Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 38

finally fixed in the written record, have originated in the drowning of
settlements as the seas expanded after the Ice Age. The Welsh story
tells of the Cantre'r Gwaelod - the Lowland Hundred - ruled by a
chieftain called Gwyddno Garanhir. It was defended from the sea by
a series of dykes. Gwyddno's nobles were in charge of maintaining the
dykes and their gates and hatches. Among them was the notorious
drunkard Seithenyn. He was on duty on the night of a terrible storm
surge, with predictable consequences. The legend insists that the sub-
merged bells of Cantre'r Gwaelod ring out when someone is in trouble
at sea. I can testify that this story is untrue: I would have heard them
often enough.
The evidence at Goldcliff suggests that the people who left their
traces there hunted and foraged on the marshes only periodically,
mostly in the summer and early autumn. Like the other predators,
they followed the great herds of deer and aurochs, the sounders of
boar and the boom-and-bust abundance of the rest of the natural sys-
tem. They appear to have set up camp on the saltmarsh for a few
weeks at a time, when the game filled the coastal forests and fish
thronged the water. Emerging from the buried soil are great stumps
and fallen oak trunks: some of which have no branches for forty feet.
This suggests a closed canopy forest, rising from just above the
high-tide mark. The mud contains the pollen of oak, birch, pine, hazel,
elm, lime, alder, ash and willow. Along the shore were reedbeds, raised
bogs and alder carr (swamp forest). Around the roots of the trees, the
archaeologists found stores of hazelnuts, buried by Mesolithic red
squirrels.
These people, they speculate, as well as hunting fish and game,
would have eaten the roots and shoots of the reeds, the sweet gum
oozing from the rushes, the seeds of grass and orache, barkbread from
the birch trees, nuts, acorns, leaves and wild fruit. Evidence from
other parts of Britain and Europe suggests that they are likely to have
used dug-out canoes to hunt and gather in the estuary and to travel to
hunting grounds further along the coast.
In late autumn they might have migrated to beaches where seals
heaved themselves out of the water to breed: easy prey for anyone
who could reach them before they flopped into the water. In winter,
they moved inland, hunting migratory birds in the upper estuary and