rehearses that route continuously, in the most ordinary way, for as long as it remains walkable — and the knowledge is not held as a narrative at all but as a piece of practical geography, of the same kind as knowing where the ford is. When the route goes, the knowledge does not have a plot to lose. It collapses into a sentence. The Mull of Galloway was a stone’s throw. You paid your toll at Coutances. She hunted deer to Harris.

That is why these particular scraps outlived the flood stories on the same coasts, which had plots and characters and were the first thing to be overwritten when a book with a better flood in it arrived. And it is why the traditions that do carry a full narrative — Cantre’r Gwaelod, Ker-Is — carry it as an obvious later layer over a plain statement about the ground: a drunk steward and a wicked daughter sitting on top of the older and stranger claim that the sea is on land that people used.

It also explains the giants, who are not decoration but repair. A statement about a walk becomes false the moment the walk becomes impossible, and a false statement gets dropped. Enlarge the walker and the statement is true again. Fionn steps to Kintyre; the memory of a crossing survives inside a body big enough to make it. The giant is what a route looks like after the sea has been over it for eight thousand years.

Cornwall keeps the one drowned country in this group with a named survivor in it. Between Land’s End and the Scillies there was a country called Lyonesse, with its churches and its towns, and the sea took it. One man rides ahead of the water on a white horse and comes out at Perranuthnoe. The Seven Stones reef is pointed out as the drowned city, and the Scillies are left as the high ground of a country that used to be walked to — the walk again, this time with a rider on it, outrunning the tide with a whole inhabited world going under behind him.

And this is why the region belongs on a map of Ice Age floods despite having so few floods in it. Ask of these twelve whether the world as we know it was set up when the water rose, and they answer in a register no other region uses. They do not describe a world remade. They describe the moment a neighbourhood became a sea — and they are, in several cases, dated: the walk to Man closing between about 10,680 and 8,550 years ago, the platform under the Glénan going under between 10,865 and 10,000, the ground at Liscannor between 10,000 and 7,830. Somebody stood on the Point of Ayre and looked at Galloway and thought it was close. The sentence is still there. The isthmus is not.

Mapped traditions