Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 37

believe that this might have been used to trap eels hiding in the sedi-
ments, pinning them down until they could be grabbed. I thought of
those people stalking the channels with their prongs, walking slowly
so as not to telegraph their movements through the water, their feet
settling into the sand, scanning the bed for the faint trail of mucus or
the serpentine mound that marked their quarry; raising the stick,
adjusting for refraction, plunging it down. The eel whips and loops,
snaking around the hand that seizes it. The fingers bite into the slimy
flesh behind the gills, lift it out, thrash the tail against the pole to
break the spinal column. The hand then pushes a stripped willow
wand through the gills and out through the mouth, and slings the eel,
with the rest of the prey, from the leather thong the hunter had tied
around her waist.
Remnants in the mud suggest that these people camped on the salt-
marsh platform in tipis. A structure nine feet across, with skins or
reeds trussed over the poles, would have housed four people. They
used the hearth at the centre to keep themselves warm and to roast or
smoke their food. Exposed to the wind and rain of the Welsh coast in
the bitter climate after the glaciers retreated, they must have been as
tough as a lamb chop in a motorway service station.
We know little about British life in the Mesolithic: the near
6,000 years (between 11,600 and 6,000 years ago) after the retreat of
the ice sheets, partly because much of the land over which those
people roamed is now under water. At the end of the last glacial
period, the sea level was 30 fathoms* lower than today's. 6 When the
Mesolithic began, some 4,000 years before the camps discovered at
Goldcliff were pitched, there was no Bristol Channel, no Cardigan
Bay, no Liverpool Bay. Even Lundy Island, which marks the western
end of the Bristol Channel, belonged to the mainland. But the sea rose
with great speed. Evidence of human occupation at the Goldcliff site
begins (about 7,800 years ago) when the sea first reaches it. By that
time most of Cardigan Bay was under water, and the seas were still
rising, about one and a half times as fast as they are today.
Like most coastal places, mid-Wales has its Atlantis myth, which
might, though it was doubtless updated with the telling until it was
* 180 feet or 55 metres.