AS you walk along the top of the Naze past the iconic Naze Tower and look out to sea, you might be surprised to know that not too long ago you wouldn’t have seen see any water at all but land.

Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea that connected Britain to continental Europe.

It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC.

Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain’s east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.

It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age period, although rising sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying islands before its final submergence, possibly following a submarine tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide off the coast of Norway around 8,000 years ago.

The archaeological potential of the area was first identified in the early 20th century, and interest intensified in 1931 when a fishing trawler operating east of the Wash dragged down up a barbed antler point that was subsequently dated to a time when the area was tundra.

Vessels have dragged up remains of mammoths, lions and other animals, as well as a few prehistoric tools and weapons.

Doggerland was named in the 1990s, after the Dogger Bank, a shallow area frequented by fishing vessels. Dogger Bank was in turn named after the 17th-century Dutch fishing boats called doggers.

Evidence, including the contours of the present seabed, indicates that after the first main Ice Age, the watershed between the North Sea and English Channel extended east from East Anglia then south-east to the Hook of Holland.

The Seine, Thames, Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine rivers joined and flowed west along the English Channel as a wide slow river before eventually reaching the Atlantic Ocean.

At about 10,000 BC the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland had a coastline of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats and beaches as well as inland streams, rivers, marshes and lakes.

It may have been the richest hunting, fowling and fishing ground in all of Europe in the Mesolithic period.