This Luminous Coast
Full
Circle Editions (March 2011)
Over the course of a year, I walked along the
edge of the East Anglian bulge, completing 400 miles on foot and a
further 100 miles in a variety of boats. This is a coast that is about
to be lost: not yet, perhaps, but soon. A thousand years ago a king
commanded the waves to retreat to show human futility in the face of
nature. Others built sea walls and estuary defences. Small stretches of
cliffs provided natural protection, as did shingle heaped into banks.
Sea walls were raised, yet still churches, houses and whole settlements
fell into the sea.
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This is
a coast about to be lost. Not yet, but it will happen soon. A thousand
years ago, a king commanded the waves to retreat from this shore. Others
more sensibly built seawalls and estuary defences around the whole of
the region. Small stretches of cliffs provided natural protection, as
did shingle heaped into banks by the sea. Revetments have been added,
and sea walls raised, even though they mostly they did their job, with
some long-remembered exceptions, churches, houses and some whole
settlements fell into the sea. The common field system came and went,
then the agricultural revolution, and lately came the industrial age. We
thought we were in control, with the means to remain an island of a size
largely unaltered since the last ice age. There were siren calls, but we
ignored them. Until this last generation, when the dots were finally
joined.
Fossil
fuels that drive our industrial economy, which in turn brings so much,
have topped up the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other waste gases.
These absorb reflected light from the earth and warm up, and more
atmospheric energy provokes climate change. A warmer world also makes
water expand. And for the 70% of the earth’s surface covered by oceans
and seas this means one thing: 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water
have to go somewhere. And that is upwards onto the land and its beaches,
marshes, dunes, mudflats, grazing meadows and shingle banks. All are now
under threat. And as if this is not enough, East Anglia is sinking too.
It seems doubly unfair, but since the glaciers retreated from northern
Britain, the land there has been bouncing upwards and thus levering down
the south-east.
Some
predictions are gloomy. In fifty to a hundred years, perhaps no
landscapes by the sea will survive quite as they are today. What, some
may ask, is there to lose? The interface between land and sea is
ever-changing: it will adapt, as will the wildlife. We can, as it were,
manage the retreat. We may lose a remote house or two on a cliff, a
slick and grimy marsh, a Victorian waste tip, a windswept grassland
peppered with skinny sheep. Maybe a beach will lose its sands, but how
often does the sun shine on a North Sea shore anyway? Besides, our
clever industrial age will come up with a fix soon enough, and all those
doom-mongers will have to eat their words.
I took
out a large-scale map to look more closely at the three counties of
Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, otherwise known as East Anglia, and traced a
line from south to north, measured distances, and realised two things.
Most of the shoreline
was in easy reach of where I lived, where I had grown up too, yet
surprisingly there were many places I had never been. I knew them by
reputation or from books, but not first hand. It was clear, too, from
the map that much of the character of the region must be defined by its
proximity to the sea. It’s surrounded on three sides, intercut by
rivers, suffused by the light off the water. Well-known wild places and
natural landscapes sit side-by-side with settlements, power stations,
military installations and clanging ports. I wondered, how would this
rim of land by the sea look if you walked from one end to the other?
Sometimes an idle thought is like a retrovirus: it gets stuck in your
DNA and replicates. I came to realise I should walk the coast before it
was lost. Perhaps this would be no more than a lament, but maybe too
there would be the undiscovered in the nearby.
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I
bought more detailed maps, cut them up, stuck pieces together, and
started taking notes about the named places of the coast. And also
notes on the gaps, the apparent empty quarters. I came to realise
there were many but of course none were empty. I built a small
library of old books with faded dust jackets, and new ones that
shined. I searched book shops and websites for the discontinued
ones, and they came musty, matured, smelling of ancient farmhouses.
My first idea was to make one long walk, a single grand expedition,
but this plan would later change. These three seaward counties of
the East Angles and East Saxons
were once joined to continental Europe, when the last ice age locked
up so much ocean water in ice. Now the coast strongly defines this
region. Beach, salting, seawall and marshland. Fishing and
smuggling, farming and sailing. Birds watched and birds shot.
Created communities, deserted resorts, eroded cliffs, villages
underwater, caravan parks and whole new invented places. All on a
linear stretch of land and sea hundreds of miles from the Thames
estuary at the east of the capital to the Wash at the king’s Lynn.
The more I read, the more I realised that I’d already started,
anticipating what might come, and so walking a future memory.
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Another
uncertainty lies in the region’s name and thus identity. East Anglia
itself is a slightly problematic term. On large maps, it tends to
include the lowland Fens and shire counties of Hertford, Bedford,
Northampton and Cambridge, as well as the three coastal counties of
Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. But this is strictly larger than the kingdom
of the East Angles, which did not include Essex. And Essex now as a
county does not include swathes of eastern London and recently
established unitary authorities, even though people there still feel
they reside in Essex.
East Anglia seems to cover Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk reasonably well,
as that is how we generally understand this bump of land on eastern
England today. These counties do, though, have distinct national and
indeed local identities. Essex has its marshes, estuaries and islands
and a formerly remote coast affected by proximal London, and recently a
target of national jokes about social aspiration. Suffolk is a desirable
escape for many, more agricultural too, resting on former glories of
Tudor wool weavers and herring fishing. Norfolk is slower, with
distinctive Broads,
flinty landscapes, sand dunes and fishing too. It is curious that these
counties should even have different identities. The borders are, after
all, only administrative lines on the map, ancient though they are. One
of my aims, therefore, was to walk the whole coast and its communities
and ecologies, and learn what I could about the specificities of place.
Walking
Once, our ancestors walked the world. Then came domestication of animals
and the wheel, and now the car. Today walking can be hard, as
settlements and transport have become rearranged beyond our control.
Many people still walk for pleasure, in urban parks or in the
countryside. But few of us now walk far as part of daily lives. This
disconnection from regular contact with the land has shifted our
perspectives on memory, place and time. A few people have walked all
their lives, and have seen how the land has changed. Ronald Blythe
remembers that footpaths were once full of people moving about, working,
interacting. These were like today’s main roads, except people talked
and walked and watched. The old countryside was peopled. Blythe writes,
“friends never tire of telling me that my life would be transformed if
only I could drive a car, quite forgetting how transformed it has been
because I cannot.” The trouble is, we get out less today, and the
resulting alienation from nature is contributing to environmental
problems. We are suffering in short from an extinction of natural
experience. “I wish to make an extreme statement”, said Thoreau,
“walking is about the genius for sauntering. It is not about getting
somewhere, but being somewhere.” Edward Abbey was blunter: “you can’t
see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned
contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees.”
Walking
is one attempt to come to knowledge differently. By placing your body
inside places and their memories, the path emerges, and the sheer
physicality of the experience shapes and can even come to dominate. The
land becomes tactile, said Robert Finch on his eastern shore, when we go
beyond observing a scene to infusing it with physical and emotional
sensations. The sun, wind and sand; the heat and cold; the painful feet
or knees; the emotional ups and downs. In this sense, walking creates
memory. It’s an act of fiction, of the fantastic, not just an objective
observation of landscapes, people, animals and events. It can bring
forth a world through subjective experience, and projects new pathways
through the forgotten. Landscapes are “imagined into existence”, wrote
Robert Macfarlane, “we do not see what is there, but largely what we
think is there”. We should also ask “what happened here?”, as Keith
Basso recommended, for we may then find that wisdom is in animated
landscapes full of memories and stories. This creation of meaning
invents stories as a way of rediscovering place, thus making it possible
to allude to future environmental and social problems, as well as to
reflect on past changes. By being in places, nature is put back at the
centre of human affairs.
Wildness
Some
take wildness to mean untouched by humans, though in truth there are
very few such places left in the world. Wildness means to me a place
where nature and the elements provide a predominant input to our senses.
We see, hear and feel natural rather than man-made things, even though
indirectly humans have shaped most environments and habitats in one way
or another. The wild can be both near and far, and in places large and
small. You can find wildness just around the corner, as well as in
distant forests, plains or mountains. You can discover it in sweeping
landscapes as well as in the grain of a stone picked from a beach.
Thoreau also observed, “two or three hours will carry me to as strange a
country as I expect ever to see”. I guessed that it would not take much
to feel lost, cut off, to see landscapes that would take my breath away,
to feel astonished at the local. You just have to give it a chance.
Animals and plants would be there, of course, making up a wide range of
natural habitats along this permeable borderland. But there would be no
herds of large animals, or pods of whales, or bears by rivers. I would
also not fear for my own safety, at least not from wild animals. Nature
teaches some respect as well as survival skills. It builds self-esteem
and confidence. It reveals the unpredictable and elemental side of the
world, the driving rain, hard wind, hot sun, fear of lightning, cloying
muds and crashing waves. Bill McKibben said he could spend a lifetime
learning a small range of mountains. In the end the world is not
knowable, and that is probably a good thing to learn too.
Going to
new places always suggests the possibility of becoming lost. Some lands
may indeed be unknown, terra still incognita. More often, they are just
strange to the visitor. Explorers in some senses are always lost, but
retain optimism about their survival and discoveries to come. Is being
lost something to do with not paying attention, as Rebecca Solnit has
suggested? Perhaps it is inattention to the weather or tides, or simply
being non-literate about the land. But lostness also suggests creativity
and the generation of the new. Are we more or less likely to be lost
today? On the one hand, we have GPS trackers, satellite navigation and
mobile phones, suggesting that the physical world is known and that we
can ourselves always be found. But our growing reliance on these aids
appears to be leading to greater likelihood of actually becoming
displaced. Thousands of railway bridges are now hit every year by
lorries, not because there are no warning signs: they have always been
there. Drivers assume the sat-nav is correct and forget how to read the
land.
This Coast
I began
with one ten day walk, and ended up walking for a year. Time distorted.
I intended to do the coast in one go, and write it up. But I changed the
plan and ended up making three types of walk. The multi-day walk, where
the continuous rhythm changed perceptions of light and time, but during
which I did not have enough time to stop and talk. The second were
single day walks to link places and meet people. The third were layered walks or
boat trips, revisiting places in different seasons to see how things
change. It was a year containing forty-five days of walking four hundred
miles and boating another hundred. I did count, but who really cares
about the number of miles? What matters is what happened during this
reinhabitation. Some days I was scorched by sun, others battered by wind
and snow. Some days the fog and mist closed the landscape, on others the
air was clear and the vault of the sky so vast I could see to another
age. I was wet and cold, dusty and sweaty, content and sad, welcomed and
lonely. I walked alone, with friends, with family, and alone again. In
every part of East
Anglia, local people say their horizontal places are distinctive because
of their huge skies. It is a special feature of the region, bringing
space, air, freedom and the sense of a long land that is both near and
far. All the way up the coast, there seems to be a settlement on a slight
rise ahead, or a pier jutting out to sea. When you drive to them, you do
not notice a few metres in height. But when you walk five or six miles,
they seem to rise from the sea or saltings like great castles. Every time you look up, they seem to
shine in the sunlight.
These
walks changed me. The most significant was after the ten day walk. I
felt I was carrying an imprint of the sun holding position somewhere
slightly behind my right eye. I had headed east, north, occasionally
west inland and east again, and so the light was almost always ahead or off to starboard. It left me
with an imbalance, and a sense that the whole world was luminous on one
side. As dark clouds raced over the water it turned slate grey and
menacing. But when the sun came out again, the water became a shimmering
mix of silver and mercury, and I was lit from below as well as above.
When the tide receded across the wide mudflats, distant container ships
elevated as mirages, or sank into perfect reflections. Birds invaded the
muds. After a baking walk one day along the sands, I drove west, and the
light refracted from behind low clouds and created a piece of linear
rainbow. I had never seen such a thing. It pointed the way home as the
beach traffic streamed out of the town. This luminous light of the coast
stayed behind my eye for a couple of weeks. I carried with me the vast
skies, stretched lands of golden cereal, dusty combine harvesters, sea
walls of dried grass, thistledown and golden samphire, and white sails gliding
across the land on invisible creeks. There was also the hammering of
hail on a river wall, drenching rain in a pine forest, crisp hoar-frost
on grass at winter’s dawn. I heard the curlew and redshank, the
outpourings of skylarks, and the crump of waves on the beach.
I have
this coast in a box in front of me now. It is full of objects I picked
up. It is also full of stories and memories, each conjured up by this
assortment of stones, shells, badges, china, leaves, bark, bog-oak,
feathers, cartridges, bones. Their textures and shapes contain larger
stories, and these are part of yet more patterned aspects of land and
seascapes. There’s a toffee-coloured stone with a hole from the shingle
piled on a bomb-testing pagoda, exquisite blue and green shards of
Victorian porcelain, a corner of fisherman’s cork smoothed by the waves,
a translucent moon-stone half-covered with lichen, a rusty three inch
nail from a seawall, bark of elm scoured by larvae of beetles, a pine
cone from a shoreline forest, the featherweight bleached bone of a bird.
These things talk in this memory box.
CONTENTS: This Luminous
Coast
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Preface: A Year on the
Coast |
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Chapter 1 |
There Be Monsters |
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Chapter 2 |
The Great Tide |
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Chapter 3 |
Down by the Sea
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Chapter 4 |
Food and Fowl |
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Chapter 5 |
Wild Archipelago |
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Chapter 6 |
Wild by Industrial |
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Chapter 7 |
Artery and Estuary |
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Chapter 8 |
Strongholds
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Chapter 9 |
Shingle Shore |
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Chapter 10 |
Erosion and Memory
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Chapter 11
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Barrier Coast |
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Chapter 12 |
Mud Cliff and
Marsh |
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Chapter 13 |
Sandhills |
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Chapter 14 |
Coda |
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Notes and Bibliography |
