Hannah Engelkamp
With wet shoes, salty hair, and a wild gleam in her eye, Hannah Engelkamp explores why walkers are drawn to the calming power of this most restless force of nature.
The author of Seaside Donkey (in which she walks the entire Welsh coast with a donkey) on why we love walks by the sea.
“The sea is fundamentally – elementally – good for us.
We are drawn to it…”
LIVE RIGHT BY the sea, in the charming little town of Aberystwyth in mid Wales with its Victorian promenade, pier and harbour, cliff railway and seaside crazy golf. I’ve punctuated the writing of this article with short walks by the sea, which three days ago was so wild and furious that it was crashing into the harbour walls and creating vertical sheets of salt water 40 feet high that hung in the heavy air for whole seconds, like scoured glass sculptures.
Two pairs of shoes are still stiffening on the radiator after mistimed attempts to get a closer look. Today the sea is softest blue and so hazy I can’t make out the horizon, and its frilly edge is full of swimmers, sunbathers and castle-builders. Neither sea-characters are good for the work ethic, which perversely is in part what this article is all about.
I propose that the sea is fundamentally – elementally – good for us. We are drawn to it, possibly even created by it, and we are certainly soothed, inspired and in some important ways letoff-the-hook by it. In a culture that doesn’t think much of resting, the sea whispers a subversive song to us, which we find irresistible. Primordially speaking the sea may have caused us to walk on two legs, and so it is a fitting homage to return to this birthplace and walk by the sea as often as possible. Meanwhile the importance of this is luckily recognised – access to the coast is so important an issue it appears in political manifestos as well as poetry, and our British coastal paths are astonishing in variety and ambition (see more on p40).
Ancestors from the sea
David Attenborough said recently, in a Radio 4 programmed called The Waterside Ape: ‘ There is one location that to this day is favoured by humans above all: the shoreline. A 2010 report from Columbia University’s Earth Institute calculated that roughly half of all humans live within a coastal strip just 60 miles wide. By contrast all of our closest primate cousins – the chimps, bonobos and gorillas – live as far from the coast as it’s possible to reach, deep in the forests of Central Africa.’
The programme airs the theory, long contentious but gathering strength, that we human beings have evolved many of our features as a result of swimming in the sea. It’s suggested we came down from the trees and began by wading about on our hind legs and eating shellfish. Then we got deeper and deeper into our new environment, swimming and diving for fish, eating more omega-3 fatty acids which contributed to the development of our large brains. We lost our hair and gained a layer of blubber more similar to that of sea mammals.
One reason the theory is contentious is it runs counter to the dominant, but far from perfect, savannah hypothesis, which proposes that man, by nature red in tooth and claw, stood up in order to hunt animals in the tall grasses, and lost his hair because the chase made him hot. Woman followed along, although the new characteristics didn’t suit her needs so well. I prefer the aquatic theory to this ‘tarzanist’ one – it appeals to me as a feminist and a fan of seafood, but most of all it seems to harmonise with the draw I have to the seashore.
And clearly this draw is universal. That half of the world’s population live in a coastal strip which adds up to only around five percent of Earth’s land surface proves that humanity in general likes to be beside the seaside.
There are other reasons we look to the sea, of course. It’s easy now to think of it as the edge, the periphery; out here on the west coast of Wales there is little water traffic, and most of it recreational, while the train line and main roads linking us to the rest of the world both go due east, away from the water, across the mountain passes. But it wasn’t
always so, in fact until very recently it was the opposite. Stone-age hunter-gatherers came in dugout canoes, ancient Britons in coracles, fleets of Roman ships, and then Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans – they all came by boat. And in the 19th century hundreds of the rural poor steamed out of Aberystwyth harbour for new lives in America, Canada, Australia and Patagonia. The sea has long been a busy place.
It’s this activity that I like – these days I appreciate the recreational bustle going on in the water. The yachts, sea-kayakers, surfers, paddle-boarders, Celtic rowers and swimmers are all people getting the work-life balance right. Even dry and tame on the quay I am invigorated by seeing them, and my own time away from the desk feels legitimised. On warm evenings the circles of students who light driftwood fires and play guitars cheer me about humanity’s community spirit.
But most of all it is the sea’s very own restlessness that calms. The jury is out, but this may even be neurological. Where air is disturbed, as it is by the pounding waves, its molecules can become negatively-charged (‘negative ions’), and once in your bloodstream, it’s thought these might produce biochemical reactions that increase levels of the mood chemical serotonin. This is far from certain, but I feel the benefits and don’t really care if they are in the mind or the brain.
Researchers from the University of Exeter have been finding that people exercising in front of blue sea projections have less brain activity than those in front of green projected views, ‘which tells us that it’s possibly less stressful and more familiar to the core human being.’ Researchers in New Zealand overlaid data from a national health and wellbeing survey alongside census information, and found that people with blue views (of lakes as well as sea), were physically and mentally happier, regardless of socioeconomic factors. Similar research in the UK found that people within three miles of the coast rated their own health more highly than those more than 30 miles from the coast, and concluded it wasn’t the sea view that mattered as much as how often people got to the coast. Other studies have found that the sound of the sea alters wave patterns in the brain with soothing effects.
The shore on two feet
Meanwhile walking by the sea is the best of all. Writer Rebecca Solnit says, ‘ Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart… Walking allows us to be in our body and in the world without being made busy by them…’ And laid out before the coast walker lies the sea, the most active and stirring example of the unwilled rhythms of the earth. The seascape and the action of walking are perfect companions.
While calming the spirit, the coast is hard physical work – the ascent of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path is said to be equivalent to climbing Everest. With the heady oxygenated benefit of being at sea-level, you
“The sea, so much bigger than our tiny human woes, with its ceaseless rhythms, gives us perspective.”
can nevertheless rise and fall, climb and sweat, a very satisfying amount, without the daunting prospect of a single high mountain ahead.
And while the overall ascent and descent might be concealed, the walk’s progress is more easily appreciated at the shore than anywhere else, as headlands are conquered and left behind. Navigating is easy – keep the water on one side and the land on the other – and paths are generally good and well-used, all contributing to the calm and quiet mind.
A very depressed friend of mine began to heal herself by renting a flat so close to the sea that I once sat in the armchair in her bay window and saw dolphins play in the sunset. When under pressure from the feeling that you have to be an ever-successful engine of industry, the sea, so much bigger than our tiny human woes, with its ceaseless rhythms, gives us perspective.
Those towering waves a few days ago couldn’t fail to put worries in their place, and wet shoes would be a fussy, human thing to complain about in the roaring face of all that wild, unharnessed power. The ever-changing light, the dancing reflections, the endlessly surprising moods of the sea – all of this movement gives us cause to look up and out of ourselves as we walk beside the ocean, looking to the far rosy horizon or folded headland.
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