ON THE ROCKS
Cal Flyn finds out what lies beneath in Adam Nicolson's fascinating man-made rockpools
Is there a more soothing activity than browsing rockpools on a warm summer’s day? It’s a pastime for the patient; at first, these small pools might seem quiet or empty. But pause a moment, crouch low and let your shadow fall still, let the breeze riffle the surface of the water, and watch this tiny marine world come to life in front of you.
Winkles encrusting the edges will unseal their grips and restart their slow perambulations. Tiny fish will shimmy from their hiding places in the dark. Discarded shells littering the bottom of the pool will right themselves and scuttle onwards under power of hermit crab.
Adam Nicolson, the prolific and award-winning author, has turned his attentions to rockpools and the intertidal zone in his new book The Sea is Not Made of Water. ‘We still go to the seaside for consolation and simplicity,’ he writes. ‘Demands and anxieties seem to drop away there; things still are as they were when we were ten. The rockpools still beckon, the blennies and gobies still shimmer beneath us… It is where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the marvellous an inch beneath your nose.’
During the research for the book, Adam constructed three man-made rockpools on the shores at Lochaline, on the Morvern peninsula, and
“It is where you find the marvellous an inch beneath your nose
monitored how they were colonised by sea creatures. He often visits the area with his wife, the gardener Sarah Raven, whose family own the Ardtornish estate. It’s centred on a beautiful bay, with views to Mull across the water, but there were no rockpools there – only dark volcanic sands and boulders.
At the beginning, he writes, they started ‘quite naked, exactly as the words say – a rockpool, a dish of rock on the shoreline,’ but over time the sea would ‘bring life to that dish, to make it a living thing’. And so it did. Soon he sees whelks ‘like porters with trolleys at a station’; prawns ‘as intricate as a space station,’ and crabs of ‘Bentley green’.
The pools themselves are a wonder of miniature engineering. During their construction, Adam consulted a contractor working on the drainage system of the city of Doha and a concrete specialist who supplied the Channel Tunnel project. Amused by the project, they dispensed advice on twelve-inch valves and non-toxic cement, while the Mull Aquarium suggested the best sites.
‘Each of the three pools is gradually further down towards the low tide line, and more exposed,’ says Adam. ‘The higher up the tide line you are, the fewer animals you will find. The swings in temperature, oxygen content of the water and salinity are very extreme, so it’s a physically demanding environment. Further down, those things are much more steady, but there’s more competition. It’s a desperate choice if you’re an intertidal creature: a horrible place or horrible neighbours.’
It was this third, low-down pool that offered the richest returns. In the book, Adam describes dipping his head under the water to find ‘a parkland of beauty’ where anemones of auburn and copper waved their fronds in the stippled, shifting light, and goby and stickleback fish slunk through the verdant undergrowth. In many ways the project has been like gardening, he tells me now, ‘but the garden wall means nothing half the time when the tide is in. The self-gardening garden which self-dissolves twice a day.’
King of this underwater landscape is the ‘brutally efficient’ green crab, which eat worms, molluscs and even their own kind. The shell is a crab’s main defence, but this armour makes mating difficult. As a result, the male will scoop up a smaller female in its claws and carry her around in his arms until she moults – keeping her safe during the most vulnerable moments of her life, while ensuring he will be the sole father to any offspring she produces during her softshelled period. But this does not come without risks to the female, however – sometimes a female crab approaching an inexperienced male will reach out a claw to stroke him invitingly, only for him to grab it and eat it. It’s a crab-eat-crab world out there, evidently.
For Adam, the familiarity he was able to develop with this
“In the book, Adam describes dipping his head under the water to find a parkland of beauty
developing ecosystem was part of the attraction. ‘The great thing about rockpool life is that it doesn’t run away. It’s not like a seabird.’ he says, referring to his earlier, Wainwright Prizewinning book The Seabirds Cry, ‘which you can only examine if you have it in a net. Being able to be with these tiny creatures was a totally intriguing thing. It’s all about waiting and seeing.’
In The Sea is Not Made of Water, Adam reflects on the coastline paradox – the observation that the more closely one measures an irregular coast, with all its coves and promontories and tiny inlets, the longer it will be. It is, he writes, ‘dizzying’ when you think about it: ‘Fractal theory suggests that the closer you look at something, the more it remains unknown,’ he writes. He draws a map of the area, then a map of the pools themselves, then realises that although his pools are small, he will never truly know them: the closer he looks, the more there is to find.
‘I wanted to achieve a change in perspective,’ he says. ‘That was the goal: to look closely and find the big in the small, the cosmos in the grain. Stephen Jay Gould, the American biologist, said that all biologists are, in the beginning, intrigued by the “lovely puzzles” of nature. The prawn is a lovely puzzle. So is a crab.’
For Adam, the creation of the three pools is by no means the end of the story. It’s a hobby, he says, that is ‘by definition unstoppable and illimitable and could literally go on around the world. It’s mud-pie-making, sandcastle-building fun. And if you pour physical and mental effort into a place, that place gains so much more significance than it otherwise would have had. It’s very gratifying – but exhausting work. I’m getting a bit old to be hauling too many rocks around. But yes, I’d love to make a few more.’
And he welcomes others to join him. Check with landowners before creating any permanent concrete structures like Adam’s, of course – but as around half of Scotland’s foreshore remains in the ownership of the Crown Estate, which allows activities including ‘building sandcastles’, you can feel fairly free to create ephemeral pools by digging in such places, or by creating dams of natural materials. Then, simply stand back and wait. Creatures will wash in on the tides, sometimes they will wash out again and sometimes not. And sometimes, as Adam found, the seagulls will eat every little fish in the pool.
But that, says Adam, is precisely the beauty of it. In the book, he quotes Heraclitus: πάντα ῥεī, everything f lows. ‘Tides run through everything… We are all afloat on a liquid world.’ In small pools, profound lessons can indeed be found.