Changing Habitats in the Holocene

The Early Holocene

The early Holocene extends from around 10,500BP up to 5,000BP, and was a period in which the climate became warmer and wetter. Sea level started to rise at around 20,000BP as glaciers began to melt. The rise was rapid, at up to 30 mm per year at some sites. Present sea level was typically reached at around 6,000 BP, although wide regional variations in this date exist.

During the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period, about 8500 to 5500 years ago, dense forests probably covered Worcestershire, with open land only on the higher hills. The Mesolithic hunters may have maintained clear areas around their habitation sites (regular camps or even permanent settlements), especially along rivers such as the Severn, but dense, largely continuous mixed forests with oak, elm, lime and Alder and a Hazel understorey would have covered most of the landscape.

The Later Holocene

Following the thermal optimum at around 9,000 – 5,500BP and up to around 500BP, there has been progressive deterioration in the climate. This has been marked by cooling in temperate latitudes and drying in the sub-tropics between 6,500BP and 4,500BP, leading to the development and expansion of the Saharan and other deserts.

The post-glacial rise in sea level more-or-less reached its maximum around Britain during the Atlantic period (7,500 – 5,200BP) and was responsible for extensive water-logging of the floodplains along the lower reaches of many rivers near the coast. At this time a whole landscape, Doggerland, centered on the Dogger Hills was lost beneath the waves in the southern North Sea. The Dogger Hills and Doggerland are named after the Dogger Banks fishing grounds that we know today.

The climate is also thought to have been more oceanic than in the preceding (Boreal) period, and it is widely believed that this led to the initiation of blanket bog in some upland locations. The Atlantic period is considered to represent the post-glacial thermal maximum.

Around 6500BP, Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers began to clear the forests for crops and pasture, creating landscapes similar to the eastern Steppes, where agriculture was born. The archaeological record of increasing arable weeds and decreasing elm pollen indicates not only a clearance of woodland for field crops but also the introduction of (Dutch) Elm Disease. The world's oldest known managed woodland is attested by the use of coppiced rods and poles used in the Neolithic tracks across southern English bogs, which required many acres of coppice to provide rods of equal thickness and length, grown from the stumps of felled trees.

The Sweet Track - a Neolithic trackway in Somerset

During the Bronze Age (c. 4400-2750 BP), the wildwood began to be cleared from the hills, valleys and heavier topsoils, so that by the early Iron Age, half of England - some estimate up to two-thirds - had ceased to be forested. When the Romans arrived, Britain was not much more wooded than today, but was a familiar landscape of woods and hedged fields dotted with single trees and scattered farmsteads. Within this increasingly controlled cultural landscape, the Celts deemed the wild places of bogs, woods, springs, trees and rivers sacred. The deposition of sacrifices and artifacts in the watery places of Northwest Europe reflect their ritual concerns with fertility and regeneration, often artistically symbolised by wild bulls, stags and boars and by recurrent tree imagery, while wood and stone pillars became the focal centres of tribal ritual enclosures.