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An enormous expanse of flat, flat mud, | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
twice a day scrubbed clean by the tide. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
No wonder it's called The Wash. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:42 | |
Out here, the horizon seems to stretch for ever in every direction. | 0:17:42 | 0:17:46 | |
The sky is huge, the mudflats are vast, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
and somewhere out there, | 0:17:49 | 0:17:50 | |
there's a point where the land meets the sea. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:53 | |
More than 100,000 wading birds like knot, | 0:17:56 | 0:17:59 | |
oystercatcher, redshank | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
and dunlin come here to feed every autumn. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
The mudflats are oozing with molluscs and crustaceans, | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
just the sort of food that waders love to eat. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:11 | |
RSPB warden Jim Scott is here to share this amazing sight with me. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:18 | |
What I love about this place is that there's always something to look at. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
The place is never still. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:23 | |
All sorts of activity going on. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:25 | |
What other species are out there at the moment? | 0:18:25 | 0:18:27 | |
Well, we've got some | 0:18:27 | 0:18:28 | |
ring plover and dunlin working their way along the edge of the mud here. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:32 | |
As the tide pushes in beyond them, further out, | 0:18:32 | 0:18:34 | |
there's some bar-tailed godwits and black-tailed godwits in amongst them, | 0:18:34 | 0:18:39 | |
all concentrating as the tide just covers this last area of mud. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
Some redshank. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:43 | |
All busy feeding away, as well, as the tide is sort of coming in. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:47 | |
I guess it's almost like a feeding frenzy happening on the mudflats. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
They're trying to get as much energy as possible before the tide comes in | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
and then covers that, and the feeding stops for the next half of the day. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:58 | |
Absolutely, yes. They're spending most of the time feeding away, | 0:18:58 | 0:19:02 | |
getting as much fuel on board as possible. | 0:19:02 | 0:19:04 | |
The fascinating thing is that they all feed in different ways. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
They all have slightly different beaks, designed for that purpose. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
That's right, yeah. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:12 | |
Things like the bar-tailed godwit, which has a great big long bill. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
It probes around in the mud, | 0:19:16 | 0:19:18 | |
so it's going for whatever shellfish and worms | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
are buried deep in the mud. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
We've got species like grey plover, | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
which is feeding more on the surface. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:28 | |
It has big eyes and it looks for prey on the surface, | 0:19:28 | 0:19:31 | |
little crabs or whatever. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:33 | |
Oystercatchers feed on mussels and cockles. | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
So no one species is really in competition with another? | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
There's a bit of overlap between some of the species, | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
but they use a wide range of techniques. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
'As the birds are making the most of the mud, | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
'it's also my chance to get mucky | 0:19:48 | 0:19:50 | |
'and see the tasty morsels, which bring them here in the first place.' | 0:19:50 | 0:19:53 | |
Look at those. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:54 | |
-These are just little clams, are they? -Yes. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
-What's feeding on these, Jim? -It'll be things like knot. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
Knot particularly like these, | 0:20:00 | 0:20:02 | |
cos they're not too far from the surface. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:04 | |
The rag worms, they're quite big and fat. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:07 | |
Yeah, quite a few calories in one of those. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
I think things like redshank will feed on these. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:12 | |
The Wash is like a giant bed and breakfast for waders. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
Some check in briefly en route to sunnier destinations. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
Others make themselves at home for the winter. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
They haven't got long to stock up - the tide is already turning. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:28 | |
And as the tide races in, the birds just take off. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:33 | |
But the birds aren't necessarily going far. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:36 | |
Some rest on a nearby shingle bank, | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
where they run the risk of becoming a banquet themselves. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:44 | |
A young peregrine falcon is looking for lunch. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
Once the danger's passed, the knot return to rest, | 0:20:55 | 0:20:59 | |
and the birds of The Wash wait for their next meal. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:03 | |
People come to the coast to indulge their passions. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
While Miranda is away with the birds, | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
it's one of my ultimate heroes that's brought me here, | 0:21:19 | 0:21:23 | |
to the home turf of Horatio Nelson. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:26 | |
I think there's something mesmerising about the sea that turns us all into dreamers, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:32 | |
and I suspect, as a boy, Nelson was no different. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:36 | |
I imagine young Nelson coming here, looking out, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
dreaming of dashing victories, distant battles, faraway seas. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:47 | |
But the truth is, not even his wildest dreams could have matched the reality of his own life. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:52 | |
You've got to admire Nelson. | 0:21:57 | 0:22:00 | |
I think he was a tactical genius. | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
Without his naval victories over the French in the Napoleonic Wars, | 0:22:04 | 0:22:09 | |
Britannia wouldn't have ruled the waves. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:12 | |
But mighty as Nelson's reputation is now, | 0:22:12 | 0:22:14 | |
he was born into humble surroundings. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:18 | |
On from The Wash, just a mile inland from the north Norfolk coast, | 0:22:18 | 0:22:22 | |
is the small village of Burnham Thorpe. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
Nelson was the son of the local parson here. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:30 | |
In 1787, during a period of peace, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
29-year-old now Captain Nelson was temporarily unemployed. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:41 | |
So like many of us have, he moved back home, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
where he spent the next five years waiting for war. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:50 | |
The parsonage at Burnham Thorpe is long gone, | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
but its garden is still here, | 0:22:53 | 0:22:55 | |
and this is where he left a lasting legacy. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:58 | |
Frustrated not to be fighting the French, | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
Nelson did some digging instead. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
In fact, it's said that he dug out this pond. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:11 | |
But he was still dreaming of the sea. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:13 | |
He dug this pond to represent the deck of a ship. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
That's why this end is square - this is the stern, the back of the ship. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:21 | |
If you imagine being at the top of the crow's-nest, on top of the mast, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:26 | |
the whole thing narrows to a point 30-odd feet away. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:29 | |
That's the bow, the pointy bit of the ship. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:31 | |
It's a lot smaller than the gun deck of The Victory, | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
but you can see that if all these lilies and all the grass and slime was scraped away, | 0:23:34 | 0:23:39 | |
it would be quite obvious - it's shipshape. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
After five landlocked years, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
Nelson was recalled to the Senior Service. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
Finally, he was back at sea, where he belonged, | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
and 10 years later, he achieved his destiny | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
onboard his flagship - The Victory. | 0:23:56 | 0:24:00 | |
It's impossible to walk through this village without constantly | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
catching glimpses and reminders of the life and times of Nelson. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
As a parson's son, the church in Burnham Thorpe would have been a second home for Nelson, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:21 | |
so it's fitting that memorabilia of my hero hangs from every wall. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:26 | |
And there's the man himself - | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
a bust of Nelson - | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
and he's looking over the graves of his mother and father. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
Now, the great warrior wanted, at the end of everything, | 0:24:40 | 0:24:43 | |
to rest in peace in this church beside the graves of his mother and father, | 0:24:43 | 0:24:49 | |
but that didn't happen. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:51 | |
Nelson's mortal remains are in St Paul's Cathedral. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
Nelson's great adventures took him far from home shores, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:17 | |
but these beaches have their own epic tale to tell. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
At low tide, they expose the remains of mysterious hidden forests. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:26 | |
Nick's exploring evidence of a lost landscape. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
This is Titchwell Beach on the north Norfolk coast, | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
and I'm heading for that dark area down by the sea. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
I think it might hold some clues. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
I'm looking for signs that this shape-shifting coastline | 0:25:41 | 0:25:45 | |
only reveals on a very low spring tide - | 0:25:45 | 0:25:49 | |
evidence that this area hasn't always been a sandy beach. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:53 | |
This looks very like a bed of ancient peat. | 0:25:54 | 0:25:58 | |
It's been scoured clean of sand by successive tides. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:04 | |
It's black and... | 0:26:04 | 0:26:06 | |
if you press your thumb into it, | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
it's spongy and water squeezes out. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
It's old reed swamp, brushwood, bits of tree. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:17 | |
Look at that! A perfectly preserved piece of tree root. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
It's Mesolithic - 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 years old - | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
part of a submerged forest. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
Almost 100 years ago, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:29 | |
the study of these tree stumps became an obsession for one man, | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
determined to make sense of a riddle written into these sands. | 0:26:33 | 0:26:37 | |
In 1913, a retired Victorian geologist, Clement Reid, | 0:26:37 | 0:26:43 | |
published his work on Britain's submerged forests. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
In his book, Reid revealed that he'd found ancient forests all along the east coast. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:53 | |
Noah's Woods, the locals called them - | 0:26:53 | 0:26:56 | |
trees submerged by a great flood. | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
His research led Reid to a remarkable conclusion. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
He said the discovery of tree stumps here at low tide, | 0:27:02 | 0:27:06 | |
proved that forests once stretched far, far offshore, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
way out into the North Sea. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
Surprisingly, Reid's writing on the submerged forests didn't make much of a splash at the time. | 0:27:14 | 0:27:21 | |
Now, 100 years later, scientists are beginning to take Clement Reid's little book very seriously. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:28 | |
In the book, Reid proposes an amazing idea. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
His maps speculate that Britain was once connected to Europe | 0:27:33 | 0:27:36 | |
by land that stretched across the North Sea, over the Dogger Bank. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:41 | |
Reid imagined there was no sea here, the water locked up in ice during the last ice age. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:49 | |
After years of studies, the existence of this land bridge was confirmed. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:56 | |
But only recently have a team at Birmingham University | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
used core samples from the sea bed to reveal the detail of the complex landscape lost to the sea. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:06 | |
'Simon Fitch is going to show me where this lost territory - now dubbed Doggerland - once was, | 0:28:08 | 0:28:14 | |
'and what it looked like.' | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
So here we are, Simon. bobbing around on a fishing boat in the North Sea, | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
but 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 years ago, we couldn't have done this. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:23 | |
-We'd have been on land. -Yeah, we'd have been | 0:28:23 | 0:28:25 | |
actually sitting on the big plane of Doggerland, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
with the rivers, the trees behind us, and the little hills. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
It would have been a diverse landscape we'd have been sitting on. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:35 | |
Just off our coast, there's a lost world. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:41 | |
Mighty rivers once ran through Doggerland, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
a wetland paradise rich with fish and birdlife to feed the early Europeans. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:49 | |
Around 10,000 years ago, as the ice started to melt, sea level rose. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:55 | |
Doggerland were submerged. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:57 | |
Its residents moved on, some into Britain, | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
which became an island as Doggerland disappeared. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
But it left clues - submerged forests along the coast, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
an ancient message Reid decoded in his slim volume full of big ideas. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:13 | |
But the ancient flood that engulfed Doggerland | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
wasn't the end of the story in Reid's remarkable writings. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:24 | |
He said that following the slow flooding of Doggerland, | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
the coastline here in Norfolk was also radically different to what we see today. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
In his book, Reid speculated that the vast estuary once cut deep into the heart of Norfolk. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:41 | |
Well, I grew up in Norfolk, sailing and canoeing this huge wetland, | 0:29:41 | 0:29:45 | |
and for some time now I've been looking out for signs of that lost great estuary. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:51 | |
Today the landscape of this part of Norfolk is just that - land. | 0:29:55 | 0:30:01 | |
But go back 2,000 years and I believe there wasn't just a river here, | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
but a vast estuary to rival The Thames. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
Clues to the existence of the estuary date back to Roman times | 0:30:11 | 0:30:14 | |
when two forts were built to guard this enormous inlet from marauders. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:19 | |
This is one of them. It's called Burgh Castle and it's enormous. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:24 | |
Just look at the scale of it! | 0:30:24 | 0:30:26 | |
'Look at the position of the fort now in the middle of a field, guarding nothing | 0:30:27 | 0:30:32 | |
'and it doesn't make any sense. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:34 | |
'I think these walls once stood at the entrance of a thriving Roman seaport.' | 0:30:34 | 0:30:40 | |
This is where the great estuary must have been. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
It helped make this one of the most important parts of Britain. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:47 | |
This would have been a trading haven to rival The Thames. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
But around 1,000 years ago, the estuary silted up | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
and the coast re-wrote itself, leaving the river we see today. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:02 | |
Another chapter in the epic shape-shifting story of this shore | 0:31:02 | 0:31:07 | |
that Clement Reid first worked out in his little book of submerged forests. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 |