Book review: Time Song - Searching for Doggerland, by Julia Blackburn

This is not a book about Brexit. However, given that it concerns itself with the once-inhabited landscape that for many millennia linked the east coast of England to the west coast of continental Europe – the Doggerland of the subtitle – and given that is has been published now, just as we are on the verge of leaving the European Union, it is impossible to read without Brexit in mind. It is a magical, mesmerising book – a book which makes you feel giddy at the thought of the deep gulf of history hidden just beneath your feet – and if it can be said to shed any light on the political tangle in which we find ourselves, it is perhaps this: that, while Brexit might seem like a big deal today, in the grand scheme of geological time it will barely register at all, beyond perhaps a gigantic queue of lorries, fossilized just outside Dover.