Our relationship with the coast has changed over history and it changes throughout our lives. Many of us fall in love with the seaside during childhood holidays. We conduct romances on the sand in early adulthood. I’m now a parent of young children, renewing my acquaintance with building moated castles against the waves. And I’m intrigued by why so many of us seek to return to the beach towards the end of our lives, too.
While my first two books – about butterflies and badgers – sprang from deeply personal experiences, Coastlines, unusually, knocked on my door. I was asked by my publisher, Granta, if I would be interested in writing a book about the seaside to loosely mark the 50th anniversary of a little-known campaign, Enterprise Neptune, which was launched by the National Trust in 1965 to save the coasts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland from development and destruction.
To be asked to write about a landscape that I love – what a wonderful gift! Once I had determined that this would be a completely independent undertaking (I didn’t want to write a book that would be sponsored or overseen in some way), I set about exploring the coast and trying to write about it in an original way.
So much has been said about the British seaside, through the everlasting Coast TV series and some splendid books: I was particularly struck by Jonathan Raban’s Coasting; Raban’s rival, Paul Theroux, also created an entertaining portrait of 1980s coastal Britain in The Kingdom By the Sea. Novelists too, from Joseph Conrad to Iris Murdoch and John Fowles, often excel with this setting. But I think some contemporary travel writing is lazy: it’s not enough to go for a walk, enjoy some banter, check Wikipedia and clothe it in fine writing.
Rather than a familiar-feeling stroll around our shores, I tried to mirror the course of a human life – to examine childhood by the sea, the coast and falling in love, how many of us work, wage war or create art by the sea as adults and then may seek to return there, sometimes on a spiritual quest, at the end of our lives. I looked for fiction and legends as well as historic or contemporary events washed up on the 775 miles of the coast now protected by the National Trust. This proved to be another useful organising principle: we have 12,000 miles of coastline and to cover it all would mean a blunt tweet on each mile. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea.) The National Trust for Scotland is also a separate organisation which meant I didn’t have to do Scotland’s stunning coastline the disservice of cramming it into a short book.
I didn’t realise when I began my explorations that our grand passion for the coast is barely three centuries old, and for much of the last 2,000 years we feared and loathed the sea. It was evidence that God’s work on Earth was unfinished, the source of sea monsters and an instrument of divine punishment in the Old Testament. More pragmatically, Britain’s coast was dangerous: why would anyone sunbathe on Teignmouth beach in 1691 when the previous year the Devon town had been ransacked by French pirates?
Our feelings for the coast were transformed in the 18th century, when supposedly rational doctors prescribed sea-bathing as a cure for all ills – and less rational Romantics identified both creative inspiration and hedonistic pleasure in the ocean’s horrific immensity. Romantics such as Byron and Wordsworth gave impetus to what became the environmental movement. Many of us are such Romantics today.
I was constantly surprised by our shores and their stories. Many coasts that I thought I knew from our culture, such as the Giant’s Causeway or the White Cliffs of Dover, were rich in revelation: visitors to the Causeway treat it like a cathedral of natural worship; the White Cliffs are riddled with secret wartime tunnels. And I didn’t even know that Durham has a coastline. Its 12 miles were badly polluted by coalmines but have been virtually washed clean by the sea (and some Lottery funds) and are glorious and empty.
The shores I most relished as a writer were those of Orford Ness, a shingle peninsula in Suffolk that was a top-secret military base for 83 years of the 20th century. It is still riddled with concrete ruins, rumours, seabirds and toxic waste. The place where my heart sang loudest was the uninhabited tidal island at Scolt Head, Norfolk, where I spent my first holidays as a toddler. Such shores are the last wilderness in southern England.
I’m suspicious when writing comes easily, but I genuinely enjoyed writing Coastlines; hopefully this pleasure is transmitted to readers as well. Apart from Orford Ness, the coastal places that possessed the strangest histories were islands – Lundy, Lindisfarne, Brownsea, Northey. This fact, and a DH Lawrence short story, has led me to my next book, Islander. I’m finding that my exploration of small island life is as joyfully fascinating as researching Coastlines. Hopefully someone will enjoy reading it, too.
Extract
“The early naturalists persuaded the National Trust to buy Scolt because of its colonies of terns, the chalk-winged creatures that nest in their thousands on the island’s sand banks, and a warden has protected these birds – from foxes, and human thieves – ever since. Emma Turner, the nature reserve’s first ‘Watcher’, caused a sensation in 1924 when she took up residence in the newly-built Hut. A gentleman of Fleet Street visited and dubbed the spinster ornithologist ‘The Loneliest Woman in England’ for her solitary vocation to protect the island’s tern colonies. Other journalists ‘followed in a bewildering stream’, recalled Miss Turner in her memoirs, ‘till in desperation I said to the ferry-man: Drown the next. Whatever the ferry-man did, it worked, for the unwelcome visits ceased.”
More about Coastlines
“In the current vogue for nature writing, lyricism sometimes functions as a form of conservationism, as though threatened species can be saved through inventive metaphors. Barkham is inventive too, not least about sounds – “the bur-booh of a train’s horn”, tiny waves that “ulped and ooped” against a rock. But he doesn’t affect to be a poet. Neither does he ignore the dirtier side of the coast, from smuggling and wrecking in Cornwall to scavenging for sea coal in Durham.” - Blake Morrison
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Coastlines by Patrick Barkham is published by Granta Books. To order a copy for £7.99 (RRP £9.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
