At a party attended by the UK’s most promiment current nature writers, where Robert Macfarlane holds forth about an ice-cold river he bravely swam in, while intermittently swapping notes on Thetford Forest with Helen Macdonald, you sense you might find Patrick Barkham standing slightly off to the side, reluctant to gain the spotlight but listening intently, the evening’s most interesting moments sticking to his brain like iron filings to a magnet. Unlike much of the most successful life writing set in the natural world right now, the power of Barkham’s third book, Coastlines, comes not from personal history but from his thoughtful, gentle voice, combined with a magpie ability to pick out a landscape’s most interesting morsels.
Despite Barkham’s polite, organised style this is not entirely a gentle book. It is, after all, largely about the sea: fearsome, destructive, impossibly old and a “portal to our savage past”. Barkham goes out on Orford Ness with rangers who shoot the foxes that endanger ground-nesting birds and hears a heartbreaking tale about a heron choking to death on a rat. In one of the book’s most compelling sections, on the National Trust’s project Neptune, we learn of the large number of dead horses, cows, dogs and cats dumped in the Trust’s car parks every year. Unlike 1983’s The Kingdom by the Sea, in which Paul Theroux travelled the UK coastline, Barkham’s is an interrupted, selective journey, focusing on coastal erosion, areas of unusual natural beauty and the eccentric characters often drawn to a life by the waves (eg the poet-priest RS Thomas, whose son found mould growing on his shoulders in his cottage near Hell’s Mouth in Wales).
Continue reading...