Unpath’d Waters was a ground-breaking 3-year research project to unite the UK’s maritime collections. It was managed by Barney Sloane of Historic England and involved 26 different organisations, including public heritage bodies, universities and commercial enterprises. It was one of five ‘Towards a National Collection’ projects awarded £14.5 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The Submerged Landscapes Research Centre at the University of Bradford was responsible for the work package ‘The Lands Beneath the Sea’. The outputs of this work package consists of two elements: the Unpath’d Waters Data Package and the Unpath’d Waters, Undream’d Shores simulation. The Unpath’d Waters Data Package consists of an updated map of the submerged landscapes under the southern North Sea, which serves as the foundation for the palaeolandscape features represented in the simulation model for this work package. The data package has been developed to facilitate access to a broad range of datasets covering the Late Pleistocene to Holocene submerged landscapes of the southern North Sea. The sources are various, including North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project, seimsic interpretation of legacy and newly collected seismic data within the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, existing literature, open access windfarm reports. Various internal and external datasets were imported into QGIS, typically in shapefile or raster formats. When vector files were unavailable, key feature maps were georeferenced from reports or academic publications, digitised, and incorporated.

The Unpath’d Waters, Undream’d Shores simulation allows users to see the development of the landscape over long time periods and appreciate what it would have been like to live in Doggerland. Users can select a date between 20,000 and 5,000 years ago. They can also select a location within Doggerland from a regional map which shows sea level changes over the whole region. They can then see a local simulation of the area chosen, with climate, plants, animals and humans.

The simulation takes two forms: a version for public exhibitions – https://zwack.itch.io/unpath-exhibition
which is also available to download and use at home, and a more detailed version – https://zwack.itch.io/unpathd-home
with more sophisticated processes and behaviours, solely for home use.