Doggerland: Part One – Understanding the Land Below the Waves

Picture the scene, you are out walking the Norfolk coast. The ground beneath you is firm, grassy, rivers and streams surround you. To the east, the land stretches on—no shoreline, no horizon broken by waves. You walk for days, following thick wooded valleys and mammoth tracks, crossing wetlands and climbing sloping hills. Eventually, without ever needing a boat, you set foot in what is now the Netherlands.

This is not a thought experiment or a myth. It is truly how the landscape of northern Europe once looked. Between Britain and the continent lay a broad, low-lying landmass known as Doggerland—a home to a vibrant ecosystem of flora and fauna that was eventually claimed by the rising North Sea. For decades Doggerland was treated by researchers as a geological curiosity, a vanished bridge between islands. But it was never just a bridge. It was a landscape, a habitat, and a foundation for the coastlines we recognise today.

What was Doggerland?

Doggerland existed during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, roughly between 20,000 BCE and 6,000 BCE. During the Last Glacial Maximum, vast ice sheets covered much of northern Europe. So much of the planet’s water was locked up as ice that global sea levels were more than 400 feet lower than they are today. Britain was not an island, instead it was the western edge of a continuous European plain.

Within this plain, Doggerland occupied what is now the southern parts of the North Sea. It was not a single flat expanse, but a varied environment shaped by rivers, climate, and the changing seasons. Large river systems—ancestors of the modern Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe—flowed across it, dumping into an ancient lake. These rivers fed wetlands and marshes, while higher ground supported grasslands and patches of woodland.

In colder periods it may have resembled tundra; in warmer phases it supported shrubs and trees. Far from being marginal, Doggerland was rich in resources: fresh water, game animals, fish, and plant life. It was the sort of place humans had been adapting to for tens of thousands of years. Some scientists have even argued that it was the most fertile hunting ground in the entire Mesolithic era.

The area now known as Dogger Bank, a sandbank in the shallow area of the North Sea, was once part of the regions highlands. It is this location, named in modernity, which gave Doggerland its moniker. In the 17th century Dutch fishing vessels or “doggers” roamed these parts of the North Sea in search of cod or dogge as the Dutch would call them.¹

 

How was it formed?²

Ice is the fundamental building block of Doggerland’s story. During repeated glacial cycles, ice sheets advanced southwards from regions which make up modern Norway and Sweden and retreated again as the climate warmed. Although the ice did not permanently cover Doggerland itself, it came close enough to shape the land profoundly.

The sheer weight of the ice depressed the Earth’s crust to the north, subtly tilting surrounding regions. As glaciers melted, enormous volumes of water poured southwards, carving wide valleys and channels into the land. At the same time, glaciers acted like conveyor belts, grinding down rock and carrying vast quantities of sediment. Sands, silts, and gravels were dumped across the plain by meltwater floods and slow-moving rivers. Over thousands of years, these deposits built up a flat, fertile surface—ideal for both plants and animals, including humans.

Crucially, these processes were slow. Doggerland was not created by a single dramatic event, but by the patient accumulation and rearrangement of sediment over millennia. The same is true of its disappearance.

A Human Element

Scientific research has proved the existence of nomadic Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities who moved through Doggerland with the changing seasons. They followed migrating animals, gathered plants, fished in rivers and estuaries, and used waterways as natural travel routes. Forests provided timber and shelter; wetlands offered birds, fish, and edible plants.³

For a long time, this human presence was invisible, assumed rather than proven. Then the North Sea began giving things back.

Fishing trawlers and dredging operations have hauled up stone tools, worked antler, animal bones, and even human remains from the seabed. Peat deposits—formed from ancient soils and vegetation—have been recovered, still carrying pollen grains that reveal what grew there thousands of years ago. Together, these finds paint a picture of people living normal lives on land that later vanished.⁴

These were not desperate communities clinging to the edge of an inhospitable world. They were well adapted to a productive environment. When sea levels began to rise as the climate warmed, Doggerland did not disappear overnight. It fragmented slowly. Low-lying areas flooded first, turning plains into marshes, marshes into tidal flats, and higher ground into islands. People likely retreated, adapted, and moved again, generation after generation.

Around 8,200 years ago, a massive underwater landslide off the coast of Norway—the Storegga Slide—may have sent a tsunami across what remained of Doggerland. Even so, this was probably the final blow to a landscape already under pressure, not the sole cause of its loss.

Doggerland is not just a lost world; it is the geological foundation of the modern North Sea. The buried river valleys, sediment layers, and ancient shorelines beneath the seabed still shape coastal processes today. Understanding them matters for everything from offshore construction to managing erosion and flood risk.

More broadly, Doggerland forces us to rethink how we talk about sea-level rise. This was not a sudden apocalypse but a long, uneven transformation—one that humans lived through. Coastlines moved. Homes were abandoned. New ways of living emerged. In that sense, Doggerland is not an anomaly. It is part of a repeating pattern in Earth’s history.

When we imagine walking from Norfolk to the Netherlands, we are not just indulging in nostalgia for a drowned land. We are recognising that landscapes we treat as permanent are anything but. Doggerland reminds us that beneath familiar waters lie former fields, forests, and footpaths—and that the ground under our feet today is just as temporary, given enough time.

 

Written by C. James McPherson MA MSc.