There’s going to be a shake up in the theory of what happened between the Isle of Wight and the North Island.
If you think the ferries are costly between the mainland and the Island, cast your mind back a mere 8,000 years to when you could walk between the two.
Until recently, the received wisdom was that instead of a whole lot of sea, the Solent River ran from Poole across the north side of the Island to the English Channel, which sat at the East of the Solent.
If you were able to cross the Solent River, you could get to the mainland, indeed people lived in the area in between.
This theory, which has stood for years, is about to be declared as bunkum – something that will rock the world of those who study this.
Solent Lagoon
Garry Momber, who has been studying this area for over a decade, has a new theory. It disputes the Solent River and favours a Solent Lagoon.
He says that this freshwater Lagoon was fed by rivers from mainland Britain and filled with freshwater fish such as trout, salmon and eels.
The Solent Lagoon provided a rich source of food for a settlement based at Bouldnor.
This all changed as the ice sheets melted, leading to rapidly rising sea levels. The seawater broke through the south of the Isle of Wight, now known as Freshwater Bay.
This seawater proceeded north, eventually killing the freshwater eels when it broke into the Solent Lagoon, leading, eventually to new species joining.
All very interesting.
As far as the last land link between the Isle of Wight and the mainland, Momber thinks that in about 2,800BC the land between Milford On Sea and Newhaven flooded, making it uninhabitable.
There’s loads more detail in an article by Peter Law at the Southern Daily Echo.
Image courtesy of Google maps
