Children of the flood: what can lands lost to rising waters tell us?

Beneath the surface: what’s been washed away, and what we can learn from them? Illustration: Benjamin Flouw/The Observer

When writer Gareth E Rees stands on the muddy foreshore at Pett Level in East Sussex, his mind turns to the Mesolithic peoples who hunted, lit fires and dreamed their very human dreams on the lands now subsumed by the steel grey swell of the English Channel.

It’s low tide at Pett Level and, as at every low tide, the withdrawing waters have exposed a landscape of twisted and pocked tree trunks that is illegible to many of today’s brisk dog-walkers and young families out on the migrating shingle.