House Husbandry Giles Wood
REVISITING old haunts in the company of grown-up children is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a parent. Here my daughter and I were again at Covehithe, a ruined church in Suffolk almost unchanged since John Sell Cotman painted it in 1804.
A recent landslide on the nearby cliff tops offered a hop, skip and a jump down to England’s version of Namibia’s wild and exhilarating skeleton coast, and my daughter remembered going there twenty years before for a picnic and the run-in her famously tetchy godfather Cyril had had with an RSPB warden.
That day the three of us had been thoroughly beaten up by our swim in the sea and not unnaturally wished to rid our bodies of deep sand deposits. We headed for a peaty freshwater lagoon seen shimmering behind a shingle spit. It was several degrees warmer in there and we were enjoying our wallow in the muddy reed beds when we spotted a warden goosestepping towards us with gritted teeth. To stand up would have signalled guilt and an admission that we had seen the discreetly sized Nature Reserve notice so we continued to wallow in horizontal mode.
A pointless argument, worthy of Pseuds Corner, ensued as a submerged Cyril ran intellectual rings around the cub wildlife warden berating us from the lagoon’s edge. Cyril argued that human beings were the pinnacle of evolution, very much part of nature and not separate from it and, in God’s eyes, therefore indistinguishable from coots, moorhens and avocets.
Cyril’s pop-up manifesto might have formed the blueprint for the now fashionable activity of ‘Wild Swimming’ which some Britons seem to think has only just been invented and whose ethos is full of the same bogus pieties that Cyril extemporised that day. Boasts the Outdoor Swimming Society (patron Robert Macfarlane) on its website: ‘We believe that swimmers have too long been held in chlorinated captivity and everyone with a set of bathers should be set free to immerse themselves in nature.’ This is old news to Cyril, who has been swimming in gravel pits, fishponds and reservoirs these past forty years without glorifying his immersions as political acts.
Last month with daughter in tow I returned to the scene of the debacle. We would bathe in the sea and enjoy a freshwater rinse in the lagoon followed by a picnic on the beach of dressed Cromer crab sandwiches and Cawston Vale apple juice. Nothing would have changed in front or behind us since no new buildings could possibly have been erected in the interval since our last visit.
This coastline suffers from the highest rate of erosion in the United Kingdom so only a madman would build here even if he could get planning permission. Since we last came the Second World War pillboxes had toppled off the cliff like children’s toys.
Once again we tested our strength against the crashing waves but as we staggered out and towards the freshwater lagoon we now spied a three-strand electric perimeter fence surrounding the shingle spit.
Even a veteran trespasser like myself was foiled: there was no possibility of aqueous ingress. This time the noticeboard was much more ‘noticeable’ and bossy. It informed us that swimming was forbidden in the lagoon for the sake of protecting the nesting site of Britain’s second rarest breeding tern – the little tern or sea swallow. Unlike my bolshier earlier self, I was now prepared to toe the line. Not least because, at my age and despite the proliferation of public access defibrillators, I simply can’t risk electrification.
Later that day I read in the East Anglian Daily Times that these ‘kick ass’ conservation measures have delivered results in the form of the best little tern breeding season ever. Respect, as they say in Jamaica
But it still prompts the question – whose ‘needs’ should take priority? Should the needs of the little terns trump those of the wild swimmers or vice versa? Who will campaign for a pecking order of pressure groups to establish a precedence in these overcrowded isles?