As a result of erosion, the present coastline around Formby Point coincides with the shoreline during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. The environment was then, of course, totally different.
Visitors today walking along the foreshore may notice patchy exposures of mud, revealed - and subsequently destroyed - by the tides and longshore currents. Some have though they were oil slicks! They are in fact, Holocene, marine sediments, deposited in the lea of an offshore sandbar onto a gently shelving beach some four to three and a half thousand years ago. A closer look will reveal that they are laminated and that within some strata the footprints of the animals, birds and humans frequenting the coast at that time have been preserved, their tracks baked hard by the sun of four thousand years ago.
Location: Formby Liverpool
Photographer: keith sweeney
