Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land

by Julia Blackburn, Enrique Brinkmann (Illustrator)

From the award-winning author of the memoir The Three of Us, a lyrical exploration--part travelogue and part history--of Doggerland, the area beneath the North Sea which, until 6,000 years ago, was home to a rich ecosystem and human settlement.

Shortly after her husband's death, Julia Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the stretch of land that once connected Great Britain to Europe but is now subsumed by the North Sea. She was driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there--studying its fossil record, as well as human artifacts that have been discovered near the area. Now, she brings her reader along on her journey across Great Britain and parts of Continental Europe, introducing us to the paleontologists, archaeologists, fishermen, and fellow Doggerland enthusiasts she meets along the way. As Doggerland begins to come into focus, what emerges is a profound meditation on time, a sense of infinity as going backwards, and an intimation of the immensity of everything that has already passed through its time on earth and disappeared.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Nature, Memoir, Travel, Poetry, Science

304 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2019

About the author

Julia Blackburn is the author of several other works of nonfiction, including Charles Waterton and The Emperor’s Last Island, and of two novels, The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her most recent book, Old Man Goya, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Blackburn lives in England and Italy.

Reviews

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 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

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but slow-moving NF account of the author's search for information on Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland , finding fossils nearby (on dry land) and from fishing trawlers, and talking to professional & amateur fossil-collectors. I would have preferred more geology and paleontology, and less poetry. And photos, in place of the dippy art! Nevertheless, I'm enjoying the book. It's now seriously overdue, so I won't be finishing it on this go. I may get back to it later. Realistically, given the size of the TBR pile, likely not. 3 stars.

From my notes: Neanderthals arrived in Britain at least 800,ooo yrs BP, and the author saw a beautiful stone axe, dated to around 400,000 yrs BP.

Bear skins attract lice, so historic Eskimos (and probably earlier people) kept a piece of bearskin in their sleeping area as a louse trap.

I once had some Doggerland fossils myself, bought at the Tucson show many years ago and then given away. My recollection is they were pretty scrappy. She found much nicer ones -- home-court advantage!

WSJ review by Karin Altenberg: https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-son... (paywalled)
Excerpt:
"For more than 100 years, the bones of mammoths and other extinct creatures—along with simple tools made of stone, wood and antler—have been turning up in the nets of trawlermen fishing in the waters between Britain and Continental Europe. Gradually, an awareness emerged of a mysterious sunken world where animals and humans once inhabited a vast, rich landscape. More recently, both experts and enthusiasts have turned their attention to this Atlantis of the North Sea.

Doggerland—which connected Britain to mainland Europe—was above water and inhabited during the interglacial periods until about 8,000 years ago, when it was swallowed by rising sea levels. Today, archeologists and paleontologists are charting what is left of this drowned country—its mountains, rivers and plains—using depth-analysis graphs produced by the oil industry. Fossil hunters and fishermen aid in the mapping as they discover new artifacts along the coasts of eastern England, the Netherlands and Denmark."

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was only a few years ago that I became acquainted with the notion of Doggerland, the land that lies under the North Sea. I think it was in the work of Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot). Apparantly, fishers already knew for a long time that under the North sea there was a vast land with special vegetation and traces of forests and rivers. But it was not until the 1990s that serious scientific research was conducted, and it is now clear that up to 8,000 years ago, at least some parts of that country protruded from the sea and were inhabited. Of course, a thing like that appeals to the imagination.

I knew ‘Time Song’ wouldn't be a real scientific work on Doggerland, and Julia Blackburn doesn't pretend to offer that. Rather, it is a romanticized evocation of the evolution of that country over the past 100,000 years, based on the many finds that still regularly wash up on the English coast. Blackburn uses a slightly Sebaldian style, perhaps on purpose, partly through the long passages in which she walks around, looks at nature, picks up fossils and stones and muses about what once was there. By the way, Sebald himself also lived and walked in that area (particularly Norfolk).

Two things stand out in this book. First, a number of fundamental historical errors. For example, she dates the age of the earth at 45 billion years (!), and connects the eruption of the Laacher volcano in the German Eifel with the sudden climate cooling of the younger Dryas-age, whilst the effects of this eruption were only local. Blackburn is also very careless in other places. But again: it is not scientific correctness that is paramount for her.

What was downright shocking to me is the constant enumeration of ancient things she finds on the beach or elsewhere (flint tools, mammoth bones, etc), and just takes with her. Apparently, the eastern coast of England and Holland is teeming with fossil collectors who keep extensive collections. She also quotes a Dutch fisherman who fished up 150,000 kilos of mammoth bones and other fossils. I agree that you cannot leave historical research only to professional academics, but how much valuable material has been lost in this way?

The second observation is that Blackburn also includes a number of things that have nothing to do with Doggerland. She describes in detail a visit to the 'Man of Tollund', a Danish bog body barely 2,000 years old, when Doggerland had long disappeared. And she ends her book with a visit to caves in Gibraltar where Neanderthals lived. In other words, Blackburn has made this book more of a reflection on the mysterious nature of time, and the fascination we all have with people living long before us and who’s lives we can barely imagine today.

She connects this with an animistic philosophy, and the intuition that life and death actually belong to the same domain, all beings and things connected and separated by time. It's an attractive view, and this indicates that this musing book is about a lot more than just Doggerland. For instance, when she refers to the death of her husband, a few years before, she feels he is somehow still out there, like a vast land now under water, and at times washing up remains on the shore. That certainly is a beautiful metaphore. But to be honest, the passage in which she describes how she ate some of the ashes of her husband mixed with some yoghurt, disturbed me a lot. And the vague, dreamy nature of her reflections and poems didn't really resonate. But maybe that's a flaw in my constellation :).

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) Deep time is a big theme in nature writing this year: see also Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. I appreciated this more than Macfarlane’s take, or Ben Smith’s recent dystopian novel, Doggerland. (Doggerland was a region of ancient England that linked it to Continental Europe before c. 6000 BCE; in the grand scheme of things, the British Isles haven’t been off on their own for that long. So you might say that the past few years’ turn towards isolationism is geographically as well as ideologically misguided.)

It’s hard to characterize this dreamy book. Blackburn follows her curiosity wherever it leads as she does desultory research into millions of years of history, including the much shorter story of human occupation. She travels in England, Denmark and the Netherlands, where her late husband was from; she finds fossils and mammoth bones, views ancient footprints, and makes a pilgrimage to see Tollund Man. All along she marvels that the past and present can lie so close together, can even mingle.

The writing is splendid, and the dashes of autobiographical information are just right, making this timely/timeless story personal: we all have to come to terms with individual mortality – and our species’ potential expiration date on this planet we have damaged. The prose chapters are interspersed with 18 poems she calls “Time Songs.” I enjoyed these, but not their illustrations by Enrique Brinkmann; then again, I don’t appreciate modern art in general.

This would have been my Wainwright Prize winner.

Some favorite lines:

“What I found so odd in being there on Bawdsey beach was the merging of the very ancient past with the very recent past and the way they seemed to be caught up in an intimate conversation with each other, their voices overlapping.”

“time is both longer and shorter / Than I ever imagined … I think it’s all right, / The world will continue / Even if we have gone / And that is surely something / To smile about.” (from “Time Song 18”)

[Annelies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waar nu de Noordzee is, was ooit, in de mesolitische tijd, land. Julia Blackburn brengt dit land met zijn landschapskenmerken, mensen en dieren op boeiende wijze tot leven in haar nieuwste boek Doggerland. Zij vertelt over de vele archeologische vondsten in de kusten rond de Noordzee en hoe zij getuigen van dit verdwenen landschap. Ze brengt de tijd van de bewoners van Doggerland echt tot leven. Ze liet mij met dit boek ook voelen dat we éen zijn in een soort verbondenheid met de aarde en de dingen om ons heen en dat die verbondenheid zich uitstrekt tot ver terug in de geschiedenis van de mens. Vergankelijkheid is voor haar daar een onderdeel van. De wijze waarop zij dit alles brengt doet iets heel raar met je; het laat je zondermeer voelen dat je een onderdeel bent van deze geschiedenis van de mens en aarde waardoor je zo'n grote verbondenheid met het geheel gaat voelen dat zelfs de dood overstijgt.

[Sense of History]

A vaguely historical-poetical musing on the vast land beneath the North Sea, submerged since about 8.000 years ago, but still 'producing' lots of fossile remains, washing up on the shore of East Anglia (England). Not really my thing, this book. See the review in my general account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timesong 18

Today is the anniversary
Of your death
And if today
I were to write you a letter
That you could read
Even though you are dead and read nothing
I would say I have been looking for you
And I have not found you
But I have found traces of your absence
Alongside the other absences
That rear up before my eyes like startled horses
A wave breaking on the shore
The moon shifting into view from behind dark clouds
I would say I have been comforted
By the crowdedness of it all

And I would say to you who does not listen
That time is both longer and shorter
Than I ever imagined:
Land becomes sea, sea becomes land,
Ice into desert, desert into salt marsh,
Salt marsh into birds and fish, animals and people,
Everything forgotten and remembered and forgotten again,

The ostensible subject of this rather unique book is the author’s investigations into Doggerland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland) – the area of land that connected Great Britain to Continental Europe (particularly the Netherlands, Germany and Jutland) until being inundated by rising sea levels some 8-9000 years ago, and which was rediscovered starting in the late 19th Century before being named in the late 20th Century.

The author’s connection to the area is:

Personal- her late husband was from the Netherlands and at different times the two worked on either side of the sea that now covers the land bridge between them, further as the opening quote illustrates his death permeates the book and interlinks with the idea of a lost society and landscape and of a replacement of permanence with fluidity and change;

Location specific - she now lives near the crumbling East Coast of Suffolk so that the idea of land being reclaimed by sea is very relevant to her, further her last book was on the Norfolk fisherman artist John Craske, and this book naturally covers much of the same coastline as the author investigates the traces of early human activity found from West to East along on the Norfolk Coast from the Seahenge at Holme Next The Sea, to the West Runton mammoth, to the ancient forests off Cromer, to the 800,000 year old footprints at Happisburgh)

Thematic (much of the author’s earlier non-fiction writing, incidentally she has written only 2 novels and both were Orange Prize shortlisted, was around Aboriginal peoples and she draws on some of this to imagine the lives and more particularly beliefs and worldviews of the inhabitants of Doggerland)

The basic outline of the book is for the author to either recount something from her past (for example visits to those who interacted with Aborginal people, or other travels) or to outline visits she has made as part of researching this book (for example to visit Tollund man or other preserved ancient bodies, to meet with those who have been researching the Doggerland area, or in particular to meet with amateur fossil and bone collectors who cover the area or the surrounding coastlines). These visits, particularly the latter, have something of a poignancy to them and are also related in comprehensive detail including minutae of say the conversations of passers by. Woven into all of this is the author’s imaginings of the lives of the peoples (set out in a very crude chronological fashion with occassional maps showing how the area was gradually flooded) interleaved with a series of 18 Timesongs (in almost all cases these are effectively the author’s free verse summaries of books she has researched as part of her writing, or sometimes of Bushman legends) and with some slightly odd (to me) *to quote the Guardian) “blurry cryptogram” illustrations by an artist friend of hers.

The overall effect is I think best described as slightly circular and overlong to read, but memorable in a slightly unsettling way once completed. I am glad I read the book but at times it felt rather like invading someone else’s memories/impressions and listening to someone else’s dreams.

[N D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time Song is Julia Blackburn's poetic and fascinating elegy to the lost 'country' of Doggerland, a massive swathe of land that linked Britain to Scandinavia and Europe before it disappeared below the rising waters of what would become the North Sea around 7000 years ago.
I really enjoyed this unusual book. Each chapter starts with an abstract drawing by Blackburn's friend, Enrique Brinkmann, and a prose poem by the author based on some aspect of the story of Doggerland. We are then taken on various journeys to the shores of East Anglia, Holland, several museums and the homes of some of the people involved in the uncovering of the story of Doggerland.
The rich archeological catalogue of finds, (human bones, animal bones, tools, remains of buildings, etc.), that illuminate our knowledge and understanding of this disappeared place where once lived both nomadic and farming humans is beautifully described as are the views and stories of the people who have contributed discoveries and expertise to the catalogue.
I found Blackburn's lyrical prose a delight to read while, at the same time, I learned so much about Doggerland, a place I had only heard of and of which I had no real knowledge. A book to be read and digested slowly that gives its own rewards.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am unable to finish this book right now and may check it out again in the future. It yields interesting and new to me information on the lost land of Doggerland now under the North Sea. The information is organized in a random though poetic manner with poetry and art so it is very slow going (for me). If one is interested in this research and wishes to focus more on the science vs random finds of fossils and those experiences a magazine article might serve.
A currently relevant quote from National Geographic: "The story of the Mesolithic people and their home of Doggerland are cautionary tales for the consequences of a rapidly rising sea level." https://www.nationalgeographic.org/ma...

Library Loan

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doggerland once connected the Rhine to the Thames. This poetic exploration of history glimpses the people, flora and fauna over millennia as this land sunk into the sea.

This book is the result of very personal research into the subject. It isn't scientific or comprehensive. The author's goal seems to be collecting thoughts, stories and artifacts into a narrative of a this lost land. I suspect this results in a stronger resolution for the author than the reader.

Not a lot has been written about this area. I added this book to my reading list when I first heard of it. It captures the people better than the land, and the included maps are insufficient. While the art accompanying Blackburn's Time Song poems may have spoken to her, it didn't to me.

[Sherrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prose interspersed with poems, known as Time Songs, the author takes us on her journey to discover Doggerland, the land which connected us with Europe until it disappeared under the waves 8000 years ago. She explores the local east coast as well as the shores of Denmark and Holland and finds bones of long gone animals and people as well as tools and weapons, and is given lots of items trawled up in fishing nets. I found it fascinating to read about evidence of such long ago civilisation and a land which has long disappeared.

[Moira Macfarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dwalen door de tijd.

Julia Blackburn neemt je mee in haar zoektocht naar Doggerland, een gigantisch laagland dat ooit de oostkust van Engeland direct verbond met Nederland en het vasteland van Europa - totdat de stijgende zeespiegel het gebied voorgoed overspoelde rond 5000 voor Christus. Ze heeft zo'n ontzettend prettige ongedwongen mooie schrijfstijl, waarmee ze met hetzelfde gemak vertelt over haar vondsten, haar onderzoek naar Doggerland, de mensen die toen leefden als over het gemis van haar man en hoe hij opgenomen is in de kringloop van de tijden. Mooi!

'We kunnen nog een stapje verdergaan. Als je deel uitmaakt van de wereld der natuur en daarin wordt opgenomen zoals de wortels van een boom in de aarde en een vogel uit de jaarlijkse migratiestromen, dan vloeit daaruit voort dat de dood niet het definitieve einde is, dat het niet meer is dan een fase binnen die saamhorigheid. De doden verblijven in een omgeving die ze hebben gekend, waar ze woonden en doorheen zijn getrokken, en de levenden voelen zich door hun aanwezigheid aangesproken.'

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written book that forced me to "slow read" in a very contemplative manner.

Julia Blackburn has a lovely way of writing that makes you feel as if you're sat having coffee and a chat with a trusted neighbour.

Her exploration into the drowned world known as Doggerland is fascinating. The parts of South East England she explores seem to draw me in. I'm admittedly not much of a history person, preferring geography and ecology, but Julia has a way of making the subject matter completely engaging and wondrous. Her imaginative writing style makes it easy to conjure up images of ancient ancestors walking the landscape, ancient creatures and primitive plant life. The illustrations at each "time song" are equally beautiful and inspiring.

I really really enjoyed this book and gutted it was only a library loan as it's a book I'd like to return to in the future (starts scrolling Abe Books!!)

Highly highly recommended.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the thoughtful, take-the-time-you-need feeling of this book. I’m so glad to have read it in this moment.

[Anneliese Tirry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik hou van de stijl van Julia Blackburn.
Je kan de titel van dit boek erg letterlijk nemen. Ze gaat op zoek naar wat er overblijft, of nog te vinden is, van Doggerland - een uitgestrekt stuk "land" dat nu overspoeld is door de Noordzee, tussen de UK, Nederland, Denemarken en Noorwegen - de vlakte die de Britse eilanden met het continent verbond, een zeer vruchtbaar stuk grond met vele rivieren. En die zoektocht, via deskundigen, maar ook met haar eigen reflecties, verloopt zo poëtisch..
Het voelt aan alsof we haar dagboek lezen.
Tussen de verschillende tijdspannes, van wanneer de ijskap van de laatste ijstijd stilaan begint weg te trekken tot wanneer ook het laatste stukje Doggerland overspoeld is ongeveer 5000 jaar geleden maakt ze een soort Time Song, een lied waarin ze telkens vertelt over wat er gebeurde.
De kaartjes zijn duidelijk en laten zien hoe dit land groeide en weer kromp, wat ze vertelt gaat over de invloed van die gebeurtenissen op de mensen, hoe ze zijn als ons.
Ik ben lichtjes jaloers dat zij zomaar voorwerpen vindt uit de prehistorie aan de kust van Norfolk waar ze woont, hoe graag zou ik ook zo eens een werktuig in mijn handen houden en mij verbonden voelen met de makers ervan.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middling, for me. Time Song is a book that tries to do many things - an anthropological exploration of Doggerland, a memoir of the author’s fascination with artifacts and anthropology of older human culture, and a collection of poems (Time Songs) inspired by paleontologic and anthropologic scientific works - and doesn’t quite grasp any of them. The drawn maps weren’t easy to read or orient. Nice sentence-level writing, though.

[Boudewijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intimate and personal story from Julia Blackborn about how Doggerland has catched her imagination.

Read in Dutch

[Lesley]

My first impressions were wrong (see below) - it got even worse.

Palaentologist-botherer extraordinaire Julia Blackburn takes time out of her busy schedule of pestering leading Mesolithic researchers to traipse around the East Anglian coast, mugging hapless fossil-hunters for their finds. Interspersed with uninformative accounts of discussions with the world's experts are her cringe-making woo-laden musings and innumerable irrelevant reminiscences of holidays, husbands etc, plus a lot of deeply awful poetry that would make a Vogon squirm. Never mind 'Searching for Doggerland' - 'Finding Doggerel-land' would be a more apt title.

The unforgettable high point for me was the moment of the author eating a bowl of yogurt, and thinking it needed a little something extra. Some fruit perhaps? A banana, blueberries? No - she reaches for the canister containing her late husband's ashes...

Hilariously dreadful. Two stars for unintentional entertainment value.
-----------------------------

Impression so far: (to be updated when I've finished and am feeling less snarky)

Doggerland is awfully interesting, I’m writing a book about it. I met a man on the beach when I was looking for fossils, tall, very quiet. He had a tupperware box with lots of fossils so I asked if I could have one. He gave me a tooth that belonged to a little creature called a shrew. I put it in my pocket and went back to my car and drove home. I met another tall quiet man on the beach, he had lots of fossils in a tupperware box. He said he had loads more at home and I could come and see them. His wife was round and cheery, and brought us ham sandwiches and tea. I asked if I could have some of his shells, from a creature called a clam, so she wrapped them in a napkin and I got in my car and drove home. I went to visit an academic, he was Dutch, like one of my husbands, with lots of tusks in his study. His lovely round cheery wife brought us cheese sandwiches and coffee, and he gave me some marvellous bones from a creature called a horse. I got in my car and got lost on the way home but got there in the end. I once lived in a cottage on a beach in Cornwall with no electricity or running water and it used to flood, I mention this for no reason in particular. I also lived in a cottage in Ireland which had no electricity or running water either, so there we are. I live in a gorgeous cottage in Norfolk now, full of fascinating things that wonderful people have given me. My husband died recently, he wasn’t Dutch, but he’s dead now. One of my chickens is dead too, I found it this morning and there was a dead gull on the beach today as well, which reminded me of Inuit children eating gulls including their eyes, a particular delicacy, I saw a film about them, quite fascinating. Doggerland was a huge expanse of land that joined England to Europe, populated by thousands of creatures called mammoths, and humans as well until it all flooded and Britain became a separate island, which reminds me of when one of my husbands who was Dutch lived in Holland and I lived in England and we used to fax each other, even though we were married. And now a poem.

Like fossil hunting, there's a lot of fruitless sifting through mud to endure before you find anything of value. So far my tupperware box is a bit empty.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still reading, but...

This is a magical book, a philosophical book, a time travel book. There is nothing fey about it, it is serious, death-haunted; it ambles about and it is curious—the book itself, not just its author, is curious, about time, death, shells, rocks, landscapes present and vanished.

I think I recall reading that Julia Blackburn is about my age. That is 68. I think it may have to do with being that age, but lately the books I read all seem to be written for me specifically, all wondering about the same sort of things, taking me to places I would like to go, and giving me glimpses of experiences that could have been my own.

I suppose it is what books do. But in a lifetime of reading, I don’t recall this degree of cohering, each book seeming to be attached to the next, commenting on each other, arousing thoughts in me that I might never otherwise have thought. I consider this phenomenon to be one of the signal blessings of being alive.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julia Blackburn is a British author whose work I was unfamiliar with until I encountered Time Song.

This is an unusual book that tries to work on multiple levels. It succeeds much more than it fails and the results is an informative entertaining and deeply personal memoir/collection of essays that is attempting to do quite bit.

First of all, this is a book about time. Ms. Blackburn continually poses the question of how do we come to know - to share the experience with - other people and animals who lived short lives a very long time ago and left as evidence of their presence only the clues from a brief (an hour, a day) visit to a temporary stopover place in their journeys. This is not just the case for the subjects of the varied archaeological observations filling the book. It is also true for Ms. Blackburn’s own remembrances of her life and especially her first marriage. The linkage between self-knowledge and the serious observation of nature and human history is clear and not overly hammered on the reader. We are all continually digging and re-digging to better come to grips in the present with ourselves and our pasts and life experiences.

There is a particular focus for the book, however. Time Song conveys the story of our recognition of “Doggerland” as what was a substantial mass of land that linked Britain and Europe via what is now the North Sea. Throughout the book, in bits and pieces, and with some maps thrown in, Ms. Blackburn describes the world that used to exist between Southeast Britain and the land at the mouth of the Rhine and on either side from Denmark in the north to south of the Rhine, including the Netherlands and Belgium. I travel to the area fairly frequently but I had not heard about this and the archaeological detective story that has fleshed out what was a part of human history up to about 8,000 BC (not entirely submerged until a little later(). I learned something from the book and following up on some of the details, and I have some new places to go when in Lincolnshire. Who knew about Mammoths and Hyenas in England? So in sense, this is a combination of science and travel writing.

... and with Britain having just had its PM announce her resignation over the Brexit mess, isn’t it fascinating to engage with a book that shows the geographic history and prehistory linking Britain with Europe irrespective of the current lousy state of politics?

But there is more here. I enjoyed the account of learning about Doggerland by spending days with a wide range of people who thoroughly enjoy walking along the shoreline at low tide - right at the point where salt water and fresh water world connect -looking for strange shells, bones from all sorts of extinct animals, fossilized footprints, or even the remnants of forests now buried underneath the North Sea. These trips occur on both sides of the sea and Ms. Blackburn has built up a large number of friendships over the years with these people. Some are professional archaeologists but many are not. This is quite a difference from the stereotypical views of lab science and an engaging account of how important discoveries can accumulate out of the work of amateurs - and trained researchers who also have day jobs that permit them to continue their queries.

Ms. Blackburn is also a poet who begins her chapters with a series of “Time Songs” - short to medium length poems the move story along and help to present and clarify the technical stuff. The Time Songs are accompanied by a series of drawings produced for the book by Enrique Brinkmann, a longtime acquaintance of the author. I am neither a poet nor a graphic artist but I think that both of these helped in the ordering of the book and the presentation of its story.

The book is not without limitations. The author rambled more towards the end and appeared to have some difficulties in concluding what she wanted to say. The Time Songs and drawings were occasionally not fully motivated, but that was not a big issue for me. If there is a limitation, it is in the uneasy coexistence of multiple levels of meaning in a complex work. The value is clearly there for the careful reader, but sometimes one needs to work a bit to get to the value. I was happy that I stayed with the book.

[Polly Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting concept to create a written image and history for a lost land. I was really taken with the idea but I’m not sure how well I actually enjoyed the execution of it in the end. Some of the descriptions of meetings with people who had a passion for their area of interest were very enjoyable, although I have never found the amount of bones on any Norfolk beach that some of the authors characters seem to have found. It was quite slow going at times and some of the digressions didn’t appear to have any link to Doggerland - for example I was very uncomfortable with the author eating her husbands ashes in a yoghurt and had no idea where that fitted with anything else. The “poems” were not poetry (until the last one which was lovely) and I have no idea what the illustrations were supposed to be. I did like the reminder that the natural world changes and we have to adapt. Not a book I’d rush back to though.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really about Doggerland, is it. It’s the author trying to inhabit the passage of time over thousands of years and communicate that 2000 years distant from here was yesterday, and will be tomorrow, and the flow of irresistible change over time is natural and holds no terrors, whatever may happen in any given moment. Seems a comforting though somewhat anesthetized outlook. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it drones on in another repeat of the formula “author makes appointment to meet archaeologist type person, author is early as always, then author and person take a walk and author describes what they see on the walk with faithful exactitude (what remark a passerby said into his cell phone for instance), and imagines what was there thousands of years ago.”

[Lucy Treloar · Rating 5 out of 5]

My book of the year so far. I loved it so much. It is calm, reflective and deeply observant. It looks not only at the past, but also at the many things that draw people to examine it and mull over it today. In a way, it is about the passingness of all things - creatures and places; there is a feeling of sweeping perspective, but it's intimate too. I often felt teary while reading it, and I'm still not sure why. I'm sure I will read it again.

[Hermine Couvreur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessant onderwerp, mooi en toegankelijk geschreven 'verslag' over het ontstaan en verdwijning van Doggerland, het rijke land dat nu bedekt is door de Noordzee.
Wat mij er toe aanzette dit boek te lezen was de horror/thriller 'Orakel' van Thomas Olde Heuvelt.
Al was dat een leuk boek, de wetenschap steekt met hoofd en schouders boven de fictie uit.
Zo jammer vind ik het, niet meer te weten over geologie. Fascinerend hoe een specialist onmiddellijk in ogenschijnlijk loze objecten, de overblijfselen van een bos of een nederzetting herkent, hoe ook vissers al eeuwen weet hebben van ondergrondse rivieren, ...
De kaarten in dit boek geven een beeld van hoe Doggerland uitbreidde, kromp en verdween. Hier ga ik me meer in verdiepen. Het boek leert je ook zèlf nadenken over de klimaatverandering waar men het vandaag zo veel over heeft.
Het enige dat me irriteerde waren de 'gedichten' aan het begin van elk hoofdstuk. Proza verdelen in verzen werkte hier voor mij niet.

[Katy Wheatley]

I love the way that Julia Blackburn writes about subjects. She has such a singular view of the world, that even when I'm not particularly gripped by the ostensible subject of the book, I know she is going to present her thoughts in such a way that will both surprise and delight me. This is part memoir, part imagining, part ambling through pre-history. It defies genres, which I love and brings a strange and curious sensitivity to the subject at hand. How do we piece together a narrative and past from the remnants afforded to us now? So much of this is about history and yet it is also a hymn of grief to Blackburn's dead husband. This is absolutely beautiful.

[Richard Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moving but disjointed elegy for lost lives and a lost country.

[Sylvie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hearing Julia Blackburn in a radio programme made me curious about a drowned world called Doggerland. It was filled with mystery, and almost too extraordinary to have had a real existence. It tied in with our present ecological preoccupations, as well as a growing body of knowledge about the past through scientific methods. At almost the same time, I went to an online talk by Ben Smith about his novel Doggerland. The talk was part of the Charles Causley Festival held every year in Launceston, Cornwall. One thing followed another, and by sheer coincidence, the epigraph to the first section of Julia’s book is part of one of my favourite poems by Charles Causley
Eden Rock.

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is.
Crossing is not so hard as you might think!’ ”

I had not thought that it would be like this,

Julia Blackburn went to a conference on the interconnectedness of science and art, focusing on that lost land they call Doggerland. In Julia Blackburn’s book, science feeds into art and vice versa, to lyrical effect. We are left with a strong sense of the land that once joined the Britsh Isles to mainland Europe, and in a way we will always feel that presence, since the process continues with the constant erosion of the East Anglian coast. For anyone who has visited that area, the lost coastline is like a ghost. The drowned steeple bell of Dunwich is still heard by some – whether imaginatively or in reality is hard to tell. Though the distinction does not matter, imaginatiion is part of our make up.

This is a book which has many choice passages. I can only give an idea of the scope of the stories and examples, the explanations and the Time Songs that punctuate the progress of what Doggerland was and is.. But the book is primarily a quest, a series of answers to questions, and ultimately, of uncertain answers, the quest being the most important element.. In the course of the quest, we come across bones, stones and other objects Julia collects, the fossil footprints she sees on the shoreline, and above all the meetiings with people who have an intimate knowledge of the land, meetings with scientists, with those closer to her and those who accompany her to certain sitess; of her travels to Holland. Jayne Ivimey went with her on several research trips along the Norfolk coast. *1 We get glimpses of the young Julia and come to understand how she became the interesting observer she is, with a lyrical voice.

The book is divided into
Old Time
Middle Time
No Time At All

An awful lot happens in Old Time. It seems to overwhelm human comprehension, a time scale of 55 to 35 million years ago. As time evolved, so did the climate and its influence on the land and on human life. Birds are a good way of studying the shift in time, and Julia has based her Time Song 2 on The History of the Birds of Britain by Colin Harrison.

Below is Time Song 3 which is shorter, and the reason for using the format of Time Songs at the beginning of some sections.

Time song 3
Everything that lives dies
and everything that lives
has three isotopes of carbon.
I do not pretend to understand
what an isotope is
but I accept that,
with death
one fo the three decays
while the other two remain stable
and from the fact of this simple change,
a date
can be measured.

This is Julia’s way of conveying concepts from other ways of thinking. and scientific facts in a form that speaks directly to our inner understanding. She describes how she came to choose the particular drawings that accompany the songs, and the songs themselves. She also weaves in brief snatches of her own personal story.

When I was starting this book I wrote to tell him (Enrique Brinkmann, a close friend of her youth) what I was doing and asked if he might make me a series of drawings for the songs. I said they were simple poems dealing with subjects that would otherwise be diificult or even tedious to explain: carbon dating for instance...and I looked that up in my Spanish dictionary.
They had once been intimate, and able to “converse” without any knowledge of each other’s language.

This method also enables her to move from epoch to epoch in an imaginative way,and include the life of those who inhabited the land. The songs evolve with the different stages and transformations of Doggerland time

Objects are found by Julia on the shore, or given to her by others who follow their particular interests. There is one artefact that caught her imagination (and mine). It was found in an unlikely place, and I’d like to give a fuller account of it because it draws together several aspects that are part of the writing, such as the personal, the historical and reflective/philosophical.

In trying to find parallels to what happened in the landscape, she visits other places. It also enables her to experience as closely as possible what it was like to live at that time. there is a ceertain immediacy to it.. It is not just the beach that yields iteresting finds. She is in Norfolk in a scrapyard full of discarded and unusable objects when she picks up a slab of clay for £3. It has curious marks on it. Jayne emails a picture of it to her husband who was abroad. His reply is detailed and outstandingly. it is 1,800 years old.

The clearest graffito is towards the bottom. The first four letters are FIAS (let it/him/her be)….the next six letters appear to be SEVERO, the dative or ablative fom of Severus and likely to denote the tough and unyielding soldier who became emperor near the end of the second century AD. He paid his soldiers well, which made him popular with them, but as a ruler he was universalyt hated.
In 208 he sailed to Britain to try to pacify the north which was being ravaged by marauding Picts and he died in York in 211. ….but why Norfolk? There were some Roman structures built in a combination of flint, mortar and brickwork around the 3rd century BC...such as the Saxon shore fort of Burgh Castle.

She puts it on a plain chest in her husband’s studio next to the skull of a whale which she found. She writes: it looks as if they are in conversation with each other.
(I think the studio belonged to the husband she lost.)

Julia wanted to find out more about the life that the doggerland people might have lived. She read Specimens of Bushman folklore by Wilheml Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Bleek was a linguist born in Berlin. In 1855 he went to the Cape to help compile a Zulu grammar and in that same year heard about a race of people known under the general term of bushmen, though now they are called San.

The /Xan allow one to see the world with different eyes. People are animals and animals are people ; a man becomes a lion, a lion becomes a man. A praying mantis is as important as an old woman, as a yunhg child, as an ostrich; they have equal status. The wind is a person and so are the moon and the stars, trees and stones and water. Everything speaks in its own voice and can be understood, even if what it says has the shifting confusion of a dream.
Now as I try to pull closer to the people of the Mesolithic who lived in Doggerland, I keep turning to the San, in the hope that their words can help me to uderstand the distant mystery of a way of life that is so different to anything I have known.

So we turn to Time Song 8, which is told by two of the /Xan people.

During the Q and A session of the talk at the Charles Causley festival, someone remarked that she wondered if Ben Smith was thinking of dogged in the title of his book ‘’Doggerland". Was it part of the etymology? It fitted the persistence of the protagonists in the novel.
This is what Julia writes about the name of the piece of land that underwent so many transformations.

Prof Bryony Coles gave Doggerland its name

she liked the etymology of "dogger", which seems to derive from the Danish word "dag" meaning dagger. The pliable stems of dogwood were used by Mesolithic peoples for making fish traps, while the hazel heartwood was used for spears and indeed for a type of dagger. On top of all that, dogwood used to grow on Dogger Bank

What I also found fascinating, is that fishermen have a sense of the presence of that land.

But for now, Doggerland is waking from its long sleep….
The great weight of ice in the more northern areas has created an undulating uniformity of lowland, with a vast lake at its heart measuring 100 km long and thirty wide. This lake is known by fishermen as Outer Silver Pit and is one of the underwater deeps where flatfish and crabs and other bottom feeders congregate in the company of stones and bones and wrecked remains of ships. Smaller lakes are filling up and spreading out, while new rivers are gathering energy; as they serpent across the land, they plough deep wide channels into it, scooped indentations that can still be traced on the bed of the North Sea.

There are descriptions of the land and an excellent account of raised bogs. This is on the section on Tollund Man, which for her exemplifies images of time passig and yet not passing, of life and death

Tollund Man found in 1950 in a bog
he lived 2,800 years ago. In Jutland.
He makes her aware of “the dead being absent and yet present”
This she experiences at an emotional level, having lost her husband.
She describes Tollund Man as if he is drifting into sleep.
She has a vivid description of what raised bogs are and of their action on a body, object or clothes. Their slow movement can shift the position of body in a curious way. Every bog has its own particular chemical composition
each one immortalises its treasures in a different way

The sense we have of what is happening to the melting ice and its implications for our survival is ever present.

the land is a sea in waiting

Matthew Hollis
Stones

What a wonderful epigraph to Middle Time.


Notes. *1
You may want to look up her friend the artist Jayne Ivimey for her short video on the erosion of the coastline and for her interest in birds and the area. The video is startling
www.jayneivimey.com

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The beginning and end of this book were more thoughtful, but the sheer amount of meandering in the middle felt aimless and wasn't as poetic or moving or interesting as the author seems to think. She would occasionally touch on an idea or fascinating history and then would move away from it frustratingly quickly, often to another godawful time song. I was also baffled at how she just appeared to contact random experts and go for extended walks/private museum tours/etc. with them, just seemingly like they had nothing better to do. A perk of her seemingly rather privileged and bohemian lifestyle perhaps? AND at how she'd just pick up a 10,000 year old flint head or piece of ancient bone literally every time she set foot on a beach - surely not...

A strange and unsatisfying read, which did pique my interest on occasion, but didn't leave me feeling like I know Doggerland any better, nor bring any insight into grief and loss and change or anything she purportedly set out to do.

[Caz Avery · Rating 1 out of 5]

The key thing is, I finished it.