Tim Holt-Wilson discusses the elephant in the room

Despite an early start for Tim Holt-Wilson’s fascinating lecture, the Corn Hall attracted a healthy audience in search of the Lost Beasts of Norfolk and Suffolk. His walk-through of the region’s pre-history was the opening event of the Corn Hall’s celebration of the (possibly apocryphal) burial of a circus elephant on Fair Green.

Tenuous though that link might be, this was nonetheless an absorbing talk that discussed East Anglia’s distant past, and the people involved in uncovering it – literally digging it up. Intriguingly, much of the early investigation into this period was carried out locally, with villages such Hoxne lending their names to geological periods. The international significance of the work carried out in the region cannot be overstated – some of the best evidence for the Cromerian period is over in the Netherlands. Whales, sea otters, walrus, sabre tooth and the elephant in the room – the mammoth – all lived here under the  skies of Norfolk,  cheek by jowl, under the big skies of Norfolk, followed by horse-zebras, gazelles and rhinos, while the earliest footprints found in Europe revealed even back then, man walked along the beach at Happisburgh.

Just as astonishing as the wild life was the ice sheet, a mile thick that subsequently swallowed up all before it. It was not lost on Holt-Wilson that this was a timely metaphor for the climate change challenges we faced today. Inviting his audience to consider the devastating effects of everything from deforestation to artificial lawns, he closed on the chilling consequences of doing nothing until it’s too late.