If you are the sort of person who feels soothed by the shipping forecast, you’ll love this book about our shores. The Pebbles on the Beach was first published in 1954, and its tone of voice recalls postwar Britain, the Light Programme and trips to the seaside. But instead of Dogger, Fisher and German Bight, it introduces us to the poetry of onshore phenomena: longshore drift, fulls and swales, heliotrope, chalcedony, swash, backwash and fetch…
Clarence Ellis was born in 1889 and, after serving on the western front, worked in further education, but his passion was pebble collecting. He has a didactic approach, occasionally strict, and once or twice poignant about the relative brevity of human life, such as when he compares the formation of sandstone to “the ‘dust to dust’ cycle of man”.
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