The Wash Coast


The Wash

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An enormous expanse of flat, flat mud,

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twice a day scrubbed clean by the tide.

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No wonder it's called The Wash.

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Out here, the horizon seems to stretch for ever in every direction.

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The sky is huge, the mudflats are vast,

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and somewhere out there,

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there's a point where the land meets the sea.

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More than 100,000 wading birds like knot,

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oystercatcher, redshank

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and dunlin come here to feed every autumn.

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The mudflats are oozing with molluscs and crustaceans,

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just the sort of food that waders love to eat.

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RSPB warden Jim Scott is here to share this amazing sight with me.

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What I love about this place is that there's always something to look at.

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The place is never still.

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All sorts of activity going on.

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What other species are out there at the moment?

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Well, we've got some

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ring plover and dunlin working their way along the edge of the mud here.

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As the tide pushes in beyond them, further out,

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there's some bar-tailed godwits and black-tailed godwits in amongst them,

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all concentrating as the tide just covers this last area of mud.

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Some redshank.

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All busy feeding away, as well, as the tide is sort of coming in.

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I guess it's almost like a feeding frenzy happening on the mudflats.

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They're trying to get as much energy as possible before the tide comes in

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and then covers that, and the feeding stops for the next half of the day.

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Absolutely, yes. They're spending most of the time feeding away,

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getting as much fuel on board as possible.

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The fascinating thing is that they all feed in different ways.

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They all have slightly different beaks, designed for that purpose.

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That's right, yeah.

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Things like the bar-tailed godwit, which has a great big long bill.

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It probes around in the mud,

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so it's going for whatever shellfish and worms

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are buried deep in the mud.

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We've got species like grey plover,

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which is feeding more on the surface.

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It has big eyes and it looks for prey on the surface,

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little crabs or whatever.

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Oystercatchers feed on mussels and cockles.

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So no one species is really in competition with another?

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There's a bit of overlap between some of the species,

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but they use a wide range of techniques.

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'As the birds are making the most of the mud,

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'it's also my chance to get mucky

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'and see the tasty morsels, which bring them here in the first place.'

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Look at those.

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-These are just little clams, are they?

-Yes.

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-What's feeding on these, Jim?

-It'll be things like knot.

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Knot particularly like these,

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cos they're not too far from the surface.

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The rag worms, they're quite big and fat.

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Yeah, quite a few calories in one of those.

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I think things like redshank will feed on these.

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The Wash is like a giant bed and breakfast for waders.

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Some check in briefly en route to sunnier destinations.

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Others make themselves at home for the winter.

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They haven't got long to stock up - the tide is already turning.

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And as the tide races in, the birds just take off.

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But the birds aren't necessarily going far.

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Some rest on a nearby shingle bank,

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where they run the risk of becoming a banquet themselves.

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A young peregrine falcon is looking for lunch.

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Once the danger's passed, the knot return to rest,

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and the birds of The Wash wait for their next meal.

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People come to the coast to indulge their passions.

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While Miranda is away with the birds,

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it's one of my ultimate heroes that's brought me here,

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to the home turf of Horatio Nelson.

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I think there's something mesmerising about the sea that turns us all into dreamers,

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and I suspect, as a boy, Nelson was no different.

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I imagine young Nelson coming here, looking out,

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dreaming of dashing victories, distant battles, faraway seas.

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But the truth is, not even his wildest dreams could have matched the reality of his own life.

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You've got to admire Nelson.

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I think he was a tactical genius.

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Without his naval victories over the French in the Napoleonic Wars,

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Britannia wouldn't have ruled the waves.

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But mighty as Nelson's reputation is now,

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he was born into humble surroundings.

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On from The Wash, just a mile inland from the north Norfolk coast,

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is the small village of Burnham Thorpe.

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Nelson was the son of the local parson here.

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In 1787, during a period of peace,

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29-year-old now Captain Nelson was temporarily unemployed.

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So like many of us have, he moved back home,

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where he spent the next five years waiting for war.

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The parsonage at Burnham Thorpe is long gone,

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but its garden is still here,

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and this is where he left a lasting legacy.

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Frustrated not to be fighting the French,

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Nelson did some digging instead.

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In fact, it's said that he dug out this pond.

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But he was still dreaming of the sea.

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He dug this pond to represent the deck of a ship.

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That's why this end is square - this is the stern, the back of the ship.

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If you imagine being at the top of the crow's-nest, on top of the mast,

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the whole thing narrows to a point 30-odd feet away.

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That's the bow, the pointy bit of the ship.

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It's a lot smaller than the gun deck of The Victory,

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but you can see that if all these lilies and all the grass and slime was scraped away,

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it would be quite obvious - it's shipshape.

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After five landlocked years,

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Nelson was recalled to the Senior Service.

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Finally, he was back at sea, where he belonged,

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and 10 years later, he achieved his destiny

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onboard his flagship - The Victory.

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It's impossible to walk through this village without constantly

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catching glimpses and reminders of the life and times of Nelson.

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As a parson's son, the church in Burnham Thorpe would have been a second home for Nelson,

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so it's fitting that memorabilia of my hero hangs from every wall.

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And there's the man himself -

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a bust of Nelson -

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and he's looking over the graves of his mother and father.

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Now, the great warrior wanted, at the end of everything,

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to rest in peace in this church beside the graves of his mother and father,

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but that didn't happen.

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Nelson's mortal remains are in St Paul's Cathedral.

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Nelson's great adventures took him far from home shores,

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but these beaches have their own epic tale to tell.

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At low tide, they expose the remains of mysterious hidden forests.

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Nick's exploring evidence of a lost landscape.

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This is Titchwell Beach on the north Norfolk coast,

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and I'm heading for that dark area down by the sea.

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I think it might hold some clues.

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I'm looking for signs that this shape-shifting coastline

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only reveals on a very low spring tide -

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evidence that this area hasn't always been a sandy beach.

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This looks very like a bed of ancient peat.

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It's been scoured clean of sand by successive tides.

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It's black and...

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if you press your thumb into it,

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it's spongy and water squeezes out.

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It's old reed swamp, brushwood, bits of tree.

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Look at that! A perfectly preserved piece of tree root.

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It's Mesolithic - 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 years old -

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part of a submerged forest.

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Almost 100 years ago,

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the study of these tree stumps became an obsession for one man,

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determined to make sense of a riddle written into these sands.

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In 1913, a retired Victorian geologist, Clement Reid,

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published his work on Britain's submerged forests.

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In his book, Reid revealed that he'd found ancient forests all along the east coast.

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Noah's Woods, the locals called them -

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trees submerged by a great flood.

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His research led Reid to a remarkable conclusion.

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He said the discovery of tree stumps here at low tide,

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proved that forests once stretched far, far offshore,

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way out into the North Sea.

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Surprisingly, Reid's writing on the submerged forests didn't make much of a splash at the time.

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Now, 100 years later, scientists are beginning to take Clement Reid's little book very seriously.

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In the book, Reid proposes an amazing idea.

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His maps speculate that Britain was once connected to Europe

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by land that stretched across the North Sea, over the Dogger Bank.

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Reid imagined there was no sea here, the water locked up in ice during the last ice age.

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After years of studies, the existence of this land bridge was confirmed.

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But only recently have a team at Birmingham University

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used core samples from the sea bed to reveal the detail of the complex landscape lost to the sea.

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'Simon Fitch is going to show me where this lost territory - now dubbed Doggerland - once was,

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'and what it looked like.'

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So here we are, Simon. bobbing around on a fishing boat in the North Sea,

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but 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 years ago, we couldn't have done this.

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-We'd have been on land.

-Yeah, we'd have been

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actually sitting on the big plane of Doggerland,

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with the rivers, the trees behind us, and the little hills.

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It would have been a diverse landscape we'd have been sitting on.

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Just off our coast, there's a lost world.

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Mighty rivers once ran through Doggerland,

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a wetland paradise rich with fish and birdlife to feed the early Europeans.

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Around 10,000 years ago, as the ice started to melt, sea level rose.

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Doggerland were submerged.

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Its residents moved on, some into Britain,

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which became an island as Doggerland disappeared.

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But it left clues - submerged forests along the coast,

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an ancient message Reid decoded in his slim volume full of big ideas.

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But the ancient flood that engulfed Doggerland

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wasn't the end of the story in Reid's remarkable writings.

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He said that following the slow flooding of Doggerland,

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the coastline here in Norfolk was also radically different to what we see today.

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In his book, Reid speculated that the vast estuary once cut deep into the heart of Norfolk.

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Well, I grew up in Norfolk, sailing and canoeing this huge wetland,

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and for some time now I've been looking out for signs of that lost great estuary.

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Today the landscape of this part of Norfolk is just that - land.

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But go back 2,000 years and I believe there wasn't just a river here,

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but a vast estuary to rival The Thames.

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Clues to the existence of the estuary date back to Roman times

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when two forts were built to guard this enormous inlet from marauders.

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This is one of them. It's called Burgh Castle and it's enormous.

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Just look at the scale of it!

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'Look at the position of the fort now in the middle of a field, guarding nothing

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'and it doesn't make any sense.

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'I think these walls once stood at the entrance of a thriving Roman seaport.'

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This is where the great estuary must have been.

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It helped make this one of the most important parts of Britain.

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This would have been a trading haven to rival The Thames.

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But around 1,000 years ago, the estuary silted up

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and the coast re-wrote itself, leaving the river we see today.

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Another chapter in the epic shape-shifting story of this shore

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that Clement Reid first worked out in his little book of submerged forests.

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