Time song : searching for doggerland

3.5 Doggland, a land mass that once connected Great Britain to the rest of Europe, traces of which the author searches. This is not a straightforward book, but it is beautifully written. The prose is elegant, the tone almost dreamlike, the search one that is informative and interesting. As she

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searches for the traces of the past, she takes the reader on a journey to visit a variety of people. Historians, collectors, museum curators, archivists, all share their stories, their collections connecting the past to the present. Part historical, part travelogue, part poetry, as the poems called Time Songs interposed throughout reflect on what went before. Her own life story and experiences add another more personal dimension to the story. In a roundaboit way it circles back to Doggerland by books end. The past always leave traces, is never completely gone, it just takes the curious and knowledgeable to continue searching and piecing it together.

"Everything speaks of what it has been: the leg bone of a wading bird holds the image of that bird standing on the mud of a shoreline, poised on its own mirror reflection."

ARC from Edelweiss

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Despite the recent shenanigans about our relationship with Europe, if you were to go back about 7000 years ago, you'd find that we were physically connected to the continent. This connection point was where the North Sea is now. We know that there were people and animals there because of the number

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of bones and other artefacts that keep being bought to the surface by trawlers. This land has a name too now, Doggerland.

For lots of people, the past has a lot of allure, there are stories to be told from the things that we find and tales from bumps in a field. Julia Blackburn is one of those who seeks out objects that can speak to her across the bridge of time. She has amassed more and more things but didn't really feel that she knew much about this land just below the sea. Her curiosity would take her back and forth across this shallow sea and far back in time to the people that inhabited this landscape. She gets to see footprints from humans that had been fossilised in mud and silt, hold flint arrowheads that were last used a millennia ago, discover the traces of plants that must have come across on the land bridge and even get to see those that have been preserved in the acid waters of the bogs that surround the North Sea.

This fascination, or almost borderline obsession with the past, stemmed from Blackburn's desire to collect and hold objects from history. The paths she takes as she walks back in time are sometimes walked alone and sometimes with others there to guide her to the wider view or the minutia of the items she is looking at. Entwined with the history and archaeology is her very personal journey as she reminisces about her late husband, the artist Herman Makkink. This the second of Blackburn's book that I have read now, the other was Thin Paths which I really enjoyed. She is such an evocative and beautiful writer and this has an intensity that makes you think of elements of it long after you have set it aside. I loved the art that was included from Enrique Brinkman, but personally wasn't that keen on the Time Songs. However, they added a pause to the intensity of the writing. Can highly recommend this.

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31/2021. This is a lightweight examination of geography, archaeology, and personal history, in this case in and around "Doggerland" the undersea bank and plains that have sometimes formed a land bridge between Britain and continental Europe. The basic journalistic-style text is full of anecdotal

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"human interest" stories written with banal straightforwardness, especially in the "songs" which are chopped-up prose, but also in the author's passing encounters with local people and their stories. These commonplaces of ordinary everyday life contain fleeting contacts with prehistoric normalities that were equally banal in their originating time but are now extraordinary and are only revealed to us by fluctuating geography.

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Pontin's holiday park, Suffolk: "I stopped off at the reception desk. A woman with shiny orange make-up had 'Faith and hope and' tattooed on her forearm, but I couldn't read the last word and so I asked her what it was. 'Pixie Dust', she said proudly and she twisted her arm round so I could see it for myself. I asked her if she had heard anything about the palaeontologists who had been working along this stretch of the coast and the discovery that humans were living here eight hundred thousand years ago. She said no, she'd heard nothing about anything like that, but a young man who was also standing at the desk and whose arms were also alive with tattoos said he'd been told there were some First World War pillboxes somewhere nearby. The pixie dust woman said, 'Well, I have learnt a lot today, haven't I?' "

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A beautiful and personal story of the author's explorations of the submerged North Sea landmass known as Doggerland. She recounts her visits with various scientists and artists and others who have connected with this area, and intersperses these with short poems ("time songs").