The Restless Coast, Roger Morgan-Grenville, Icon Books

Jon Gower

Here’s a writer who can certainly put down walking boots as tax deductions, because former soldier Roger Morgan-Grenville must get through a good few pairs. His recent volume, ‘Across a Waking Land’ sees him rack up a thousand miles in 55 days, porgressing on foot from the Solent to the north west corner of Cape Wrath in Scotland. And now this series of walks along The Restless Coast, sampling some of Britain’s 10,000 miles of coast.

Salmon fishing

He looks at the delcline of fish and chip shops and the gargantuan scale of salmon fishing, much of the latter viewed through the lens of animal welfare, whilst attentively looking for signs of coastal change, in places where the sea is claiming the land. He is also constantly alert to the fact that the testing trek is changing him. Here he is, on the Welsh rim of the Irish Sea, where he walks above pupping seals and under skies of gulls and aerobatic
choughs:

‘Walking my way round various sections of its coast path, on the Llŷn Peninsula and in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, I feel myself more involved with the sea beyond the shoreline than I ever have before or will again. The land to my left has gone from being the anchoring solidity of my journey to a mere reference point. At first, I put the new feeling of change down to the autumnal equinox, with its regular horizontal, bucketing rain, but slowly, village after village and headland after headland, I come to understand that the changing sense of place has once again captured me.’

Faded grandeur

And what a range of places! There’s the civil engineering feat of the Thames Barrage and the flat expanses of the Dee estuary, ‘simply scoured out by a large glacier to the north which always remained shallow. In the author’s always amiable company we visit the ‘slightly rakish, faded grandeur of the town of Hoylake on the banks of the River Mersey,’ and, in Bognor Regis in Sussex, have the sense of something bad having been survived, ‘a sticking up of two fingers at the doom-mongers and earnest social commentators’ who have been writing the place off for quite some time.

One of Morgan-Grenville’s real strengths as a writer is his ability to make scientific research accessible and understandable, so that we learn about marine heatwaves and seabird decline, bio-abundance and sex-changing fish. When he looks at the much bigger picture he reveals that the north and west of Britain is still springing gently ever higher in reaction to the weight of ice it lost fifteen millennia ago, while the opposite, south-eastern, part is “actually sinking into its own compacting clay at a rate of about five centimetres a century.”

He then adds the effect of climate change to this shrinking phenomenon to show how coastal cities such as Cardiff, Glasgow and London are threatened by salt water inundation in the coming decades. One salutary fact he shares is that almost a quarter of a million British homes will need to be abandoned in the next thirty years.

The context is fascinating, for as he memorably explains, Britain wasn’t even as island 10,000 years ago. Since then, even without the effect of climate change, the sea has risen half the height of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

Pollution

We see the sea and land refracted through so many lenses in this book but almost all of them show the impact we have, such as the effects of pollution, often invisible to the naked eye. But this is certainly not the case when the author meets former RSPB warden David Shackleton, who spent a year gathering plastic washed up on Annaside Beach in Cumbria, which he then used to cover his garden, as a sort of guilt inducing art installation. The list of
stuff is sadly and remonstrably very long but includes 650 items of footwear, 290 cigarette lighters, 4000 plastic bottles and 22 safety helmets.

Profligacy

Elsewhere in this fine book we encounter plenty more examples of human profligacy, and, indeed, illegality when it comes to dumping sewage or the effects of dredged up toxins on lobster populations. We dump stuff and lose stuff all the time, such as the individual pieces of Lego lost at sea when a series of freak waves hit the cargo-ship Tokio Express not far from Land’s End. There were 50,000 sharks, 353,000 daisies and, ironically enough, almost 28,000 lifeboats, some of which are still being washed onto the land.

Observer

Morgan-Grenville is an indefatigable and keen-eyed observer, but he can’t always remain detached or contain his anger at times. This is hardly surprising when he notes that “From the coracle men of the polluted River Teifi to wild swimming groups in Kent, entire ways of life are coming to an end for entirely avoidable reasons. ‘As a species,’ said one headteacher to me a few months earlier on a similar subject, ‘we are neither sufficiently engaged or sufficiently enraged.’” Which might be watchwords for any readers of this timely, compelling and deeply considered book by a writer who carries out his work sublimely well, even as he wears away the soles of his walking boots. Taking us with him, showing it as it is.

The Restless Coast: A Journey Around the Edge of Britain by Roger Morgan-Grenville is published by Icon Books and is available from all good bookshops.

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