The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Read Free Page B

mud. A man with his dog paused on the sea wall to watch us go. Here and there we had to wait for the tide to recede, revealing more of the path before us. I peered over the edge of the causeway as if off a pier, though the water to either side was only a few inches deep. A goby in a pool wriggled its aspic body deeper into the sand.
    After 300 yards the causeway ended for real, dipping beneath the sand like a river passing underground. Further out, a shallow sheen of water lay on top of the sand, stretching away. The diffused light made depth-perception impossible, so that it seemed as if we were simply going to walk onwards into ocean. We stopped at the end of the causeway, looking out across the pathless future.
    ‘I think there’s a sun somewhere up there, burning all this off,’ said David brightly. ‘I think we’ll be in sunshine by the end of the day.’
    It seemed hard to believe. But it was true that the light had sharpened slightly in the twenty minutes it had taken us to walk out to the end of the causeway. I glanced back at the sea wall, but it was barely visible now through the haze. A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.
    The sand was intricately ridged, its lines broken by millions of casts, noodly messes of black silt that had been squeezed up by ragworms and razor shells. The squid-ink colour of the casts was a reminder that just below the hard sand was the mud. I took my shoes off and placed them on a stand of eelgrass. For some reason, I couldn’t overcome my sense of tides as volatile rather than fixed, capricious rather than regulated. What if the tides disobeyed the moon, on this day of all days?
    ‘I’m worried that if we don’t make it back in time, the tide will float off with my shoes,’ I said to David.
    ‘If we don’t make it back in time, the tide will float off with your body,’ he replied unconsolingly.
    We stepped off the causeway. The water was warm on the skin, puddling to ankle depth. Underfoot I could feel the brain-like corrugations of the hard sand, so firmly packed that there was no give under the pressure of my step. Beyond us extended the sheer mirror-plane of the water, disrupted only here and there by shallow humps of sand and green slews of weed. I thought of the lake of mercury that allegedly surrounds the grave of the First Emperor Qin in the unexcavated imperial tombs at Xian in China, where the Emperor was buried in a grave complex a square mile in area, at the centre of which was his own tomb hall, a bronze vault designed to replicate in miniature the space of his empire. Jewels were embedded into the tomb’s ceiling to symbolize the sky; the streams, wetlands and oceans were simulated by the lake and by the rivers of mercury that ran from it.
    We walked on. I could hear the man whistling to his dog, now far away on the sea wall. Otherwise, there was nothing except bronze sand and mercury water, and so we continued walking through the lustrous air, out onto the flats and back into the Mesolithic.
    In 1931 a trawler named the Colinda was night-fishing around twenty-five miles off the Norfolk coast, in the southern North Sea. When the men pulled in their nets and began to sort the fish from the flotsam and rubble that the nets had also trapped, one of the men found, part embedded in a hunk of peat, a curious object: sharp and shapely, about eight and a half inches long and unmistakably of human workmanship. The man handed it to the trawler captain, Pilgrim Lockwood. Lockwood passed it to the owner of the Colinda , who passed it to a friend, and in this roundabout way the object at last reached an archaeologist called Muir Evans who was able to identify it as a harpoon point, made from antler and with barbs carved on one side.
    The Colinda Point, as it is now known, was one of the first archaeological clues to the existence of a vast, lost and once-inhabited landscape: a Mesolithic Atlantis that lies under the southern half of what