The English Coast

A History and a Prospect

Peter Murphy

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441145147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

This book examines the interaction between people and the coast of England. It spans from 700, 000 years ago, and the earliest evidence of humans in this remote corner of north-west Europe, to the end of the 20 th century. The coastline has witnessed interesting and significant events throughout history and looks set to do so in the future. Often it is the first place where changes can be seen, for example the effects of climate change. It is also where evidence for human adaptation to environmental changes can most readily be seen.
The coast has, of course, also been a cultural contact zone for millennia in terms of trade, industry, immigration and conflict. We are certainly at a time of great environmental and economic transition, so it is apt to now take a long view and place current events in context. Some changes happening today may seem unprecedented but in fact are not, while others are entirely new. One thing we can be sure of is that the coast and sea will become increasingly important to us, both as an economic benefit and as a threat.

1
The deep past

Some 700,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherer people stayed for a while at a place near the modern village of Pakefield, on the Suffolk coast. While they were there, they made some of the flint tools that were essential for their survival.1 I write the word ‘people’, but they were not of our own species, Homo sapiens. No human remains have yet been found from that remote time in North-Western Europe; but they were most likely of the species Homo heidelbergensis, whose remains have been reported from later sites, dating to around 500,000 years ago. The tibia (shin-bone) of a Homo heidelbergensis individual from Boxgrove, in Sussex, indicates a height of around 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in), and the robustness of the bone implies a body weight of over 90 kg, or over 14 stone.2 They were certainly large and strong. We know almost nothing about their mental abilities, other than what we can infer from their paucity of innovation, over hundreds of millennia, in tool manufacture. Some ancient geniuses invented tool types that worked: that was good enough, and those forms remained in use for unimaginable times. Early hominins were certainly not mentally like us, for whom innovation is everything. They might, or might not, have had language, although the mutated form of a gene implicated in modern human language development – FOXP2 – has been detected in DNA extracted from more recent Neanderthal bone, placing the origin of this mutated gene to before about 400,000 years ago.3 How conscious they were of themselves in time is even more irretrievable: we cannot know whether they had animal-like perceptions of their place in existence, living principally in the present, or human-like perceptions, looking to the past and future. As the late John Wymer remarked, assuming either could be badly misleading.

The current interpretation is that this was a brief colonization of North-West Europe by hominins, at the extreme edge of their geographical range, during a short-lived warm climatic phase. Like all animals, they would have had a core habitat, to which they were well adapted, and peripheral areas into which they could expand, if environmental conditions changed favourably for them. The Pakefield hominins may not have been adapted either physically or culturally (in terms of the use of fire and, so far as we know, clothing or the construction of shelters), for a cooler North European climate. Their expansion north was ended by climatic deterioration and it certainly left no lasting environmental imprint. However, current work is likely to modify our perception of the capacity of early hominins to cope with a cool climate. They may prove to have been more inventive and adaptable than anyone thought.

The landscape that the Pakefield hominins inhabited was very different from that of today.4 Rather than an open beach and cliff line at the edge of the North Sea, the local environment was then low-lying and marshy, with wetland plants, reeds and alder trees, close to an extensive river estuary; and there was open grassland and oak woodland nearby. These varied habitats would have supported a range of herbivore prey, from deer to elephants, besides plant foods, shellfish and fish. Flint for making tools was available from river gravels. Later, around 500,000 years ago, sites such as Boxgrove, Sussex and Happisburgh, Norfolk were again visited by hominins during other warm climatic phases and, by around 400,000 years ago, NorthWest Europe was occupied during most warm phases. There is an unexplained absence, or at least paucity, of evidence for hominins in England between around 200,000 and 70,000 years ago, to which we will return.

A digression into geological terminology is necessary, not only to explain some of the main terms used in this chapter, but also to illustrate changing perceptions of our own place in time over the last 150 years. The last 2.6 million years of the earth’s history comprise the Quaternary period. The defining feature of the Quaternary has been a trend towards cooling of the global climate but, within that general trend, there is now evidence, from analysis of oxygen isotopes in deep ocean cores (see Appendix), for a series of over 60 major climatic fluctuations over the last 1.65 million years.5 After around 500,000 years ago, these fluctuations intensified, resulting in repeated alternating glacial, and warmer interglacial, stages at the latitude of the modern British Isles. Within the major cold and warm stages, there were also shorter-lived warm (interstadial) and cold (stadial) events. The main climatic fluctuations are known as Marine Isotope Stages (MIS), and are numbered backwards from the present, our modern warm stage being MIS 1. Earlier warm stages therefore have odd numbers, cold stages even ones. In Britain, and on the Continent, there are various other terms for glacial and interglacial stages, generally based on the names of places where sediments relating to them were first described. I have used some of these terms below, since they are widely used in other publications, but sparingly. The Marine Isotope Stages provide a helpful aide mémoire to the relative ages of sites and deposits, and to climatic conditions.

The Quaternary is conventionally divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene and the Holocene. The term ‘Pleistocene’ was developed by the pioneering geologist Sir Charles Lyell, to include the ‘Ice Age’ or ‘Glacial Period’. Later in the nineteenth century it was realized that in fact there had been more than one glacial stage, separated by interglacials. The pioneering studies of Clement Reid, who examined glacial and interglacial deposits, and the plant remains which they contained, on the Norfolk coast were instrumental in developing this understanding.6 We now know that, at times, glaciers expanded as far south as the modern Thames Valley, and global sea levels fell by more than 100 m, so the land mass of England was connected to the Continent as a peninsula. During interglacial stages, there was thermal expansion of the world’s oceans and glacier ice melted, so that sea levels rose. At such times, Britain was once more an island, and there were warmth-loving animals and plants, such as hippopotamus and water chestnut (Trapa natans), in its rivers.7

The latest glacial stage of the Pleistocene, known in Britain as the Devensian (after the river Deben in Suffolk), ended around 12,000 years ago, and was followed by the second epoch of the Quaternary, known as the Holocene (from Greek, meaning ‘completely recent’), within which we live. It refers to the period over which glacier ice has retreated to high latitudes and high altitudes. When the term ‘Holocene’ was first coined, our present warm post-glacial stage was considered to differ from the previous warm interglacial stages. It was thought that the ‘Ice Age’ was over. This might be viewed as one of the last relics of an anthropocentric and Eurocentric view of the world, since it was known in the nineteenth century that it was over this time that anatomically modern humans permanently colonized and inhabited NorthWest Europe. There seems to have been an implicit assumption that the appearance of Europeans of our own species must mark some fundamental change. However, given the evidence we have now for repeated climatic fluctuations, it is almost certain that we live in an interglacial stage, and that a new glacial stage should lie ahead – were we not now interfering with the earth’s climate, with unpredictable outcomes. Viewed like this, the Holocene is really no more than just one further stage of the Pleistocene, termed the Flandrian (after the deep sediment sequences of this period in Flanders). Both terms – Holocene and Flandrian – remain in use, even today, and an international scientific journal still uses the former as its title. During the Holocene, or Flandrian, the general trend has been one of warming, though with some sharp, and very rapid, climatic oscillations.

Over the vast span of time represented by the Pleistocene, hominins of at least two species and, more recently, our own species, Homo sapiens, lived by hunting and gathering, in what were later to be the British Isles. Farming was a very late arrival, around 6,000 years ago. In archaeological terminology, the period from around 700,000 to 10,000 years ago is named the Palaeolithic, divided into Lower, Middle and Upper. Most of the tools that have been recovered are of flint, though other types of stone, including chert and quartzite, were also used. Collectively, they are known as lithics. The Lower Palaeolithic is represented by ovoid or pointed flint hand axes or bifaces (termed the Acheulian industry, after St-Acheul in the Somme – the ‘type site’ where these tools were first recognized), and rather crude flake tools (Clactonian, after Clacton-on-Sea in Essex). At one time it was thought that the Clactonian flake tools were more primitive and earlier, but it is not that simple: the evidence now is that very accomplished and elegant hand axes were made at least from 500,000 years ago in Britain. Tool production depends on cultural traditions and the quality of the raw material and, for one reason or the other, in parts of Eastern Europe a tradition of producing hand axes did not develop. Flake tools are perfectly adequate functionally. They are generally found in Britain in deposits formed early on in successive interglacials, when the climate was still warming, but hand axes mainly come from somewhat later interglacial deposits. It is possible that this reflects repeated early colonization by the flake-using hominins of the east of Europe first and then, later in each interglacial, by hand-axe-using hominins migrating from the south. However, flake tool production certainly became more sophisticated later, with the development of the Levallois technique (again named after a French site). It involved careful reduction of a flint nodule to make a core, from which the finished tool could be struck with one blow, and required a greater degree of imagination, spatial perception and preparation. Human remains are rare and fragmentary in Pleistocene deposits, but, at least in the earlier part of the period, Homo heidelbergensis was the tool-producing hominin and, later on, early forms of human akin to Homo neanderthalis – Neanderthal people – were in England. Middle Palaeolithic technology was certainly produced by Neanderthalers, from around 200,000 years ago: the distinctive artefact is a new type of refined and carefully finished hand axe with a flat base (see Figure 1).

The technology of the Upper Palaeolithic, produced by Homo sapiens from around 40,000 years ago, shows a mastery and control of the raw material to make refined flint points and blades.8 During the subsequent Mesolithic period, dating from around 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer groups had to adapt to an ameliorating climate, local extinction of cold-climate herbivores such as reindeer and horse, and expansion of woodland. Characteristic tools include flint axes and adzes with their cutting edges made by a single transverse blow, and microliths – very small flint blades which were mounted in wooden shafts (for use as arrows) or in hafts as cutting implements.

Figure 1. A Middle Palaeolithic hand axe, dredged from Aggregate Extraction Area 240, off the East Anglian coast.

Our understanding of the chronology of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, and of the massive changes in climate, sea levels and environmental conditions which occurred, are based on a range of techniques derived from many areas of science. Scientific dating techniques, and the form in which dates are presented in the text (such as cal BC, a calibrated date expressed in calendar years BC), are outlined and explained briefly in the Appendix.9 Alongside these innovations, new marine geophysical and geotechnical methods are permitting reconstruction of ancient landscapes which are now submerged beneath the North Sea and the Channel. It is not possible to give a full account of these methodologies in a book of this length, but a short introduction is given in the Appendix. They underpin the new results which are summarized here and in Chapter 2. In Table 1, a schematic summary of chronology and environmental change, in relation to early human activity, is presented.

THE LOWER AND MIDDLE PALAEOLITHIC

As noted above, the earliest evidence for hominins on the land area that is now England comes from freshwater and estuarine sediments of the Cromer Forest Bed Formation at Pakefield, Happisburgh, and other places on the East Anglian coast. However, the fact that a hominin site has been found on the coast today might have nothing at all to do with its original geography: sea-level change has been on such a massive scale that Pleistocene sediments originally deposited well inland are often now exposed in coastal cliffs. The sediments at these East Anglian sites were deposited by rivers which flowed eastwards from the north and Midlands of England across East Anglia, which have been named the Bytham and Ancaster rivers. They were subsequently obliterated by later glaciations, which completely modified the drainage pattern of the region.10 The date of around 700,000 years BP (Marine Isotope Stage 19, or MIS 19) for the Pakefield site is based on analysis of small mammal remains and palaeomagnetism (see Appendix). At this time, before the first glaciation of the region, there was a continuous land connection between England and northern France along the chalk ridge of the Weald–Artois anticline (see Figure 2).

North of this ridge, there was a large bay of the North Sea, into which flowed the precursors of the Rhine, Elbe, Thames, and the Bytham and Ancaster.11 To the south of the chalk ridge was a southerly, or Manche, embayment. The early Somme and Seine, a river which flowed along the present-day Solent, and other lesser rivers of southern England drained into the Manche Embayment.

Quaternary geologists are still uncertain exactly when the Weald–Artois ridge was breached. Nevertheless, it is clear that in the Anglian Gl...