In Search of Doggerbank: The Island of the Damned May 11, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Prehistoric , trackback
Most countries have a lost realm that nationals can get teary eyed about: Italians beating their chest over Istria, the Spanish spitting blood for (and all too often on) Gibraltar, even Islamists weeping about the orange trees of Granada. Britain is no exception: the difference is that the UK’s lost territory was not taken by neighbours but by the sea. I refer here, of course, to the offshore island of Doggerbank. Fertile, beautiful, well-populated Doggerbank with its red deer, its boars and mammoth herds and freezing winds blowing in from the Urals a thousand miles away. What, you’ve never heard of Doggerbank? Then let me tell you a story…
Archaeologists speak habitually of Doggerland (rather than Doggerbank) the low lying territories (now at the bottom of the sea) that in an early and unhappy phase of Britain’s history kept the country moored to the Continent. At this date Britain was, though it pains Beach to say this, a peninsula of France. However, as sea levels rose Doggerland got wet, then got sunk and only the highlands kept above the waves, the area today known by sailors and anyone who listens to the Fishing Forecast on BBC radio as Doggerbank (Dogger Island on the map).
If you go and read studies of Doggerbank you will discover that tens of thousands of ‘Doggers’ (inhabitants of the Bank) lived on those hills, threw their nets into the cold waters of the North Sea and defecated, procreated and did just about everything else that humans get up to. Of course, ‘tens of thousands’ is just archaeologists speaking through their baseball caps: the soft end of the humanities has a longstanding love affair with pseudo-statistics. But there was certainly a human population and occasionally human bones and objects have been dredged up off the Doggerbank. From these we learn of Mesolithic communities that depended on the sea and that probably viewed their own inland peaks as marginal lands.
Doggerbank has, as is well known, been important in European history. Julius Caesar landed there after he inconvenienced Kent. The province of Doggerbank was evacuated by the Romans in 410 when Honorius lost his nerve. The Doggers had their churches burnt by the Vikings: in fact, some historians speculate that the Doggers were largely wiped out in the early tenth century. In 1099 Dogger knights were the first over the wall at Jerusalem. Catholic recusants were stubborn in the Principality of the Banks and the English crown had to give some limited autonomy to the province in the time of Elizabeth. Dogger vessels ran the blockade and supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. Etc etc
Of course, all of this is in the realm of what might have been: as it happens, Doggerbank and the poor Doggers never made it out of the Mesolithic. The island sank beneath the waves around 5000 BC and ceased to be a place of settlement and became, instead, a hazard to passing fishing vessels who kept catching their nets on the roofs of prehistoric cottages: it was also the site of a famous battle between the Russian war fleet and phantom Japanese torpedo boats in 1904, but that’s another tale.
The island had survived for about a thousand years, the last memory of a vast lowland territory stretching across much of the North Sea, before there was sea there. What happened to the last Doggers? There is the claim that they were wiped out within three or four generations of the creation of the Doggerbank (the island) by a tsunami: archaeologists though are almost as bad with tsunamis in a marine landscape as they are with population figures. Even if the community had been wiped out (everyone? think of the relatively slight effect of the 2004 tsunami on hunter gatherer populations) it is difficult to believe that such good Atlantic real estate would have been left empty for long. Or are we to believe that at this date humans didn’t have ocean worthy ships?
Other news from Doggerbank? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Here is a fascinating map from Reclaiming Doggerland. I want a summer house on Elbow Spit and fully intend to watch gazelle at Puzzle Hole.
29 May 2017, Neil H. sent in this extraordinary document (linked from here)
