It’s dawn. A waning crescent moon tracks Jupiter and Saturn across a sky brightening from navy to royal blue. The reeds whisper, wrens chunter in thickets of sea buckthorn, oystercatchers and curlew call. The first geese of the day, recently arrived from Greenland, tack towards the Wash as the sun crests a bank of castellated cloud and gleams of golden light race up and down a million stems of marram grass, making the dunes shimmer.
The soundscape would have been familiar to those working on the mosaic of wet woodland and salt marsh that existed here in the spring of 2049BC. Their work involved the hand-felling and splitting of oaks and the laborious excavation of a much larger trunk by the roots. A hole was bored in the massive stem and a hawser of braided honeysuckle threaded through, allowing the stump to be dragged then lowered upside down into a ready-made hole and packed around so that it stood with roots spreading just above head height.
