The Restless Coast E-Book

Roger Morgan-Grenville

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The island of Britain has over 10,000 miles of coastline, steeped in history and constantly shifting, changing, adapting and providing. The Restless Coast is a moving and beautiful account of a journey around it, during which the author travels its length to discover its challenges and opportunities, and to talk to the people trying to protect it. At once delightful travelogue and passionate defence, The Restless Coast shines a powerful spotlight into the thin line that surrounds us, and defines our status as islanders. Overarching the journey is the extraordinary natural history of the coastline, together with the story of how man has imprinted himself on its very geology and shape for countless centuries. Into the account, Roger Morgan-Grenville threads the modern challenges that the shoreline faces, and the people who are trying to protect it. At once informative, angry and funny, The Restless Coast is a very personal love letter to our island edge.

Leseprobe

Praise for Across a Waking Land

‘This book is an open-hearted, humble and gritty adventure with a deep love of nature at its heart. It takes courage to walk alone across the land, and it takes passionate curiosity to find out what lies behind the green fields of Britain. Roger Morgan-Grenville possesses these qualities, they shine through every page. Across a Waking Land is a masterful interweaving of personal endeavour with the big conservation challenges of Britain today. I loved it.’

MARY COLWELL, author of Curlew Moon

‘Beautifully captures the essence of a British spring’

Birdwatcher Magazine

‘Prescient, perceptive and powerful: an articulate and thoughtful account of nature’s increasingly fragile state, experienced through an advancing spring.’

TIM BIRKHEAD, author of Birds and Us

Praise for Taking Stock

‘Funny, insightful and hugely informative … a charming book’

Daily Mail

‘Tremendous … We all need to take stock, and this is the ideal starting point. I learnt a lot from this book and laughed a lot too.’

ROSAMUND YOUNG, author of The Secret Life of Cows

‘Stylishly locates the importance of the cow in absolutely everything from finance … to future food. [A] first-prize rosette for this paean to the wonderful cow, Man’s other best friend.’

JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL, Country Life

‘A lyrical and evocative book’

Daily Express

‘No cow could ever hope for a better appreciation of its truly unique worth.’

BETTY FUSSELL, author of Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef

‘An epic story told with warmth, wit and humanity. Will make us feel differently about these long-suffering animals.’

GRAHAM HARVEY, author of Grass-Fed Nation

Praise for Shearwater

‘This charming and impassioned book meanders, shearwater-like, across a lifetime and a world, a rich tribute to an extraordinary bird drawn through tender memoir and dauntless travel.’

HORATIO CLARE, author of A Single Swallow and Heavy Light

‘Shearwater is sheer delight, a luminous portrait of a magical seabird which spans the watery globe’

Daily Mail

‘This is wonderful: written with light and love. A tonic for these times.’

STEPHEN RUTT, author of The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds

‘What I love about Roger Morgan-Grenville’s writing is the sheer humanness of it … Bravo – a truly lovely book.’

MARY COLWELL, author of Curlew Moon

‘Shearwater is a delightful and informative account of a lifelong passion for seabirds, as the author travels around the globe in pursuit of these enigmatic creatures.’

STEPHEN MOSS, naturalist and author of The Swallow: A Biography

‘A captivating mix of memoir, travel and ornithological obsession … A book not just for seabirders or island-addicts, but for all who have ever gazed longingly out to sea and pondered vast possibilities and connections.’

BBC Wildlife magazine

‘A beautiful mix of memoir and natural history … entirely infectious.’

Scottish Field

Praise for Liquid Gold

‘A great book. Painstakingly researched, but humorous, sensitive and full of wisdom. I’m on the verge of getting some bees as a consequence of reading the book.’

CHRIS STEWART, author of Driving Over Lemons

‘A light-hearted account of midlife, a yearning for adventure, the plight of bees, the quest for “liquid gold” and, above all, friendship.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Liquid Gold is a book that ignites joy and warmth’

MARY COLWELL, author of Curlew Moon

‘Beekeeping builds from lark to revelation in this carefully observed story of midlife friendship. Filled with humour and surprising insight, Liquid Gold is as richly rewarding as its namesake. Highly recommended.’

THOR HANSON, author of Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

‘Behind the self-deprecating humour, Morgan-Grenville’s childlike passion for beekeeping lights up every page. His bees are a conduit to a connection with nature that lends fresh meaning to his life. His bee-keeping, meanwhile, proves both a means of escape from the grim state of the world and a positive way of doing something about it. We could probably all do with some of that.’

DIXE WILLS, BBC Countryfile magazine

‘Both humorous and emotionally affecting … Morgan-Grenville’s wry and thoughtful tale demonstrates why an item many take for granted should, in fact, be regarded as liquid gold.’

Publishers Weekly

By the same author

Across a Waking Land (Icon, 2023)

Taking Stock: A Journey Among Cows (Icon, 2022)

Shearwater: A Bird, An Ocean, And a Long Way Home (Icon, 2021)

Liquid Gold: Bees and the Pursuit of Midlife Honey (Icon, 2020)

Unlimited Overs (Quiller, 2019)

Not Out of the Woods (Bikeshed Books, 2018)

Not Out First Ball (Benefactum Press, 2013)

 

For Tom and Alex, with much love and in the hope that you will discover for yourselves the full range of wonders of your ancestral coastline a few decades earlier than your father managed.

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-144-2

ebook: 978-183773-146-6

Text copyright © 2025 Roger Morgan-Grenville

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

Appointed GPSR EU Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218

Address: Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, Estonia

Contact Details: [email protected], [phone]

CONTENTS

Prologue: An End, and a Beginning

PART 1: WATER

1The Blue Anthropocene Coast

PART 2: SOUTHERLY

2A Salmon Dilemma: Sutherland and the Outer Isles

3The Honey Pot Island: The Sea Eagles of Mull

4Restoring the Commons: First Aid for Seabeds in Argyll and Beyond

5Art, Activism, and a brief introduction to Nature Conflict

6The Lost Kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod: Cardigan Bay

PART 3: EASTERLY

7The Sea as Bringer: The South West Coast

8A Bay of Sewage and Sex-changing Fish

9Three feet high, and Rising

PART 4: NORTHERLY

10A Wild Goose Chase: In Search for Abundance

11The Shrinking Caravan Coast: East Yorkshire

12Dead Crabs on a Troubled Shoreline: North Yorkshire and Teesside

13Black-eyed Gannets and the Power of Hope: Northumberland

14Salar: North-east Scotland

Epilogue: Dunnet Head

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

PROLOGUE: AN END, AND A BEGINNING

‘The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world.’

Henry David Thoreau

This story found life in the shadow of a lighthouse.

It was late spring, and I had just finished walking for 55 days up the 1,000-mile spine of Britain from the Solent on the south coast to the north-west corner of Scotland; I was resting against a wall at Cape Wrath, eating a damp cheese and pickle sandwich and watching the tireless fulmars.1 Tireless fulmars are good things to watch when you, yourself, are tired; their rapid rising and falling among the updraughts and eddies of the cliff air creates their own energy, a tiny part of which it is easy to imagine transferring to you. Oddly, the feeling of accomplishment that might reasonably have been expected to stir in someone middle-aged after such a long walk had been instead hijacked by the sense of a something not finished, of there somehow being more to come. For a while, I just put it down to the faint grief that inevitably attends the end of any long journey, but the sight of a little yacht far below, butting its brave way through the swell and out towards the Orkney Islands, and then a separate one, a fishing boat, turning south towards Kinlochbervie, said something entirely different. It talked of new journeys, and of this moment being only halfway at best. It talked of the coast.

Contrary to what most of us might logically assume, that the ‘wrath’ in Cape Wrath refers to the local anger of the stormy weather and violent seas around it, it actually derives from the old Norse word for ‘turning point’. And, as it was for the Vikings, resetting the sails of their longships for the southerly voyage down the indented western shores of ‘Bretland’, so it became for me. Deep down, so deep that it took me a good six months to come to fully acknowledge it myself, it was calling for me to one day turn on my heel and follow that fishing boat down the coast as far as she and her inshore fellows would lead me. All the way round the south coast and back to the north coast, maybe. This tattered, watery edge of my otherwise tinder dry world hid a fresh world of cliffs and coves, ferries and fishing villages, salt marshes and salmon farms, all awaiting discovery. As Robinson Crusoe found out, to understand your island a bit better, you first have to understand what surrounds it.

It is all but pointless to expect a journey to provide definitive answers to specific questions, and anyway, that’s not really the point of them. I wasn’t looking for comprehensive answers, so much as a better understanding of how my coastline worked, what threatened it and what people were doing about it. By seeking the answer, we assume that there is a clear ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’, which there generally isn’t, and we over-narrow the frames of reference of the trip, and thus stop being inquisitive. And if we stop being inquisitive, we might as well just hurry to the destination as quickly as possible and hope that the weather is good and the views agreeable. Better instead just to travel and let the miles tell you whatever story they will. Then, if you walk enough miles, you’ll know more than you did when you started, and care more, and want to do more.

A while after my return home from Cape Wrath and back in downland Sussex, I stuck a large map of Britain up on the wall of the room where I do my writing, because that’s how and where adventures begin, with clean maps and a blank canvas. Lines from various sharpies started to appear on its laminated surface over the next few weeks until there were thirteen of them spaced around the whole length of the coast,2 with small orange, blue and yellow sticky circles placed along them at varying intervals denoting things that I particularly wanted to see. Thirteen different coastal foot journeys, then, over the course of twelve months, to allow me to know a little better the thin liminal ribbon of sand, rock, mud, marsh and grass that separates our island from the ocean beyond, and the people who live and work there. From the seafood that we harvest from its estuaries and bays to the power we harness from above its offshore shelves, from the warming and rising of its seas to the steady erosion of its moveable coastline, there are things happening wherever you look, and always there are people to tell their stories.

A hundred million years ago, the spot on the earth’s surface where I am now standing was the southern tip of Greenland; a hundred million more, and it was Greenland’s northern tip, another hundred, this was water somewhere off Alaska, and finally, half a billion years ago, I would be treading water right in the middle of the largest body of sea the planet has ever seen. To watch a time lapse reconstruction of the movement of the tectonic plates beneath us is to see the movement of land masses on an unthinkable scale, and you are either the sort of person who is delighted or overawed by the fact that we are moving still, and at the same rate. I know my journey cannot be through deep time, but it is good for my humility to understand the cosmic insignificance in space and time represented by one middle-aged man walking on and off for a year or so around the coastline of his island home.

What followed was a journey of discovery, of anger, of inspiration and of hope. It involved almost every coastal county in Britain, just under 2,000 miles of walking and hundreds of bus, train and ferry trips. I even rediscovered hitch-hiking after a gap of 40 years. Joyfully, cars were rarely involved, as they generally make lousy companions on solo linear walks. Besides, you don’t need £4 and someone’s permission to park your feet.

I would start, I decided, on World Ocean Day at the very lighthouse where I had finished the last journey.3 And then I would just see what happened.

1 A story told in Across a Waking Land. Icon Books, 2023.

2 This is the eternal unanswered question: how do you measure a coastline? The Ordnance Survey figure for the mainland of Britain is 17,819 km, and that is good enough for me.

3 8 June 2023

PART 1

WATER

THE BLUE ANTHROPOCENE COAST

1

An Introduction

‘No water, no life. No blue, no green.’

Sylvia Earle, US Marine Biologist

In 1972, as part of the final Apollo mission, one of the most iconic images of all time was captured. We call it the Blue Marble. This snapshot of the world, taken from outer space, is now seen as a pivotal moment in helping people understand the sheer fragility and isolation of our home. But humanity’s understanding of blue as a distinct colour arrived relatively late; surprisingly, given their seemingly endless coastline, the ancient Greeks had no word for blue, and no real concept of it. For that matter, and for a long time, nor did anyone else.

It was not until 431 CE, when the Catholic church got round to colour-coding the saints and just happened to dress the Virgin Mary in a blue robe, that blue finally became accepted as a proper colour, just as red, green, black and white had been accepted for millennia.1 It was so costly to produce artificially that, even then, it would then take another 1,000 years for mainstream art to fully accept and utilise it. And yet blue is the most prevalent colour by far of our planet, because three-quarters of its surface is water. The blue of this water is the dominant shade that we reflect back when seen from space, but it is also a tricky colour, almost ephemeral at times. Because we perceive blue at a short wavelength, it scatters before it arrives, almost as if it gets lost. Blue is another world.

Within the blue ocean’s depths are thought to be contained around 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of salt water or, to put it another way, 95 per cent of all the available habitat on our planet.2 The sea’s presence just happens to be what makes life on our planet possible, and from it all life on earth originally arose. Within its depths, countless tiny phytoplankton produce, as a biproduct of photosynthesis, much of the oxygen that will eventually allow us to breathe. At the same time, the sun heats the sea water, which evaporates and condenses to form clouds which then become the precipitation that waters our crops and slakes our thirsts; a trillion tons of it are evaporated from the surface of the oceans, each and every day.3 Moreover, the largest proportion of protein that we as a species eat still comes from the seafood that we harvest from or grow in its depths. ‘The ocean,’ as one scientist phrased it, ‘is an engine for converting sunlight into movement and life and complexity, before the universe reclaims the loan.’4

We may be land creatures, but we are utterly reliant on the salt water around us. Indeed, according to one anthropological theory, by surgeon and amateur evolutionary biologist Peter Rhys Evans, our evolution may have been rather more associated with coastal waters than we think, and that it is not for nothing that we became hairless apes with variable skin colours, strange inner ear bones and the unique ability to hold our breath.5 For a land mammal, our unusual taste for a protein source from a different element to our own suggests, at the very least, a deep cultural connection with what lies offshore. Either way, the sea defines us, and water is, according to the most famous polymath of all, ‘the driving force of all nature’.6

Although the sea is one continuous body of water, we have traditionally divided it for convenience into four principal oceans. On the swirling, north-eastern edge of one, the Atlantic, our little archipelago is an almost insignificant outpost, no more than 0.05 per cent of the surface area of the earth. And, depending on where you draw the line on the definition of ‘island’, our principal island is surrounded by around 6,300 smaller ones, as well as the islets, skerries and rocks that make up what is the twelfth longest national coastline in the world. When you multiply the length of our coast by its great tidal range, we probably have more intertidal area than any other country on earth. Just about every drop of rain that falls on our fields, and each breath of wind that cools us, is influenced by our being an island, and generally as a result of what goes on over the western horizon. And perhaps the most influential of all those things going on is the 60-mile-wide horizontal column of warm water that is, for now, winding its way towards us at about five miles per hour across the Atlantic; because of the Gulf Stream, our climate is perpetually mild, and our winters are more like Memphis than Moscow.

Our reputation for talking incessantly about the weather is often overstated,7 but it is rooted in the waves around us. Because of the shape of our country, no one in it can be more than 45 miles from tidal water, and only that much if they happen to be in the village of Coton in the Elms, in Derbyshire. There is almost no part of our island story that does not have roots in the sea around us. We are, to paraphrase one of our more distinguished post-war politicians,8 simply ‘a lump of coal surrounded by fish’. But, before you get to the fish, you get to the coast.

We tend to see the coastline between our land and that ocean as something permanent, yet it is anything but, not least because the whole island group has been inching itself northwards on its long voyage from what is now Antarctica for at least the last 600 million years. Even today, it is not just Brexit that is pulling us away from Europe; in a metaphor rich with political irony, our landmass is heading west towards America, although not quite as fast as America is heading away from us. The great storms that batter our western edges are obvious agents of erosion and change, as is the water that our river systems bring to the sea, but there are far more powerful and subtle dynamic forces at work, too. Most of us are blissfully unaware that, while one part of our main island (the north and western bit) is still springing gently ever higher in isostatic reaction to the weight of ice it lost fifteen millennia ago,9 the opposite, south-eastern, part is actually sinking into its own compacting clay at the rate of about five centimetres a century.10 When you add this shrinking phenomenon to a sea level that is set to rise as a direct result of the warming climate by a not so gradual centimetre every three years, you can accurately predict the slow inundation of a swathe of the east coast, and the reappearance of salt water in the streets of cities as far apart as Gloucester and Glasgow. Cardiff and London are assessed to be third and seventh respectively on the list of large cities on earth that are most vulnerable to the rising sea.11 The Thames Barrier, originally designed to be raised a couple of times a year, is in reality raised three times that amount already. On the Holderness Plain in Yorkshire, erosion sees to it that roads that once went somewhere now come to a yawning halt on clifftops above a sea that is chewing up around two metres of land a year.

There is much that we still don’t know, but we can say for certain that our island is still changing shape and doing so at a geological warp speed; so much so that, according to a 2022 report from the Environment Agency, not far off a quarter of a million of our homes will need to be abandoned in the next thirty years, and double that number of people will be displaced. This is not entirely surprising. After all, we weren’t even an island 10,000 years ago and, since then, the water around us has risen, in a process that predates any fixed notion of climate change, by over 30 metres, which is well over half the height of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. This sinking feeling is not new alarmism, so much as a relentless natural process way beyond our power to influence. Our planet is older than we care to think, and our part in it no more than a slight clearing of the throat in its long story: if we think of the history of the Earth in terms of a 24-hour clock, the dinosaur extinction event took place 21 minutes ago, and all our own written history is compacted into the last tenth of a second.12

Far from being a single entity, our long coastline plays host to a wide variety of different habitats, each one a sensitive miracle of natural diversity and variety. Mudflats that arise from eons of settling silt brought by rivers from the land further inshore, and are teeming with worms, snails and bivalves; saltmarshes that host up to 150 unique species of invertebrates and help prevent our villages from flooding; machair dune grassland with its corncrakes and twites; lagoons, rocks, shingle and the towering weather-battered cliffs and stacks of the north that give a home only to lichens and dense colonies of seabirds. We have even created habitats of our own, such as our coastal cities, or the Wallasea Island Wild Coast project in Essex, where the three million tons of London earth that has been extracted for Crossrail has created a new 700-hectare wildlife reserve of mudflat, saltmarsh and grassland, butting out into the sea. And yet there is a remorseless shrinking of available intertidal habitat going on, caused by coastal squeeze, a process through which mudflats and saltmarsh are lost to erosion and higher sea levels, but where the presence of coastal defences are preventing new habitats developing.13

Out in the sea and below our horizon, even the most bullish trawlerman would struggle to argue that the last century had been a good one for the fish numbers in our waters. Compare and contrast the record-breaking year of 1911, when over a billion herring were decanted onto the docksides of East Anglia, with the situation now, when ‘there are only two or three local fishermen working the sea there’, and where ‘the one remaining smokehouse processes herrings caught by Norwegians to be exported to Northern Europe’.14 Unbelievably, our island nation still manages to be a net importer of fish, with 270,000 tons more coming in than we ship out.15 As for herring, so for cod, salmon and sole: we eat more than it is in the gift of the ocean to provide us with. And, as for fish, so for invertebrates, mammals and birds. The kindest that could be said is that we have not been good custodians of the sea that we were given dominion over.

And imagine that, in that same sea, twice a day, every day, a giant body of salt water,16 slow and irresistible, arrives at the Scilly Isles, off the west coast of Cornwall, and splits in two. One part rolls up the western coast, turns east at the top of Scotland and then heads down the eastern shore until, somewhere off the Thames Estuary, it meets with the other half, which has come up the English Channel. Then it turns around and retreats again the way it came. We may see it creeping inexorably up harbour walls in Cornish fishing villages, racing across the mud flats of Morecambe Bay or insinuating itself deftly into the finger-like creeks of the North Norfolk seaboard but, wherever we do, we will see it doing this with a greater range and energy than almost anywhere else in the world.17 Then, a few hours later, we note again its retreat, carrying in its eddies and backwaters tiny traces of physical witness to our inland human impact, before it returns six hours later to start the adventure all over again. We call this hydraulic process the tide, and from its actions and bounty stem many of the thousands of ongoing biological processes and food chains that deliver to us the extraordinary plant, insect, fish, bird and mammal life that delights and sustains us. As Canute demonstrated to his sycophantic courtiers a thousand years ago, these are the living breaths of the ocean which even a king is powerless to hold back.18 Even industrial man. Even us.

Often, because so much of what happens on the edgelands between land and sea is hidden from us by the dark water, we hardly know about our coast, or seem to care much about it. Maybe this is because our predisposition is to fear the unfamiliar element around us, and therefore consciously not want to discover too much about it, and risk disturbing the brooding magic. And it is a delicious fear, a fear that is woven into the very culture and metaphors of our grounded lives: ‘we look to dry land, try to remain grounded, and we hope for plain sailing in the days to come’.19 It is a fear of whirlpools and sea monsters, predators and poisoned barbs, a fear of the unseen five miles of mysterious danger below us in the unlikely event that we find ourselves treading water in the middle of the ocean. But it is also high adventure. Wherever we are on the coast, the proximity of the ever-changing sea constantly reminds us of what we are not, which is in control: around 250 us around these islands meet our end in its insistent, salty embrace each year,20 and it is not for nothing that the ghosts of over 37,000 shipwrecks punctuate our coastline.21

These days, apart from those who make their homes and their living there, the coastal settlements sometimes seem to have become little more than places for the rest of us to go and lie on the sand, hold conferences and stag weekends and visit heritage museums. You hear the words ‘used to be’ a good deal in British seaside towns. It is as if we have taken those saucy postcards, piers and ice cream vans as the seaside’s true leitmotif, and built our expectations of it from them. In stark contrast to many other coastal nations, wealth and enterprise have leaked away from the coast and been largely replaced by old people, low wages and poverty, other than the very best houses, which tend to be owned by faraway money. Granted, the more energetic of us occasionally tramp by foot from settlement to settlement along its wonderful coastal paths, but the vast majority will arrive and leave by car and train, that is if they haven’t already flown off to lie in the sun by some other country’s ocean. If we are not careful, we can start to see the seaside more as a mere source of entertainment and heritage than the life force it truly is, more a museum of the heady days of sexual licence and experimentation than a functioning modern community with the need for a future. As important as anything, the people who live on that coast, and who still strive to make a living around it, need to be able to fashion sustainable futures that involve more than a few temporary seasonal jobs in seaside pubs, or vulnerable jobs in a declining fishing industry.

From our own point of view, our role as islanders makes us bold and independently minded; seen from our neighbours on occasion, it makes us moody and treacherous. Whatever shade of that is true, it is also what our lives happen to be built on. And, in whatever fashion those lives happen to be built, the coast almost always exhales a sense of adventure and anticipation: from pirate stories to fish and chips, there is something for everyone.

For good or ill, it is we humans who are increasingly shaping that coast around the folds and pleats of the way we live. This chapter is called ‘the Anthropocene Coast’ in informal acknowledgement of this unofficial geological era in which we are now said to be living, which is itself derived from the Greek words for ‘man’ and ‘new’.22 It reflects the idea that the eight billion of us are now cumulatively such influential residents of the planet that we as a single species are starting to change its very future geology, through our contribution to ecosystem and climate change, pollution and species loss, let alone the cleanliness and health of its surface. If you were to narrow the effects of this influence down to our own tiny corner of the world, you would see it everywhere: in the poisoned shellfish and in the phosphates draining out of our agricultural rivers; in the deep-water ports and the crumbling man-made sea defences; in the depleted seagrass meadows and the barren seabeds below our salmon farms. Perhaps our biggest challenge is that, somewhere out there behind both the headlines and the headlands, our coastal waters are warming at an alarming rate, and so are the rivers that feed into them.

And yet we also need to remind ourselves of the good we do, and try to do, too, the beauty we have created and the sanctuary that we have started to provide in, for example, our much-argued over Marine Protection Areas and No-Take Zones. If we start to see it all as a lost cause, then how can we possibly expect our children to get out there and finish anything we have started? We have brought back the white-tailed sea eagle to its skies, the blue-finned tuna to its waters, and we have helped the rare natterjack toad to cling on for a new tomorrow. We farm sheep on Ramsey Island just to give the beleaguered chough a continuing toehold and we have restored dynamic dunescapes in North Devon that have brought back flowers not seen for half a century. Through rat eradication programmes, we have brought burrow-breeding seabirds back to islands from St Agnes to the Shiants. Humpback whales have recently been seen in Liverpool Bay for the first time since 1938, and otters regularly swim up the Mersey. We should celebrate the rivers such as that one and the Thames, which are cleaner now than they have been since before the Industrial Revolution, and let these little advances inform us all how much more we could achieve, and how quickly, if we have the mind to. It is as if the coast, that ribbon of delight stitched for ever around our lives, has only now become a live and exciting subject, something that we have the power to alter for the good.

Finally, we need to remember that the coast should be, and in recent times has been, a place for the visitor to breathe in uncomplicated joy. It may be that in the re-finding of that joy we discover some of the answers as to how to allow it to thrive in the future.

1 Interestingly, it was a further thousand years before the colour orange was described in isolation.

2The High Seas. Olive Heffernan. Profile Books. 2024.

3 From Blue Machine, by Helen Czerski. A powerful and beautifully written scientific guide to the hidden world of the world’s oceans.

4 Ibid.

5The Waterside Ape: An Alternative Account of Human Evolution. Peter Rhys-Evans. CRC Press. 2020.

6 Leonardo da Vinci

7 Anecdotally, the Scandinavians do it far more than the British.

8 Aneurin (Nye) Bevan MP (1897–1960). What he then went on to say was that ‘only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time’.

9 Although the MCCIP 2020 report card indicated that, for the first time, sea level rise was outstripping the vertical land movement.

10 Compare this with Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, where some areas have reportedly subsided 16 feet in the last 25 years (Bloomberg).

11 Earth.org

12Otherlands. Thomas Halliday

13Coastal Adaptation to Benefit Wildlife. Ausden et al. British Wildlife. Dec 2023.

14Silver Shoals. Charles Rangely-Wilson

15 UK Sea Fisheries statistics 2019

16 The salt which makes up on average 3 per cent of sea water comes from a variety of sources, including from eroding rocks, and from vents and salt domes on the seabed (National Ocean Service). Only rainwater lacks any salt at all.

17 The tidal range in the Severn Estuary is a full fifteen metres, second only in the world to the Bay of Fundy in Canada.

18 Anyone who has experienced the joy of watching Knots foraging on, and almost against, the incoming tide, will readily understand why their Latin name is calidris canutus.

19The Draw of the Sea. Wyl Menmuir. 2022

20www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com

21 Historic England.

22 In March 2024 scientists rejected the idea that there is now enough evidence to suggest that nuclear weapons testing, fossil fuel burning, and overexploitation have pushed us into this new era, even though they have often voted on candidate sites to represent Anthropocene’s birthplace in case they eventually agree that there is.

PART 2

SOUTHERLY

A SALMON DILEMMA: SUTHERLAND AND THE OUTER ISLES

2

Early June

‘The aim of argument should not be victory, but progress’

Karl Popper

A handful of miles from Cape Wrath, at the north-west tip of Great Britain, lies Sandwood Bay. It is a stretch of sand and dunescape of almost cliched beauty and remoteness.

Words and pictures generally fall short in describing it to others, so it is perhaps best just to go there yourself once in your lifetime, and to sit alone for an hour or so on one of the giant machairdunes behind it, drink it all in without overthinking it, and just let it thread into you whatever memories and emotions you happen to be receptive to. Anyway, if you have come from anywhere but Sutherland, it has taken you days to arrive here, so you should probably give it the time it deserves. Your attention might be drawn to the Shepherd (Am Buachaille), an unfeasibly tall and isolated sea stack out to the south, or to the ochre colour of the sand, or the rippling blue wildness stretching away up to Cape Wrath. It really doesn’t matter. If you allow it to, and especially if you put the phone and the camera back into your pack where they belong, it is communicating directly with a part of you that is beyond thought, the part that admits to being awed. Breathe deep. In a fast-moving and fragile world that demands our complicit 24-hour attention and anxiety, it is uncomplicated wonder, and it is a nature cure. It seems as permanent as the stars.

But on that hot afternoon in June, I start to learn that this permanence is perhaps illusory. I have walked to Sandwood over the unforgiving moorland from Cape Wrath, and it has taken me some time to notice that something is adrift. I have been here before a few times, which means that there is an expectation loosely based on those memories, but it is an expectation that goes unfulfilled. Things that are missing are inevitably harder to spot than the things that are in front of you. For sure, there is much to delight: a little rock sculpture on the sand, the pink of the thrift and the yellow of the trefoil, the colourful tents of some wild campers above the dunes, and an old arthritic man walking his equally old arthritic spaniel along the tideline. There is the sultry song of the waves washing onto the sand, and a distant fishing boat that butts its way through the choppier offshore seas to its home at Kinlochbervie. High above, there are the contrails of a jet on its polar route to America, a journey that may be completed in not much more time than it has taken me to walk here from Cape Wrath. Then it dawns on me: the thing that is missing is birds. Where I might have expected raucous gulls and kittiwakes at the lighthouse, some foraging fulmars off the low cliffs, bustling cormorants at the bay and – a little further out – the brilliant white torpedo shapes of diving gannets, there is only the quiet of emptiness, the last knockings of a silent season. There are none anywhere to be seen. Gone also are the soaring flight songs of the lapwings from the moor, the restless piping of the oystercatchers from the sea rocks, the skylark. When the seabirds stop crying, it is as if the summer has lost its voice.

Away from the windswept ocean greyness for which their colouring has largely evolved, seabirds are easy to spot, being generally large and dominantly countershaded with white or black, and often operating in noisy groups. If they are around, you will almost certainly see or hear them. But if they aren’t, you are slowly drawn into an ecology lesson, which leads inexorably to questions about our stewardship of this planet. Seabirds are good indicators, which means that through their shifting populations and changing behaviours, we can learn much about their entire ecosystems, and what we might have done to them. From the 12 million tons of plastics that find their way each year into our oceans,1 to the rapidly warming sea around our island; from the depleted fish stocks,2 to the man-made diseases that decimate their colonies from time to time, seabirds call plaintively to us to change our ways.3 Sixty years ago, 1.5 billion of them made this call; these days, it is nearer 500 million. Extrapolate that into the middle distance, and you arrive in silence sooner rather than later. As an island of infinite variety, we are still rich in breeding seabirds – we have about 80 per cent of the world’s Manx shearwaters and 56 per cent of its gannets4 – but their continued presence here is not a given.

Of course, even as I heed the silence, I know in my heart that they will be back, that this is just a freak moment in time, a foreshadowing of the worst of avian flu, a coming together of both temporary and permanent absences to create a momentarily silent sky. Yet it comes as an uncomfortable foretaste, for silence is not in the nature of the coast. To any naturalist, silence calls out louder than the noisiest kittiwake colony.

And perhaps no silence articulates more precisely the scale of our nature challenge than that of the gulls, and no place better illustrates this at the start of my journey than the ribbon of coast between our land and the wild blue yonder across the horizon.

A good proportion of the environmental problems that we face start with the food decisions we make or that are made for us. To satisfy our national hunger (the hunger from which 60 million of us will each try to eat 35 tons of food in our lifetimes, and waste a third of it), we need to have access to a vast amount of supplies. For this, half a million of us work in a national food industry in which about 55 per cent of produce is home grown,5 and the rest imported from all around the world. Our 200,000 farms cover just under three-quarters of our land and are by far the most influential factor in how much nature will be around for our children to enjoy. Most of us are uninterested in the massive production and supply chains that lead to our dinner plates, and surprisingly relaxed about who we give our food money to. Other things divert us more easily. Phones, for example, and holidays abroad. A cynic might say that a country that delegates its national food policy to a handful of powerful supermarkets gets roughly what it deserves – a reliable supply of cheap, not very good food, sourced in an efficient but not very fair way. In politics, food and the environment always seem to come in a distant tenth to the imperative of being re-elected, a phenomenon that, in Scotland, often smells of fish.

That night, I treat myself to salmon for the first time in many years. My body says that I need some protein, and I am in the heartland of farmed salmon, so the food miles are theoretically close to zero. Besides, I used to love it before I gave it up.

Salmon farming, in principle, is much like any livestock farming, in that you breed a captive population of stock as fast as practically possible on its way to the human food chain. The captive stock, in the case of salmon, is in a process of endless selection for fast growth, and is contained in a netted pen (generally around 25–50 metres deep and 50 metres or so in diameter), which is located within tidal water that, theoretically, cleans the waste away every few hours. Generally fed on pellets containing a mix of vegetable and fish oil, the salmon grow to their marketable weight of around 4 kilos in somewhere under 2 years.

While there is evidence that humans have been farming fish in China for close to 5,000 years, salmon farming is a relatively new industry in Britain. From its humble beginnings on a small farm in Loch Ailort, Inverness-shire, in 1971, the extraordinary growth of aquaculture in Scotland has mirrored in an accidental way the equally extraordinary decline of wild fish out in the ocean. The predictability and safety involved in farming protein, as opposed to hunting it, makes a great deal of sense, on the face of it, and we have been doing it for 10,000 years. In the five decades since 1971, salmon farming has become huge business, stretching up Scotland’s west coast like a 400-mile long necklace, from Arran in the south to the Shetland Islands in the north: 1 farm has become 213,6 14 tons has become 205,000,7 and a handful of jobs has grown into around 2,000.8 At roughly the same time, 1,220 tons of rod-caught wild Atlantic salmon in 1983 has become about a tenth of that;9 indeed, in December 2023, the once plentiful Atlantic Salmon joined 157,190 other creatures on the IUCN Red List,10 informally an extinction watch. Farmed salmon, who contribute £760 million to the Scottish economy each year,11 are now the UK’s biggest food export and are a highly nutritious and lowish carbon food source.12 And it’s not just salmon: aquaculture as an industry in Scotland also includes rainbow trout, oysters, mussels and scallops, not to mention freshwater hatcheries, across maybe 400 different sites.13 These days, there is also a growing industry emanating from the harvesting of seaweed, that extraordinary and prolific coastal survivor that has evolved to thrive both in the wet and the dry, and in salt water and fresh. By any standards, aquaculture is a remarkable financial success story.

It is equally remarkable, then, just how viscerally salmon farming has come to be opposed, with criticism ranging from shocking welfare to antibiotic overuse, and seabed damage to the infection of wild salmon with sea lice. Indeed, there is a positive alphabet soup of pressure groups working on the matter, to the extent that occasionally calls to mind Life of Brian’s People’s Front of Judea sketch.14 ‘Salmon farming has lost its social licence, for some reason,’ said one industry figure to me. ‘Well under a quarter of the people in Scotland actually oppose it, but the activists have become a very powerful and well-coordinated lobby.’ To be fair, they probably need to be powerful and well-coordinated these days: most of the small players in this industry have either closed or been absorbed into the large ones, whose far-reaching interests are keenly defended by their industry body, Salmon Scotland, or Salmon Norway, as critics often refer to it. There is nothing wrong per se in foreign ownership of businesses, but the extent to which Norwegian companies control Scottish farmed salmon is remarkable, including by far the largest of them, MOWI.

An influential campaign called Off the Table is asking chefs and restaurants to pledge not to serve farmed salmon to their guests.15 Meanwhile, in October 2023, the campaigning group WildFish submitted a letter to the Competition and Markets Authority over the industry’s claims to be sustainable, which they dispute, and the industry’s plan to change its protected name from ‘Scottish Farmed Salmon’ to ‘Scottish Salmon’, which they consider misleading.16 And yet, in comparison, the broiler chicken industry, which produces 37,000 jobs and almost 1.1 billion birds in often highly questionable and polluting conditions, seems almost to get away without comment. Ditto pigs and often cattle.

It is partly to try to find an answer to the question ‘should I be eating this stuff at all?’ that I am walking down the West Sutherland coastline, home to a raft of these offshore farms. After all, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has told us that, to protect the land, we need to derive more protein from the sea which, in default of anything else, means more farms. We humans eat 180 million tons of seafood a year, which makes fish still by far the main source of protein for the world’s population.17

For a while, I stare at the pink salmon steak on my white plate, and idly wonder at the basic strangeness of its life; how one of the world’s great cold water migratory predators has been reduced to swimming around a small, circular tank of warmish seawater with a couple of hundred thousand competitors, and where one big farm can hold more fish than the entire global population of wild Atlantic salmon.18 A fish that, when wild, is genetically matched to one specific river, must be at the very least confused by a circular pen. A fish that in order to conform with market expectations might have both carotenoids and oily fish added to the feed, for colouring and Omega 3 respectively, is not necessarily consistent with the natural beauty of the marketing images or, indeed, with nutritional excellence. A fish for whom the deformities of an over-rapid growth are commonplace. You are, as they say, what you eat eats, and not everything the fish on my plate ingested was free of chemicals. And it is probably a good idea to avoid deluding yourself that the fish on your plate has had what is generally understood to be a good life. Out there, in the vast oceanic food system, maybe; but in here, no. Not at all.

People don’t generally think too much about fish welfare, but according to the critics, they should. Sea lice are an ever-present problem within the packed pens, with infestations tormenting the fish and, worse, crossing over to wild salmon who are even less able to deal with it. Occasional sea lice are part and parcel of a salmon’s life, but when this rises to four or more per fish, as it does frequently, there is a major impact on the young salmon’s welfare. More than 10 million salmon died pre-harvest on Scottish farms in both 2022 and 2023,19 out of a total production of around 40 million. Recently, this has been added to by the arrival of a plague of microscopic jellyfish, hydrozoans, who cause huge damage to gill health, which in 2022 nearly doubled reported pre-harvest mortalities from 8.5 to 14.9 million salmon,20 often over 30 per cent of the total. If there is no solution found to this issue (which may or may not be exacerbated by the warming oceans), it could have existential consequences for the industry, never mind the fish. Don Staniford, a campaigner who has been a thorn in the side of the industry for years, points out that if ramblers saw one in four sheep or cows dead in a field, a similar percentage to the 2022 figure, they would be horrified and action would be taken.21 The problem, he continues, is that what goes on in the fish pens is largely hidden and inaccessible. Tavish Scott, the CEO of the industry body Salmon Scotland, counters with: ‘Wild Atlantic salmon have a survival rate of only around 1–2 per cent, compared to 85 per cent for a farmed salmon.’ Keep in mind that the industry means for that 200,000 tons of salmon biomass already out there to double in the next ten years, with half of the increase already in the scoping and planning process. If you were searching for a slowdown, you won’t find it here.

It would take an imaginative soul to think that life for a farmed salmon is good, but nothing is simple. For example, the Norwegian company MOWI22 has recently been given a welfare award23 by none other than Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). This is intriguing, given that pre-slaughter weekly mortality rates in MOWI’s Scottish operation have often run at more than 10 per cent.24 It seems at first glance rather like giving the Spanish Inquisition a prize for ecumenical endeavour, but then the world of research is always full of surprises to the open mind.