The moment Britain became an island

[THE FUGITIVE]

Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character?
The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.
What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit land slowly being submerged as sea levels rose.
But it wasn't until 6,100BC that Britain broke free of mainland Europe for good, during the Mesolithic period - the Middle Stone Age.
Find out more

Neil Oliver's A History Of Ancient Britain continues on BBC Two, 16 February, 2100 GMT
Watch episode one on iPlayer
Clickable timeline of British history
It is thought that landslides in Norway - the Storegga Slides - triggered one of the biggest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth when a landlocked sea in the Norwegian trench burst its banks.
The water struck the north-east of Britain with such force it travelled 25 miles (40km) inland, turning low-lying plains into what is now the North Sea, and marshlands to the south into the Channel. Britain became an island nation.
At the time it was home to a fragile and scattered population of about 5,000 hunter-gatherers, descended from the early humans who had followed migrating herds of mammoth and reindeer onto the jagged peninsula.
Ancient signs of French connection

Fossilised trees in Bray, Co Wicklow
"In Bray, on the east coast of Ireland, there are fossilised trees on the beach, lying where they first grew 8,000 years ago.
"There are drowned forests off Dorset, Wales and the Isle of Wight. That's because back then, the Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land.
"When the great melt came, and the seas gradually rose by 300 feet, we were cut off from mainland Europe for good."
From 2008's British Isles: A Natural History
Watch Alan Titchmarsh explore the forest
Ancient sites, and related activities
"The waves would have been maybe as much as 10m (33ft) high," says geologist David Smith, of Oxford University. "Anyone standing out on the mud flats at that time would have been dismembered. The speed [of the water] was just so great."
At Montrose, on the north-east coast of Scotland, Smith has uncovered signs of this long-ago natural disaster. A layer of ancient sand runs through what should be banks of continuous clay - sand washed inland by the inundation.
Relics of these pre-island times are being recovered from under the sea off the Isle of Wight, dating from when the Solent was dry land.
Grooved timbers preserved by the saltwater are thought to be the remains of 8,000-year-old log boats, and point to the site once being a sizable boat-building yard, says Garry Momber, of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (see video clip below).
The tsunami was a watershed in our history, says archaeologist Neil Oliver, presenter of BBC Two's A History of Ancient Britain.
"The people living in the land that would become Britain had become different. They'd been made different. And at the same time, they'd been made a wee bit special as well."