Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 36

numbers that, when George Neville became Archbishop of York in
1465, he served 204 of them at his inauguration feast. 4 This could
help to explain why they became extinct here 400 years ago. But in
1979 they began to creep back. Birds migrating from the Continent
established a small breeding colony in Norfolk, encouraging conser-
vationists to try to reintroduce them elsewhere. In 2009, a group was
released in the Somerset levels. 5 They will, their mentors hope, spread
up the Severn valley into the quags and slobs of the rest of Britain.
The findings at the Goldcliff dig augur well for the first phase of their
expansion.
Among the tracks the archaeologists found the remains of Meso-
lithic meals. Here were the bones of red and roe deer and wild boar,
charred and marked with stone axe cuts, and the colossal ribs and
vertebrae of giant aurochs, one of which had been chipped by an
arrow head or spear; a few otter and duck bones, charred hazelnut,
cockle and crab shells. Two microliths - the small stone blades with
which spears and arrows were tipped - have been oxidized by fire,
which suggests that they were still lodged in meat that was cooked
here. But overwhelmingly the remains are of fish: salmon, pouting,
bass, mullet, flatfish and, above all, eels. The number and size suggest
that the people trapped them here in shallow water, on moonlit stormy
nights around the autumn equinox, when the eels began the migra-
tions that would take them to the far side of the Atlantic. Three
pointed stakes uncovered in a fossil channel could once have sup-
ported a set of basket traps.
I remember those movements from my own childhood: standing
beside clear streams in Norfolk and the southern counties and watch-
ing a black chute of eels, which sometimes looked as densely twined
as wickerwork, writhing its way downriver. Now you would be fortu-
nate to see half a dozen in a day. The great caravan persisted from the
Mesolithic until the 1980s, then collapsed.
Among the stone blades and grinding stones and adzes, the awls
and scrapers made of bone, the antler mattocks scattered over the fos-
sil marshes, were artefacts seldom found in sites of this age: tools
made from wood. The excavators found a spatula, a wooden pin, a
digging stick. But the one that intrigued me was a y-shaped stick,
abraded, perhaps by sand, on the inside of the fork. The researchers