The Prehistoric Submerged Forest on the Porlock Salt Marsh

6,000 years ago, you wouldn't be standing on the Porlock Salt Marsh, but in the heart of a deep, dark forest filled with wolves and deer.

The standing skeletons in our photo above were killed in the 1996 floods—a recent reminder of the sea's power. But beneath the waves lies the true submerged forest: 6,000-year-old oaks that haven't seen a leaf since the Stone Age. The submerged forest at Porlock Weir dates back roughly 5,000 - 6,000 years (the Neolithic period). At that time, the sea level was much lower, and what is now a rocky beach was a dense, thriving woodland filled with wildlife, including wild boar and red deer.

As the climate warmed after the last Ice Age, the forest was slowly drowned by rising sea levels. The trees were buried in peat and salt marsh mud, which created an anaerobic environment, preventing the wood from rotting, and effectively pickling the stumps for millennia.

Today it's a hauntingly beautiful prehistoric landscape that reveals itself only see at low tide. The dark, waterlogged wood and the surrounding salt marsh create a stark contrast to the lush green cliffs of the South West Coast Path on either side of salt marsh. 

When the tide is exceptionally low, archaeologists have found evidence of human activity in the surrounding clay, including prehistoric footprints of both humans and animals, and flint tools—suggesting that Stone Age hunters used this forest as a hunting ground before the sea claimed it.

Hiking past the forest on our way to Porlock Weir, it feels a bit foreboding, like we just might see dinosaurs. 

We didn't see it, but there is one particularly famous massive oak trunk that lies prone on the mud. You can only see it at very low tide out on the beach; if the tide is in, it's completely underwater. The guidebooks say the trunk is so well-preserved by the peat that you can still see the grain of the wood. Because it's been preserved in peat for millennia, the wood would be rock-hard and feel more like stone or dense coal.

​We were standing on 10-foot-deep history book of the English coast.

The surrounding area too, is marshland; parts of the path run through soggy, squishy areas. These soggy spots are actually part of a vast peat shelf, a massive, organic lasagna made of compressed, waterlogged vegetation that has been building up for thousands of years. In some places this shelf is nearly 10 feet thick. It’s essentially a time capsule; scientists have taken "cores" (vertical samples) from this mud to study the pollen trapped inside, which tells us exactly what flowers were blooming in Somerset 5,000 years ago.

Core samples are taken by driving using long, hollow tubes deep into this shelf. When they are pulled out, scientists have a vertical timeline of Somerset’s environment. They can tell exactly when the climate warmed up or when certain flowers first appeared. 

This is the same mud where the footprints of Neolithic hunters were found. Because the peat is so dense, it captured the impression of a foot or a tool and locked it in place before the next layer of silt covered it up.

How amazing is that?