Doggerland: The Lost Land Where You Could Walk from Britain to Europe

Picture walking from London to Amsterdam. Not flying, not taking the Chunnel. Just on foot, over hills, through woodlands, beside rivers. This was possible ten thousand years ago.

The North Sea covers what used to be solid ground linking Britain and continental Europe. Doggerland gets its name from Dogger Bank, shallow fishing grounds where Dutch cod boats worked for centuries. The fishermen never knew they were trawling above a submerged world.

Twenty thousand years ago, at the height of the last ice age, ice sheets held so much water that oceans sat 120 meters (394 ft) lower than today. The continental shelf connecting Britain and Europe emerged as dry land. And it was huge—roughly the same size as England.

A Place People Called Home

Around 12,000 years ago, as the climate warmed, the frozen landscape began transforming. Forests grew. Rivers appeared. Marshes spread through low-lying areas. Deer, wild boar, and aurochs found new habitat, with Mesolithic hunters right behind them.

These groups stayed. They set up camps and returned annually. Fish swam in the rivers. Game roamed the forests. Berries and nuts ripened every summer. Parents raised children there who grew up and did the same.

The seafloor still holds evidence. In 1931, fishermen brought up something unusual: a barbed spear tip made from deer antler. It turned out to be 13,000 years old. Trawlers have since brought up stone tools, flint blades, mammoth bones, all kinds of artifacts. The footprints, though—those really get you. Perfectly preserved in sediment. One location has 39 prints on the seabed. Someone walked through that mud 8,000 years ago, probably checking traps or tracking animals, and those impressions survived their entire civilization.

Divers today can go 20 meters down and see where they walked.

The Slow Drowning

Doggerland began to disappear slowly. Ice sheets across northern Europe melted. Water poured back into the oceans. Shorelines crept forward 1 to 2 meters (3.3-6.6 ft) per century. A human lifetime wouldn’t register much change, but generations watched it happen. By 9000 BCE, the ocean had carved through, forming a huge tidal bay between England and Dogger Bank. The continuous landmass fractured into islands.

Families kept moving inland. Camps relocated. Hunting grounds shifted. The ocean never stopped advancing. In total, waters rose about 120 meters (394 ft) — taller than the Statue of Liberty. The people living through this couldn’t understand why it was happening. They had no way to track melting glaciers or measure ocean levels. They just watched their territory shrink.

Then disaster. Around 6200 BCE, part of the Norwegian seafloor gave way. The Storegga Slide sent roughly 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cu mi) of sediment crashing into the ocean depths. The tsunami hit Norway at 10 meters (33 ft). When waves hit Doggerland’s remaining islands, they’d dropped to 3-6 meters (10-20 ft) but still wiped out coastal settlements.

Some higher ground might’ve survived initially. If so, it didn’t last. The ocean kept rising. By 6500 BCE, complete submersion. Dogger Bank persisted as an island until roughly 5000 BCE before disappearing too.

All the forests, river valleys, hunting grounds, settlements—buried 15 to 30 meters (16-30 ft) deep now.

Mapping the Drowned World

Oil companies drilling in the North Sea created detailed seafloor surveys. Archaeologists figured out this same data could rebuild Doggerland digitally. So far, teams have mapped about 46,620 square kilometers (18,000 sq mi) of the submerged terrain. University of Bradford researchers covered 188,000 square kilometers (72,587 sq mi) in total. That’s larger than England and Scotland combined.

These reconstructions show ancient river systems, hills, coastlines from different periods, and marshland zones. Archaeologists can spot probable settlement locations and hunting territories. It’s essentially a major archaeological site that’s completely underwater.

Trawlers occasionally bring up artifacts. A stone blade here. A bone tool fragment there. Small additions to what we know.

Look at any North Sea map today. Oil rigs occupy ground where rivers once ran. Fishing boats work over submerged forests. People had complete lives there. They raised children, crafted tools, sat around fires, walked through mud and left prints that survived eight thousand years. Nobody then could’ve imagined petroleum geologists would reconstruct their homeland millennia later.