Open Country

This week's Open Country is a journey along a stretch of familiar coastline, but also back in time, to a far less familiar landscape. Emily Knight explores the Deep History Coast of North Norfolk, where the crumbling shoreline has given up some of the most impressive fossil remains ever discovered. To help her get a sense of the landscape that came before this one, she meets palaeontologist and author of "Otherlands", Dr Thomas Halliday, who explains what this ancient place would have looked like, how it might have felt to walk through it, and who you might have met along the way.One of our companions on this stroll through time might have been a true giant of the past - four metres tall and weighing in at ten tonnes - the West Runton Mammoth. It's the most complete mammoth skeleton ever found, buried in the shifting sands of the beach for hundreds of thousands of years, before being discovered after a storm in 1990. While we stroll along a sandy beach, the West Runton Mammoth would have strolled instead alon