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HISTORY OF ICENI LAND
To investigate the history of the land where the Iceni lived and worked it is necessary to look back to the last ice age partly responsible in forming the geography of the land we we know today.
The last ice age is documented as having lasted around 80,000 years. Whilst under the ice, and possibly before, Britain was connected to the rest of Northern Europe by land which is now beneath the North Sea, known as Doggerland.
Attempts to reconstruct what happened in Britain before the last ice age is hampered by lack of evidence and the personal opinions of those researching the subject. It is, however, fairly well agreed that the ice age reached its pinnacle around 20,000 years ago.
Britain was covered with huge ice sheets from the north of Britain to an imaginary line stretching across Britain from the Bristol Channel to Kent, (around where the M4 now runs) To the south of this line the temperature was still inhospitable, being cold and icy with little useable vegetation and few animals that could be hunted for food. Most of the people who had lived in Britain before the ice age had followed the animals in the hunt for food and migrated into the warmer temperatures of Southern Europe.
When the ice began to melt at around 11,500 to 13,000 years ago, the water from the melting ice was absorbed into the sea, significantly raising sea levels. The release of the weight of ice in the north of Britain produced a tipping of the land, today Scotland is still rising and the south of Britain is still sinking as a direct consequence of the shifting weight of melting ice; a phenomena called “isostatic rebound.”
By 6,000 BC Doggerland had disappeared under what is now the North Sea, splitting Britain from the rest of northern Europe.
East Anglia is well known for its fens, rivers, defensive banks, and washes but this is not a naturally occurring landscape, it is a man made one in an attempt to prevent flooding, provide land for agriculture and the rivers or canals for transportation of goods. For centuries the land, especially in the North of East Anglia, consisted of wet, boggy areas, liable to flooding from the sea and from its various estuaries and rivers. Over at least four centuries the land was drained, dykes and defensives were built, rivers contained and great open lakes called ‘Broads’ were opened and extended to carry the water as it drained from the land. The result is the landscape we see today.
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