Time Song: Searching for Doggerland

A journey into Doggerland, the ancient region that once joined the east coast of England to Holland

Time Song tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC.

Julia Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of this vanished land. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who, despite having lain in a peat bog since the start of the Bronze Age, seems to be about to wake from a dream.

With each of its pages bringing a surprise, an epiphany, and a phrase of such beauty and simple profundity you can only gasp, Time Song once again reveals Julia Blackburn as one of the most original writers in Britain,

'This book is a wonder' Adam Nicolson, Spectator

'A clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past' Antony Gormley