Pages from Rev. Alexander Catcott’s A Treatise On The Deluge. Paper cut-out elk and giant deer by Sean Harris

We now know that around 12,000 years ago the climate was warming, causing the ice sheets that had covered much of the landmass familiar to us as the British Isles and Ireland to gradually melt. Year by year, decade by decade, century by century the map changed – as it always does. Beneath the ground in caves the bones of wild beasts were slowly covered by layers of earth that built up inch by inch as time passed – just as the beasts themselves became buried deeper and deeper in memory.

In the eighteenth century, natural scientists – often men of the Church who were the only ones with the time to think about such things and commit their thoughts to paper – began to unearth these bones in the course of their philosophising. This created a number of significant puzzles because, rather confusingly, many of the bones were huge and the animals from which they might have come were nowhere to be seen in the locale. And we have to remember that at this time extinction was not known, let alone understood. And also that The Truth was by and large owned by the Church.

Therefore, it was only natural to conclude that the answer to the conundrum of the missing beasts lay in the Old Testament. These bones had been washed into caves by Noah’s Flood; they were victims of The Deluge.

The Reverend Alexander Catcott’s A Treatise on the Deluge (1768) carefully lays out the rationale for this and includes a detailed and carefully considered deck plan for the Ark, showing how all the species were quartered and where the considerable food supplies necessary to keep them from eating each other were stored.

Catcott also muses on absent species – and the vexing presence of giant antlers in ‘the Slutch’ of the Deluge in Ireland (deposits which we now attribute to glaciation). These, he concludes, must belong to the ‘moofe-deer’ – the massive ‘Mus’ (or moose) encountered by explorers in the New World.

However, in the fullness of time, science has shown that these incredible racks were the crowning glory of the Giant Deer Megaloceros giganteus, the extinct cervid formerly known as the Irish Elk.

But for Catcott – and indeed wider society – The Word, The Truth was God.