COASTLINES
PATRICK
BARKHAM Illustrated by Emily Faccini
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INTRODUCTION The Fortress of Light
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No cars glittered in the large tarmac car park. Seafront razzle dazzle was locked away inside boxy grey amusement arcades shuttered for the winter. The little shops on the stone-and-slate high street betrayed a seaside town’s weakness for punning: Born and Bread, Sophisticut and Cloud Nine. Opposite a derelict patch of weedy concrete, a tiny lane twisted upwards between dainty terraced homes, their chimneys pluming wood smoke from living-room fires. Five minutes and the old Welsh fishing village of Abermaw graciously gave way to gorse and bracken. A pause, breathless, where the slope softened, in golden sunshine, and the town of Barmouth was laid out like a miniature attraction below. Stone cottages hugged the hill. Below them were dark, handsome houses with pointy gables that arrived with the Victorian holiday makers. Behind them was a thin line of railway, its former goods yard filled with a supermarket; the ugliness of the amusement architecture and the deserted car park. Beyond them was a broad yellow beach and the strong blue Irish Sea filling the great expanse of Cardigan Bay. The Llŷn Peninsula stretched a hazy finger along the northern horizon; to the south, the swirly sand mouth of the River Mawddach met the sea; at its side was the old port, embracing boats with its stone arms. 3
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This simple, easily earned view contained all the elements of the British coast. The fundamental ones – water, wind, rock and fire – of course, but their natural and human elaborations as well: mountain, river, harbour, beach, dune, seafront, bridge, car, boat. On one of those limpid days at the end of autumn, it also offered a vivid soundscape. Oystercatchers fussed on the mudflats. A corvid cackled. Beep-beep-beep went the warning sound of a lorry reversing towards a cargo bay in town. An amplified recording of ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’ wafted from the High Street, where Dolgellau Rotary Club were raising premature Christmas cheer. A jetski thudded on the sea. But none of these pinpricks of human bustle could detract from the mighty calm of a big sea view. Its peace quelled all dissonance. The British Isles are more edge than middle. Our coastline spans 10,800 miles, longer than India’s, and, however far we travel inland, we are never more than seventy miles from the sea. It has protected us from invasion and given us an empire. Our projection of naval power over the globe for a couple of centuries bequeathed us both unimaginable riches and the romantic notion that we are a maritime nation. But we are not, really. Like a typical Briton, I grew up fifteen miles from the sea and spent my childhood holidays on a sandy, windy and occasionally sunny English beach. I can swim but I can’t sail, I’m an appalling surfer, a bad birdwatcher and an enthusiastic coast-path walker. The beach clears my mind and cheers me up. I can’t think of anything I dislike about the coast apart from nuclear power stations. I love old harbours, tacky resorts, big waves, sandy coves, humungous cliffs, oystercatchers, fish-and-chips, flotsam and jetsam, samphire, sunsets – but most of all I love the desolate beaches where I played as a small boy. The first thing I did when I had children of my own was to take them back there; someday, I’d like to retire to a cottage by the sea. In this respect I am a typical member of a coastal nation, happiest 4
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when looking seaward with my feet placed firmly on solid ground. The line between land and sea has become our favourite playground, national park and retirement home. It was not always so. For centuries, the sea was feared, a fickle, destructive god that brought invaders, pestilence and death on a whim. The coast was a place for fishing communities, military fortifications and lawless pirates and smugglers. The Romantics were in awe of its horror and immensity, even as they eulogised its beauty. The rest of us, even the wealthy, stayed away. We turned our backs on the sea until the eighteenth century, when Romantic sentiment and a quackish medical fashion for sea bathing saw prospectors rush to the beach as if the sand were gold, constructing the hotels, promenades, piers and attractions that created Brighton, Blackpool and Barmouth, playgrounds for working people enjoying their newfangled holidays. Time by the sea became an entitlement: in 1829 Dr Arnold, the founder of the public school at Rugby, observed that ‘more than half my boys never saw the sea’ as if it were an essential part of their education that they did. A few weeks’ annual paid leave also came to be regarded as a basic human right and, by 1962, 30 million holidays were spent at the British seaside. The subsequent rise of cheap flights to foreign beaches with guaranteed sunshine caused many traditional resorts to struggle by the 1980s but the economic downturn in the first decade of this century saw a significant increase in domestic holidays, with long-term trends also showing people increasingly inclined to take short breaks on the British coast. Our seaside has always been a place of extremes, of weather and landscape. We are naturally blessed with a greater diversity of types of coastline than perhaps any other nation: spectacular cliffs of granite, chalk, sandstone and a contrasting collection of other geological formations; coves, bars and spits of sand, pebbles and shingle; bays, harbours, promontories, headlands; huge dunes, vast estuaries, marshes and tidal flats. We have the second highest tidal 5
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range in the world (the Severn rises and falls by more than 14 metres; 10 centimetres is typical on the Mediterranean) and the largest shingle promontory in Europe (Dungeness). On this record-breaking topographical variety, we have created places of human extremes; wealthy villas cheek-by-jowl with wilderness. Seaside communities such as Sandbanks in Dorset boast some of the most expensive real estate in Britain; others, such as Easington Colliery on the overlooked Durham coast, are among the most impoverished. Many of the sprawling resorts we built so quickly have been hollowed out by cheap foreign travel, while older communities have been decimated by the decline of traditional shoreline industries like fishing and shipbuilding. Even where tourism is flourishing again, it is an industry incapable of providing many well-waged, year-round jobs, and the coast is lined with holiday properties that sit empty for much of the year, as locals are priced out of a view of the sea. These places of development and deprivation crowd against unexpectedly large sections of ‘natural’ coast. The character of our greenest countryside is almost entirely the result of centuries of human activity but the coast is the last repository of wilderness, in southern England at least. The survival of these untamed shores is often a historical accident but it is also because a handful of local people have fought tenaciously to save their unspoilt character. Gazing at the faint lines traced on the sea where the currents collided in Cardigan Bay, I considered this spectacular, everyday view. The rough hillside of Dinas Oleu would never be a major tourist attraction. It has a lovely name, which means ‘fortress of light’, but it contains no rare plants or archaeological treasures or spectacular rock formations. One thing singles out these four-and-a-half acres for attention: in 1895 Dinas Oleu became the first piece of land to be owned by the National Trust. A humdrum hill above a bucket-and-spade resort that has seen 6
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better days seems an unlikely starting point for a charity inaccurately associated with an upper-class urge to preserve stately homes. But Dinas Oleu is precisely in keeping with the National Trust’s first principles, and it began a conservation campaign that has shaped the character of our shores in the last 120 years more fundamentally than any other human endeavour. I was surprised when I heard that the National Trust owns 742 miles of the 3,000-mile coastline of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Like most people, I had no idea it had played, and continues to play, such a vital role in our coast, and our relationship with it. Fanny Talbot, a moderately wealthy Victorian woman, offered this hill to the putative National Trust because she wanted to ensure the public would always be able to enjoy it by placing it in the hands of ‘some society that will never vulgarise it, or prevent wild nature from having its way’. Octavia Hill, one of the four founders of the Trust, which grew out of the successful movement to save the commons of London, spoke of the importance of having ‘open air sitting rooms for City dwellers to have a place to breathe’. This small patch of land, a beautiful view five minutes from the busy streets of Barmouth, was exactly that. We take our coast for granted, in that we casually view the beach as common land, a playground for the enjoyment of everyone. In almost all areas, the water’s edge is actually owned by the Crown, and administered by the Crown Estates, which chiefly seeks to exploit things like the seabed – selling licences for gravel extraction and windfarms – for financial gain. The people of Britain don’t own any of it, and could be chucked off it at any moment. Lacking any revolutionary fervour to nationalise the shore, to seize it from an aristocratic family whose possession is an accident of their birth, we have instead channelled our desire for an accessible coast into charitable endeavours and, mostly, the National Trust. The Trust may have been born by the sea but its early years were 7
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mostly spent elsewhere. During its first three decades, it only acquired a handful of coastal nature reserves (Barras Nose at Tintagel, Cornwall, Blakeney Point in Norfolk and the Farne Islands in Northumberland), as it focused its activities inland, battling to preserve the Lake District and the Peak District before taking responsibility for saving great stately homes threatened with demolition between the wars. In the spring of 1965, however, the charity turned decisively to our shores. It launched Enterprise Neptune, vowing to raise £2 million (the equivalent of more than £35 million today) to save the most precious portions of coast from rampaging tourism and industry. Envisioned as a temporary campaign, Neptune was so popular it went on and on, to date raising more than £65 million for coastal purchases as well as acquiring many more acres of donated land. The Trust safeguarded 175 miles of coastline in Neptune’s first decade, 99 miles in its second and now protects a total of 742 miles. In effect, the Neptune coast is contemporary common land. Unlike the National Trust’s stately homes, which cost so much to run that they require an admission fee, its coastline can be freely visited by anyone. By law, this land is inalienable: the Trust cannot sell it or give it away, but must manage it on behalf of the nation – for everyone, for ever. Perhaps it is significant that Neptune’s biggest individual donor lives in Derbyshire, the county furthest from the sea. Our bookshelves are groaning under the weight of guides to our coast and the National Trust itself has produced many lovely books about its own seaside estate. I hope to provide something slightly different, and tell a story about our relationship with the coast through exploring the places protected by the Trust. There are universal components to the way humans respond to the sea, but the particularity of Britain’s relationship with the coast fascinates me. Rather than another geographically arranged guide to the seaside, I want to look at the different ways we relate to our shores as children, as adults and at the 8
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end of our lives. I will consider how we grow up by the sea, develop grand passions by it and are inspired to artistic creation on its shores; how the coast can be a theatre of war or a locus of religious pilgrimage; a place of work or an escape from reality. Although any discussion of the British coast should include Scotland, the National Trust in Scotland is a completely separate organisation. Because I am exploring only the landscapes owned or influenced by the National Trust, I am saved from doing Scotland a disservice and condensing its incomparable shores into a small book. Even so, this book, like any encounter with such a vast coastline, must be deeply subjective. I cannot hope to describe every one of Neptune’s 742 miles so I have instead chosen places that have entranced me with their stories. At the end of each chapter, I offer some practical information to encourage everyone to discover these magical places for themselves. As I stood on the sunny hillside of Dinas Oleu, I wondered what the pioneering coastal conservationists would have made of our relationship with the seaside today. The Victorians Fanny Talbot and Octavia Hill would be aghast at the scale and ugliness of many coastal developments – the industrial container ports, the immense oil and gas depots, the sprawling seaside resorts – but they would be amazed by the achievements of the conservation movement they began as well. The founders of Enterprise Neptune would also be surprised: the coast has not been swamped by caravans and ‘shack’ development, as they feared in 1965, and many stretches they judged to be ruined by industry have been reclaimed and recovered. Our impulse to conserve the coast has shaped our shoreline more profoundly than any destructive endeavour over the last half-century. The four-and-a-half acres of Dinas Oleu may be one of the less distinctive pieces of the Neptune coast but it perfectly represents our shores as they are today, for better and for worse. It would be easy to 9
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bash Barmouth as a seaside town in decline. But Dinas Oleu has not been spoiled by the Arousal Cafe or Vegas Amusements. The noise and the aesthetic carelessness of the early twenty-first century would horrify eminent Victorians but here, in Barmouth, human activity was low-key enough to be held in balance by the residual beauty of the place and the generosity of the sea, the beach and the sky. It was only a short climb but we don’t need much to gain a liberating sense of perspective. I descended ‘the Fortress of Light’ completely refreshed by half-an-hour there, exactly as Octavia Hill had intended. One gift the coast will never fail to provide is a sense that we are small and the world is wide; that it is unchanging while we scurry about; that our time is short but the waves and the rocks have all the time in the world. This should leave us diminished and scared, but somehow it doesn’t. We are put in our place, and can view our hopes, triumphs, failures and anxieties as the ephemeral things they truly are.
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Explorations of Neptune The short, steep walk up to Dinas Oleu exemplifies Octavia Hill’s vision of outdoor sitting rooms – green spaces, accessible to everyone, close to towns. Many people would not give Barmouth a second glance but it has plenty of charm, a gorgeous beach and a stunning position overlooking Cardigan Bay. Park by the beach (or take the scenic Cambrian Coast railway), cross the railway line by the station and walk up Beach Road. Turn right onto the High Street and look for a tiny lane on your left. Follow it up the hill and five minutes’ exertion earns a glorious, almost aerial view of the coast from the first piece of land ever protected by the National Trust. Take a maze of little paths through the gorse, and you will find a rock engraved with a typically Victorian poem by Canon Rawnsley, one of the Trust’s founders, celebrating the ‘ocean’s wild infinitude’. The hillside is also home to ‘The Frenchman’s Grave’, the resting place of Auguste Guyard, a visionary philosopher who was given a home in a model community in Barmouth established by the social reformer John Ruskin. OS Map Explorer OL18 Harlech, Porthmadog & Y Bala Nearest railway station Barmouth, 1/4 mile
Further Reading Nicholas Crane, Coast: Our Island Story, BBC Books, 2010 Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood, The Fabled Coast, Random House, 2012 Jonathan Raban, Coasting, Collins Harvill, 1986 Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea, Penguin, 1983
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