Footprints were created by a small family group of both children and adults, together exploring the muddy estuary of what was then an early course of the River Thames. Other archaeological finds in the Cromer Forest Bed Formation reveal that the local Palaeolithic landscape was a floodplain teeming with life. Much like Doggerland, that much later, now submerged, Mesolithic land of plenty which once connected Britain to mainland Europe, the estuary was similarly a resource-rich landscape in which early humans flourished. The wetland environment was home to diverse plant and animal species, surrounded by ancient conifer woodlands which provided critical forest resources and supported large herbivores such as mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, wolves, hyenas and giant deer.
Beyond the fascination with deep time and creative leaps of imagination brought on by archaeology, what I find most intriguing about Happisburgh’s footprints is their setting - the earliest evidence of when people first set foot on what is now Britain was discovered in an ancient estuarine landscape of mud. Unlike concrete footprints, Happisburgh’s footprints tell a story of fleeting traces and provisional landscapes, of just how rich and life-giving transitory environments can be. After they were meticulously documented, the footprints washed away as quickly as they came into view, in dialogue with the non-human forces of the shore. A 900,000-year-old trace was, due to erosion, permanently lost to time in a fortnight. To walk from Great Yarmouth to Cromer is to cross these times.
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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