Submerged forest
Borth was the first place I visited while researching Lost to the Sea. For most of the time, its spectacular submerged forest lies hidden beneath foreshore sand. Having no idea…
INTRODUCTION: Postcards from the Edge
I’ve begun gathering these remnants in the months before the book comes out, in part as it’s hard to let go of a project that’s obsessed me for the past three years. Now, sorting through the piles of postcards and old booklets, beachcombings, cuttings and photographs, I am repeatedly drawn back into their stories.
Ghostly drunken laughter from the Penny O’Pint
Before it began to collapse into the sea, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Blackpool’s first entertainment venue. It's said to have started out as a ginger beer stall in the 1850s, selling sweets and nuts, with fortunes told by 'Gipsy Sarah'. With a traveller encampment on nearby cliffs since the 1830s, Sarah's husband Ned was among the first to settle there.
Moorlog & Doggerland
Spotting the fragment above, I thought grizzled shoe-sole before I saw moorlog. Dusted with salt crystals, the peat was pierced with finger-sized holes, that I recognised – with glee – were made by piddocks. Usually, these elegant marine bivalves live embedded in soft seabed rock such as chalk or slate. Yet here they'd burrowed into an ancient fen beneath the sea.
The Garden of Sleep
This postcard shows some wonderfully spectral Edwardians wandering the clifftop graveyard of St Michael and All Angels Church at Sidestrand. In the early 1880s, as the cliff edge drew nearer, its medieval nave and chancel were dismantled and rebuilt inland. The tower and churchyard, though, remained on the cliff-top.
Otherworld islands
Researching tales of enchanted islands off the west coast of Ireland, I came across some fantastical images. The roots of the stories lie in medieval legends of seafaring Irish monks, including the ninth-century Voyage of Saint Brendan and even earlier Voyage of Bran. In search of the Otherworld, Bran and the monks set out in a currach, a hide-covered row-boat. Two days out into the Atlantic
Britain’s oldest amusement park
Blackgang Chine sits high above a landslip at the ‘Back of the Wight’. With a longstanding reputation for whimsical creepiness, the park has been owned by the Dabell family since opening in 1843. Today, the usual thrill rides - and animatronic dinosaurs - join some early favourites: a fibreglass Mouth of Hell, the Crooked House and a Hall of Mirrors. As the sea continues to encroach, though, the attractions closest to the landslip retreat.
A lost church & half a village
Along a 4-mile stretch between our house and Warden Point, the island has lost farms and cottages, pubs, a post office and at least one church. On average the island's cliffs lose some five feet a year, although after years of little change acres can be lost at once.