Don’t tell Boris Johnson, but Britain wasn’t always an island. It used to be part of the European landmass, connected by a territory called Doggerland, which was located beneath what is now the North Sea, between Suffolk and Holland. Doggerland was fertile, rich and marshy, and supported an abundance of animals as well as successive eras of human life, from Neanderthals to Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Around 6,000 years ago, it was inundated by rising sea levels and disappeared beneath the waves, though traces of its presence frequently resurface. Dutch trawlers dredge up mammoth bones alongside wriggling fish; divers encounter submerged forests; the jaws of rhinoceroses crop up on beaches after storms.
Julia Blackburn, who lives in Suffolk, became interested in Doggerland in the wake of her husband Herman Makkink’s death in 2013. Makkink was a Dutch artist (he made the sinister phallic murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange), and there was something magnetic about the idea of this vanished territory that had once connected their two homelands. A magpie anyway, eyes to the ground, always turning up oddities, she’d become fascinated by the immense age of the worked flints and fossilised bones she kept finding in the eroding cliffs of Covehithe beach, a place where “things … often appear magically out of nowhere and then vanish with an equal magic”.
As in her last book, Threads, a loosely woven study of the fisherman-turned-artist John Craske, Blackburn conducts her investigations by way of a sort of stubborn pottering. It is research as beachcombing, patiently sifting, waiting to see what the tide has brought in. The story of Doggerland and its enigmatic inhabitants accumulates via dreamy, seemingly half-distracted anecdotes and encounters, not only with professional experts in the Mesolithic and Palaeolithic, but also with local fossil finders and treasure hunters, their garages stuffed with ice‑cream tubs of Roman coins and ammonites.
Like Blackburn, all of them are fascinated by the relics of deep time, gummed in the mud beneath their feet. There’s Ray the slaughterman, who found a medieval well after a storm, and the Dutch custom inspector Dick Moll, whose house is crammed with mammoth bones and molars and who gives Blackburn a parting gift of mammoth hair, “very red and pubic”. But the most spectacular find belongs to Bob Mutch, a disabled former bank manager who discovered the worked flints that put the presence of humans in Britain back by 200,000 years. “Still,” he says laconically, “it was quite a thing to know you’re the first person to touch it since Pioneer Man came over from Europe.”
These encounters are interspersed by what Blackburn calls “time songs”, 18 elliptical, quasi-poetic summaries of books and interviews, condensing dense compendia of information into something not so much like songs as lecture notes. Many explain the great eras of geological time (“the isotypes take me back / Forty thousand years”), one describes the discovery of the Sweet Track in Somerset, another retells a folktale about beavers. They share a slightly awkward quality, but what they do transmit is a sense of intense effort, like being with someone who is listening very hard.
There has always been a speculative, unsteady quality to Blackburn’s writing. She doesn’t so much research the past as think her way into absences: Goya, Napoleon, Billie Holiday, a partisan village in wartime Liguria. Practice work, she calls it, looking at the meadow behind her house and imagining the castle that was once there, or gazing out at the familiar grey waves and trying to will time backwards, the sea receding, the forests restored. It’s an approach that more than once recalls Ursula Le Guin’s beguiling work of future-archaeology, Always Coming Home. “I told myself,” Blackburn writes, “that the answer lies in the pleasure of the doing, the pleasure of diving down into one’s uncertainty and finding a way back to the shore.”
Gradually, the people come into view. People who lived very lightly, stopping for a night and moving on, knapping tools to butcher an animal and immediately discarding them. The traces of their existence are minuscule: a few stone axes and arrows, the remains of a basket. On Goldcliff island in the Severn estuary, Blackburn sees tiny pockmarks in the mud: rain falling on a particular day between 5500 and 5200BC. Nearby are human footprints: two small children, aged five or six, struggling with their balance, and an adult who slips in the mud.
How to reconstruct their lives? Blackburn draws on material from more recent hunter-gatherer cultures like the /Xam Bushmen and Netsilik Inuit, as well as her own experiences with the Indigenous Australians she encountered while writing her 1994 book Daisy Bates in the Desert. But she also does something more subtle, an interweaving or drawing together of times, juxtaposing the now and the then until the gap contracts. Tenses shift abruptly, within the field of a paragraph. She describes a Mesolithic burial, a baby cradled on a swan’s outstretched wing, and then, casually, her own husband’s cremation, the way they painted the cardboard coffin with a jagged line of red ochre, for the mountains he loved, and crowned it with a circlet of ivy.
The deliberate inconsequentialities begin to gather meaning. The people now, with their lop-eared rabbits and clumber spaniels, eating muffins and losing their phones, seem consolingly similar to the vanished hunter-gatherers who preceded them, flanked by dogs, gathering samphire and sliding in the mud. “The people who lived here,” she says, and it’s not quite clear which ones she means.
In Denmark, she visits Tollund Man, the revenant found in 1950 in a Jutland bog, where he had lain for at least 2,000 years. He looks like her husband, she thinks, in the last days of his life. Sitting beside him on a little stool, she feels “as if he was about to laugh at a joke that had appeared in his dream and there was a sense that although his eyes were closed they were not fully closed and he could see me, could see any one of his visitors, at the point where the eyelids let in a narrow strip of light”.
There is something of the ubi sunt tradition about all this. The question of where the dead go – ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, or “where are those who have gone before us” – was a pervasive theme in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature. Vanished but close, Doggerland serves as a ready metaphor for lost things, the extinct and the dead. Perhaps it’s simply a mark of Blackburn’s attention to fragility, but it’s noticeable that many of her Doggerland interlocutors are ill, limping after Lyme disease or crippled with spinal muscular atrophy.
Then there’s Herman, gone but not gone, little fragments of his presence washing up all the time. How can it be said that death is any kind of end, when it is so apparent that people don’t entirely go away, but linger and return? Blackburn is keener on the notion of what one of her scientists calls “process”: the way people, animals, even objects continue after death, transitioning through forms, a slow scattering into parts that will last hundreds, thousands, even millions of years.
There are so many losses behind us. Deep time is comprised of endless seemingly cataclysmic events, eras of extreme cold and heat, mass extinctions followed by stubborn regeneration. Over and over again, everything is destroyed: by the Laacher See volcano eruption, which was visible across Europe and caused falling temperatures and darkness for more than a hundred years; by the Storegga landslides, which spelled the end for Doggerland.
Species appear and vanish, cultures develop and are annihilated. It sounds depressing, but this is one of the only books I’ve ever read that has made me feel better about climate change. It’s not that we’re not doomed. Many of the scientists to whom Blackburn speaks are certain of that, pointing out how many past disasters and extinction events occurred as a consequence, alarmingly for us, of land reacting unpredictably to melting ice.
But the end of us doesn’t mean the end of existence altogether. The immense, specific abundance of the Mesolithic – the clouds of redstarts and seas of mammoth – won’t return, but if this book convinces me of anything, it’s that there will always be more life to come. “The important thing,” as Blackburn puts it, “is that they were there, however briefly.”
• Olivia Laing’s Crudo is published by Picador. Julia Blackburn’s Time Song is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £25). To order a copy for £22 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
