Sand between your toes: Our collective coastal minds

Sand between your toes: Our collective coastal minds

By Paul Montgomery PhD

A key experience most of us have shared is our first childhood memory of going to the beach. The feel of the sand under your feet, the sound of the waves lapping against the shore, and the taste of ice cream on a balmy summer's day.

This sun-soaked image is only one part of the longer story of coastal communities, which face extreme weather events, that are in the process of completely reshaping the coast of the UK driven by the climate change that is happening today.

Is there much better than an ice-cream on a sunny day? This one is from the legendary Hockings in North Devon (Copyright: CiM/MOLA)

While these visions of the coast are relatively modern ones, the story of our interaction with the shore is timeless and intertwined with the changes of the coast. There is a striking contrast between our picture postcard ideal summer visits to the beach, and how coastal communities experience the more holistic view of life by the sea that includes the lean winters when the sea is less inviting.

The Coasts in Mind project empowers communities to map the impact of coastal and climate change on some of England's most vulnerable coastlines. It aims to examine the impact and changes to the coastal environment that have affected and been experienced by local communities over the past 100 years. Generous grants from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Lloyds Register Foundation have funded the Coasts in Mind (CIM) project. CiM’s work involves collaboration with communities in four English coastal regions: the Swale Estuary in Kent, Poole Harbour in Dorset, Sefton Coast, Merseyside and the Taw-Torridge Estuary in Devon. These projects enable coastal communities and their partners to document, in their own words and images, the changes they have observed or know about in their coastal areas. CiM provides a space for the public to curate these experiences and perceptions as digital entries through the Coasts in Mind online mapping platform. Gathering this information will be supported by a program to train community volunteers to utilise and curate their entries on a dedicated webpage for at least the next twenty years.

Beach huts on the Tankerton to Herne Bay beach (copyright: CiM/MOLA)

The place of the coast in our stories

From the perspective of anthropology and geology, the coastline or a seashore is the area where the land meets the sea or ocean, as described in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. It is a line that forms the boundary between the land and the ocean or a lake. But it's not just a dry geological or environmental zone; it’s where humans live and interact. Coasts and coastal environments were always important in the history of human societies and cultures. All humans, when they interact with the environment around them, create an entire cosmos of tangible and intangible culture. It's a combination of tangible (e.g. ports, ships, and pottery) and intangible cultural heritage (e.g. place names, folklore, and traditions) that forms the composition of today's coastal landscapes. Today's scholars sometimes use the term “maritime cultural landscape”, coined by the father of the theory, Christer Westerdahl, to denote this zone of human activity (Westerdahl, 1992).

Within every coastal landscape, there is a narrative of “maritime cultural landscape” that is indelibly linked to the way humans interact and perceive the natural environment around them. The term ‘maritime culture’ grew out of a broader understanding of not only the use of the sea by humans, but the attendant structures, cultural identifiers and associations through story, folklore created between people and the ocean. In the past, the field of maritime history and archaeology has been heavily shaped by researchers delving back into antiquity, mapping the complex and sometimes overlapping cultural and material mosaic of maritime landscapes. However, the CiM project is an opportunity for the past to rub shoulders with the present. The work of integrating the experience of today's contemporary societies and their perspective on their maritime environment is challenging. Gathering this information is crucial to collating a richer historical record as we go forward.

By involving and utilising the human experiences of today's society, we are harvesting information about changes to the natural environment through the prism of everyday life on the coast. From a scientific perspective, we preserve the value and possibility of personal ideas and perspectives on the natural environment. By raising awareness of changes to the natural environment, not only are we promoting the study of conservation of our maritime past, but also grounding some of these abstract scientific concepts of climate change that mainstream society struggles to articulate in their everyday lives. Harnessing the public's attention and hopefully recognition and value of the heritage of the maritime environment.

What is the value of recording the experiences of coastal communities?

The joy of being outside in nature and the promise of prosperity for coastal communities have been intertwined with the smell of fish and chips and the clank of arcade dodgems. The narrative of coastal communities has been linked to a wider canvas that includes history and economics, such as tracking growth, infrastructure development, and connecting the coast with major urban centres; using the local communities' knowledge, archives, interviews of life experiences, through recording their narratives and folklore, complemented by pictures and drawings from the area and their sometimes family albums/archives.

This process will give us a contemporary human perspective on the impact of climate change on the coastline, mapping the movement of the shore in terms of erosion and deposition. As such, lived knowledge will complement the parallel streams of ecology, geology, and historical/archaeological data. There is a great deal to be gained by investigating, recording and helping to preserve the narratives and viewpoints of coastal communities through their stories and local histories. By working to involve the coastal communities in the process of gathering and curating their stories and experiences, we are adding another layer of empirical data to the historical record. To add weight to the established impact of climate change, it is necessary to highlight the changes on a human level. In the stream of modern consciousness, the coast recalls the lights of Blackpool tower, the sand of St Ives, and the ancient landscapes of Lyme Regis. Rarely do the annual erosion of dunes and loss of vegetation, and/or the destruction of valuable heritage sites, make the front pages in our media. In future decades, the information which is gathered will offer new insights and a narrative from the ground level of the changes that have occurred due to climate change.

Historic postcard showing Blackpool prom being battered by rough seas in c. 1906 (Copyright: Andy Sherman)

Beyond academia: Shaping future citizen scientists to powerfully champion local coasts

The construction and curation of the digital archive associated with the CIM project is an attempt to push beyond the traditional limitations of academic papers and publications. In the case of maritime cultural landscapes of the UK, past projects such as CITiZAN, (the Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network), highlight the threat of coastal erosion to a wealth of foreshore and intertidal sites. CITiZAN, alongside its derivatives and forebears, have highlighted the valuable role and contribution that normal people can make in their everyday lives to understanding the coastal environment. A community-based platform that is populated with information primarily from the public offers an insight into not only the changing perspective of coastal communities but also the environment and the dynamic between the two.

The challenge of sharing with the wider public is considerable, but necessary to overcome the cyclical nature of our 24-hour news, which only shines a light on the coast during dramatic events (e.g. freak weather events). The Coasts in Mind web page will be facilitated by community volunteers, who will enable people to share the stories of their lives, their families, and narratives that shaped their town.

Find your local coastal story on the CiM map (Source: Humap)

Such stories will allow us to explore how traditions and habits can overlay the day-to-day of life with the historical and geological changes on this coastline. Gathering these stories is crucial to our understanding of the wider mosaic of human experience and coastal change, which gives us a deeper insight into our relationship with the coast. Keep this in mind the next time you buy an ice cream or a bag of chips.

Sources

Westerdahl, C 1992 ‘The Maritime Cultural landscape’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 21 (1), 5-14