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This belief, gradually and categorically disproven, remains stubbornly persistent, clinging on today in the pseudo-scientific ‘flood geology’ of the creationists, who invoke mighty geysers and rents in the earth’s tectonic plates in their bid to explain where sufficient water came from and drained to that did prevail so exceedingly upon the earth that it was sunk to the depth of fifteen cubits.
    In the town where Matthew grew up they told a different story of Noah’s flood, replacing the creationist piety with low English comedy. The medieval Wakefield Mystery Play has at its centre a pitched battle between Noah and his stubborn wife that culminates with an exchange of blows and insults – ramshit! Nichol needy! – that would make Punch and Judy blush. And when the rain stops and the ship with its cargo of paired beasts reaches land, Noah is not thrilled but horrified by the spectacle that awaits him, of a featureless earth that might never have been inhabited. ‘Behold, on this green,’ he cries:
    . . . neither cart nor plough
    Is left on the scene, neither tree nor bough,
    Nor other thing,
    But all is away:
    Many castles, I say
    Great towns of array
    Flit in this flooding.
    Typical Yorkshireman, I thought to myself: never bloody happy. But you don’t have to believe in the testimony of Genesis to understand Noah’s shock. Isn’t that how the world goes, disappearing before our very eyes? The play was last performed in 1576. How many trees had survived since then, how many carts and castles and ploughs? Probably not a single oak in the whole vast Weald, though their lives make man seem puny. They had been swept up by that silent, shiftless flood which swirls perpetually across this world. In time it would obliterate everything in sight, for forms rise but briefly and collapse no matter how solid they look.
    In this landscape of erasure, one plant stood out as an anomaly, a living fossil. The horsetail that choked every half-damp ditch I passed had been here when the Weald was still a tropical swamp, long before the chalky Downs were formed. If a nuclear winter ever comes to pass it’s the horsetail I’ll put my money on, rising stiff-fronded through the dust and rubble as it has for the last 230 million years. Equisetum , as it is properly known, is the living link between our own age and that of the dinosaurs. Cows trample it now, but it was growing here when the Weald was home to the iguanodon , one of the first dinosaurs to be discovered.
    The earliest traces of the iguanodon were found at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the obstetrician and geologist Gideon Mantell, just over a mile from where I now stood. In this period neither the concept nor the word dinosaur existed and even the idea that life forms might become extinct was new and barely tolerated. Geology, as I have said, was an emerging discipline, and in the rush to find and date the layers of rock that comprised the planet’s crust, a number of mysterious fossils were being unearthed and, for the first time, systematically classified. The categorisation of early mammals was fairly easy, but stranger and more ambiguous remains were also being discovered. In 1811, on the coast of Lyme Regis, the fossil-hunter Mary Anning had found the skeleton of a previously unknown marine reptile. It was named, after some considerable debate, the ichthyosaur, and over the next ten years various papers were published describing its anatomy and provenance. The discovery caused ripples of intense excitement in the scientific establishment on both sides of the Channel. What was this strange creature, which didn’t look like anything so far found in the sea? How old was it? And if it really was extinct, why had God created it only to let it drop out of existence?
    Like Anning, Mantell was fascinated by fossils and the secret history they seemed to encode. Originally a shoemaker’s son from Lewes, he worked by necessity as a country doctor, pursuing his