A journey around the British coast reveals the effects of world war, work and art on a fragile, ever-changing environment
Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside. Why is that? Because we evolved from aquatic creatures and have an innate affinity for the sea? (The human body is two-thirds water.) Because the coast shows us nature at its most spectacular? (Waves and whales, starfish and shearwaters.) Because we’re spoilt for choice? (The British Isles are more edge than middle, with a coastline spanning 10,800 miles, longer than India’s.) Or because of the proximity? (Nowhere in Britain is further than 70 miles from the sea.)
At the outset of his book, Patrick Barkham entertains these various possibilities and adds another – the impact of formative childhood experiences. Until the age of five, his family holidays were spent on Scolt Head Island, a four-mile hump of sand dune and salt marsh off the Norfolk coast. Bleak and windswept, the place was no idyll, and after an episode when Barkham’s father spotted two men stealing rare eggs but failed to persuade the island warden to confront them, the family stopped going there. Revisiting it 35 years on, Barkham surmounts the discomfort he felt as a child to achieve a dreamlike peace or state of hypnagogia – no easy matter when you’re swimming in the North Sea.
Continue reading...