CHAPTER II 
THE PEOPLE OF THE SUBMERGED FOREST 
The Megalithic monuments and the people who built 
them belong to the closing phases of the Neolithic period. 
We are now to seek traces of the people who lived in 
England towards the commencement of that period. 
The records of the- time are not beyond recall, for we now 
know that large tracts of country over which the early 
Neolithic people roamed and hunted, perhaps established 
their village communities and, in all likelihood, cultivated 
their little plots of ground, are preserved beneath the 
waters of surrounding seas. At various parts of the 
English coast a low tide exposes the fringes of these 
Neolithic territories along the foreshore. The old land 
surfaces are easily recognised when they are marked, as is 
the case in some localities, by the blackened stumps of 
trees, still rooted to the soil on which they flourished long 
ago. Remnants of these submerged forests are to be seen 
along the West, South, and East coasts of England, round 
the Channel Islands, and along the North-West coast of 
France. They extend far out into the bed of the North 
Sea. The Dogger Bank (see Mr Clement Reid's map, 
fig. 1 1), now covered by 60 feet of water at low tide, still 
yields, when dredged, peat and the remains of the marsh- 
plaats which once grew where now great steamers come 
and go. Even at greater depths — at levels which lie 120- 
130 feet below the surface of the sea — the same evidences 
of an old land surface are to be found. ^ Mr Clement Reid 
' See Mr Clement Reid's excellent manual on Sub/nert^n-d Foresfs, 
Cambridge University Press, 1913. 
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