How Neptune saved the coast

Michael Kerr is charmed by a poetic account of our shoreline that traces the National Trust campaign to protect it back 50 years

Patrick Barkham wrote his marriage proposal in the sand at Wellsnext-the-Sea, in Norfolk, and showed it to his girlfriend, Lisa, from a dune he had played on as a boy. When he walked to the beach after a storm in 2013, the dune had gone. Its loss was a reminder, he says, of our tendency to see the coast as “dependably permanent” when it is being reshaped constantly by the forces of nature. Over the past 120 years it has been shaped, too, by the National Trust, which made its first acquisition in 1895 – not a stately home but four-anda-half acres of rough hillside above Cardigan Bay. In 1965, the trust initiated Enterprise Neptune, appealing for £2million to save the most precious stretches of coast from caravan parks and power lines. That campaign has carried on, and to date raised more than £65million. The trust now owns a total of 742 miles at the edges of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, to be managed, on behalf of the nation, for ever. In Coastlines, published to mark Neptune’s 50th anniversary, Barkham takes a series of walks through this coastal estate. His intention is not to catalogue it but to explore our relationship with it, both across the span of a life – from the toddler paddling in the shallows to the pensioner in a deckchair – and through history. He reminds us that what we see today as playground and nature trail has been a workplace not only for fishermen, wreckers and smugglers but also for miners. He summons the shades of seventh-century monks in their cells and Cold War scientists in their bunkers. He follows in the footsteps of novelists, poets and artists who have turned seaward for inspiration, from John Fowles, in the jungly Undercliff of Lyme Regis, to Terry Frost, under the lucid light of the Penwith peninsula. “Every day,” writes Barkham, “there is something surprising, joyful and new to be found beside the sea.” The same might be said of many pages of his book. On the sea-coal coast of Durham, written off by the trust’s surveyors in 1964 as blackened “beyond redemption”, he finds that nature has been restoring herself. The sands may not be golden, but they are at least brown; fish are returning, seaweed and mussels appearing on the rocks. In Northern Ireland, however, he learns that Strangford Lough, despite being supposedly protected by numerous classifications (“a body of water surrounded by committees,” conservationists joke), has been fished out, its seabed ruined. On walks with the trust’s staff and volunteers, Barkham discovers that acquiring land is the easy bit. Management is trickier. It can entail the shooting of foxes to protect ground-nesting birds. Longer term, it can mean taking on the sea itself, if it shows signs of eating away at what is known, in trust circles, as “the liabilities”. Climate change, rising sea levels and demands for energy are adding to the challenges. “New Wylfa”, a proposed nuclear power station, could bring 3,000 jobs to Anglesey. It would also destroy the view and the peace that walkers currently enjoy at Felin Cafnan, a ruined water mill. The trust’s ranger there says: “Wylfa is good for switching the lights on, but Felin Cafnan Mill is good for the soul.” In Suffolk, Barkham meets the artist Maggi Hambling, creator of Scallop, which has been such a divisive addition to the seafront at Aldeburgh. When he confesses that he can’t detect in the real North Sea the passion of Hambling’s painted waves, she teases him: “Well, that’s because you’re a writer. You don’t use your eyes.” She’s wrong. This is how he sees brent geese: “Murmuring, they walked in a deliberate fashion, a line strung across the pasture like police conducting a fingertip search, plucking at the grass with their beaks.” His ears