Tides, coasts and people: culture, ecology and sustainability.

Owain Jones, Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of the West of
England, owain.jones@uwe.ac.uk

Natasha Barker, Senior Marine Policy Officer, WWF-UK, natasha.barker@btopenworld.com

1 Introduction

Tides are an exciting and dramatic feature of many parts of the UK coast, and
coastal areas globally. They are profoundly important in shaping the
physical, economic, social and cultural geographies of the coast, and are
so in ways which connect all these together. Thus they are important for
those with responsibilities for managing the coasts, littoral areas, and sea
margins (with an eye to sustainable management). And for those seeking
to deepen our ‘socio-ecological’ understandings of the coasts more
generally – understandings which acknowledge the complexity of any
environmental issue and how they are always constructed from interacting
natural and social processes. Intertidal areas - from marshy areas, sand
dunes, beaches, to estuarine mud flats - are subject to a wide range of
pressures and loss.

Estuaries are particularly important in the UK context, are highly tidal, have
very powerful and important physical, economic and cultural forces at work
within them, yet are often seen as empty, ugly, and thus ripe for neglect
and or development of one kind or another.
This paper draws upon my cultural geographical work on what I term ‘tidal
culture’, and Natasha Barker’s work on the culture and management of
estuaries in UK Russia and Canada which have the other highest tides in the
world, which was conducted as part of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust
Travelling Fellowship (Barker 2008). The Severn Estuary is used as an
example as it familiar to both, and is the subject to the second highest tides in
the world and the highest in Europe.
2 Tides (a brief introduction)

The sun and moon exert "tractive" force on the oceans, drawing the waters
towards their ever moving "sublunar" and "subsolar" points. Tides occur in
all the oceans (to varying degrees) but vary markedly, and becomes very
apparent and significant when more affected water meets land.

Variously, around the world’s coasts, the all important sea level continually
rises and falls to make either microtidal coasts (under 2 metre range);
mesotidal coasts (2 – 4 metres); or macrotidal coasts (4 metres and higher)
(Haslett 2008). Tidal areas can be diurnal (tides rise and fall roughly once
every 24 hours, e.g. Gulf of Mexico), semi-diurnal (tide rises and falls
roughly twice in 24 hours, e.g. Atlantic coasts of Europe and North
America), or ‘mixed’ where the rhythm is more syncopated, as in one low
tide followed by two higher tides (e.g. west coast of Canada and the United
States).
Before I give a few examples, I set out the anatomy of the tide

The turn of the tide

High tide
Low tide
Slack water (a pause at the turn of the tide)
The flood (tide rising)
The ebb (tide falling)
Highest tides (springs)
Lowest tides (neaps)
Lee tide (tide and wind same direction)
Weather tide (tide and wind in opposite direction)
Storm tide (height of tide increased by weather conditions)
(Flotsam and jetsam)
They form complex seasonal and monthly rhythms of changing heights and
times of high and low water.

Within this base rhythm there is local variation caused by factors such as
the shape and orientation of coast, air pressure, wind speed and direction,
how they have been ‘engineered’ (sea walls etc).

Importantly tides have rhythm signatures which differ form the more
ubiquitous rhythms of season and day night. The pattern of high and
low tides migrates across the day night timetable.
The temporalities of everyday life are often claimed to be changing (e.g.
Kreitzman, 1999).

Speeding up (Gleick, 1999)

Smoothing out - floating free from the rhythms of natural life - becoming
social, abstract, economic (24/7)

We have ‘less connection’ with time as embedded in processes of day night,

the seasons, weather patterns etc, and the corresponding lives of plants and
animals.

Serres (1995: 28) in the Natural Contract puts this down to the retreat of two
ways of life – ‘the peasant’ and ‘the sailor’ and sees it a defining aspect of
modern life.

‘how they spent their time, hour by hour, depended on the state of the sky and
on the seasons. We have lost all memory of what we own these kinds of men. [
] The greatest event of the 20th century incontestably remains the
disappearance of agricultural activity at the helm of human life in general and of
individual cultures’
There are clearly changes and in some ways we are more isolated from natural
rhythms (some examples comes later).

BUT, for various reasons, life remains much more temporally rhythmic and
various, than is often acknowledged. Not least because of;

the depth, scale, power and ubiquity of natural temporalities embedded in the
life world. They cannot be so lightly thrown off, they are deeply engrained in our
bodies, our everyday lives and in relational formations which pattern life.

As Harvey (1996. 210) states ‘Night and day, the seasons, lifecycles in the
animal and plant world, and the biological processes [of the body] are typical
encounters with various kinds of temporality’.

These are still very understudied. In the excellent Timespace book by May and
Thrift ‘natural times’ are mentioned in the introduction but all the chapters are
more or less about social/human time. A similar pattern appears in the papers
published in the journal Time and Society.
Tides
Lefebvre’s (2004) ‘rhythmanalysis’ is a call to study temporality and also the use of
rhythm to analysis everyday spatial practices.
He raises tides as an example. He says that European cities on the Atlantic coast
have differing qualities of life (rhythms) to those on the Mediterranean coast
because of the much more extreme and varied tidal ranges that affect them.
Tides, in the UK, and elsewhere, are a key form of natural temporal process bringing
differing space/time patternings to many aspects of everyday life.
Tides are a response to the relational movement of sun, earth and moon.
They generate extraordinary inter-tidal spaces. (These can be very dangerous and
scene of exploitation and tragedy, e.g. Morcambe Bay).
“Then there is Michael Marten, a photographer who has become fascinated by the
lost tidal land - amphibious, unowned - that exists between the low-water mark and
the high-water mark, and who takes pairs of images from precisely the same position
(the positions of the tripod's feet marked with pebbles and sticks) at high and low
tide.” (Macfarlane, 2007)
Where significant tides occur they have obvious impact on natural
systems such as erosion and deposition but also on many aspects of
social, cultural, and economic everyday life

Agriculture
Tourism
Sea related industries
Land transport
Sea transport
Power generation
Various forms of recreation
Environmental management
Place identity
Material forms (sea walls, boats, bridges, urban and rural water fronts)

Two very brief examples

London sewer system
Airbus A380
Estuaries are particularly influenced by tidal flows

The NCC (1991) identifies 155 estuaries (which by definition are tidal)
around the British coastline and calculates that ‘the 9,320 km. of estuarine
shoreline makes up 48% of the longest estimate of the entire coast’, and that
‘18,186,000 people live in large towns and cites adjacent to estuaries’.

Make ‘other’ space

Tidal landscapes are powerfully affective.
‘These places seem to have a very particular power. This lies in the sense
of freedom that beaches offer, their sheer openess, and the novelty of the
life they support’ (2).
‘these are places that literally have a life of their own, where rhythms of
tides and seasons set an agenda that seems to stand outside human time’
(3).
Bill Adams:
Future Nature
(1996).

Don MuCullin: (1989)

Open Skies:
Burnham-on-Sea
with Hinkley Point
Power Station
Severn Estuary

(second highest
tidal range
in the world –up to 15 m)

Severn Estuary
Partnership

“Britain’s longest river brings vast quantities of water into the Severn Estuary.
Europe’s biggest tide takes masses of water back up into the mainland. The
mighty Severn influences the ways we live in many ways – and deserves all
the attention we can give it!” (SEP, 2005, p .2)
Roughly 20 % of the estuary is intertidal space (100 km sq). 80% of coastline
is modified / engineered (sea walls)
All manner of sites around the estuary have polyphonic rhythms of day night and
high low tides (and seasonal changes)

Beaches
Farms
Ports
Cities (rivers, docks and swing bridges)
Power stations
Nature reserves

The rhythm of the tides become part of everyday practice and dwelt life for many
people (to varying degrees)

Local governance has to deal with highly dynamic system which cross
boundaries and intersects with all manner of social/economic/ecological
functions.

Two brief examples

Grazing the salt marshes

A complex pattern of tide driven management

Tourist beaches
NOT Weston-super-mare
Loosing the tides
Sea walls
Land reclamation
Making ports non-tidal
The Taff Barrage
The Severn Barrage??
From ferries to bridges

First Severn Bridge

replaced ferries in 1967 –
changed rhythm and
speed of transport and
relation to the landscape
SENSE OF PLACE
“people can’t die along the coast, said Mr Peggotty, except when the tide is pretty nigh out”
(Charles Dickens David Copperfield)
This for a number of reasons:

They scramble that profound margin `betwixt land and sea`

They create a highly charged form of space: the inter-

tidal zone

They threaten to inundate at high tide

They threaten to empty at low tide

They repeatedly empty and fill

They bring this other rhythm, and other life to the

landscape

Very little studied in a landscapey cultural geog. type ways (as far as I can ascertain)
Tide, Time and Narrative

The turn of the tide is often used to locate ‘us’ and our
stories in time - to mark a point where things can start, and
things can end.
This reflects a need (perhaps) not only for human stories to
embed themselves in (patterns of) space and place, but
also in patterns (rhythms) of time.

Joseph Conrad
Beginnings and Ends
I am collecting a number of examples where the tide, and particular state of
the tide, is used as a motif at the opening (and often) the close of novels,
and other writings.
Most famously perhaps Conrad set the narration of Heart of Darkness
between the turn of two tides.
(Opening) The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of
the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and
being bound down to the river, the only thing to do was to come to and wait
for the turn of the tide.

(Close). Marlow ceased, and sat apart [ ] in the pose of a meditating Buddha.
Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb”, said the
Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank
of cloud, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an
immense darkness.

(Conrad published two sets of stories entitled Twixt Land and Sea and
Within the Tides – the margins of land and sea being a key element in
his form of psychological realism).
Novels
Mill on the Floss - George Elliot
Frenchman’s Creek - Daphne Du Maurier
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea - John Burnside
Travel/place writing
The Kingdom by the Sea - Paul Theroux
Coasting – Jonathan Raban
Modern Nature – Derek Jarman
Tides and life and death
A number of folklore sources tell how key moments in the life cycle (conception,
birth and death) were believed to be affected by tidal rhythms.

Shakespeare and Dickens both draw upon this.

'People can't die, along the coast,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'except
when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's
pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood. He's a going out
with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an
hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the
flood, and go out with the next tide.'

Dickens; David Copperfield:

the death scene of Barkis
The American poet Walt Whitman, when visiting American Civil War
hospitals in Washington, recorded that the gravely injured seemed to die
more readily and peaceably when the hour corresponded to the turn of
the tide.
Lyall Watson in Supernature (1973) discusses the moon’s influence on
life on earth, not least via the tides.
Every living animal and plant is made aware of the rhythm. The lives
of those that inhabit the margins of the sea depend entirely on this
awareness’ (22).

He tells of experiments with oysters which, when moved from the shore
to a distant inland location, adjust their daily opening and closing to what
would be their new tidal rhythm. They can somehow feel the moon’s pull.
Climax

The Sea: John Burnside (2005)

The Highest Tide: Jim Lynch (2005)
both use an equinox tide to bring their narrative to a climax
and the tide as a dramatic device more generally.
“They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning
under a milky sky the waters in the bay swelled and swelled, rising to
unheard-of heights…”

(Opening of The Sea)

Renewal
Anne Bronte: Angus Grey
My footsteps were the first to press the firm, unbroken sands; nothing
before me had trampled them since last night’s flowing tide had obliterated
the deepest marks of yesterday, and left in fair even, except where the
subsiding water had left behind it the traces of dimpled pools and little
running streams. [ ] Refreshed, delighted, invigorated, I walked along,
forgetting all my cares, feeling as if I had wings on my feet [ ] and
experienced a sense of exhilaration to which I had been an entire stranger
since the days of early youth.

Joyce Carey: Horse’s Mouth

I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in
a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide. [ ]
Thames mud turned into a bank of nine carat gold rough from the fire [ ] I
swam in it. I could not take my eyes of the clouds, the water, the mud.

James Joyce: Ulysses

Loss, Threat, Dread

The Riddle of the Sands: Erskine Childers

Peter Grimes (poem): George Crabbe
Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour (poem): Sylvia Plath

Much more uneasy, even disturbing views of inter-tidal space

‘Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt

Mud stench, shell guts, gulls leavings’ (Plath)

There anchoring, peter chose

From men to hide,
There hang his head, and view
The lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel
slowly glide. (Crabbe)

Causeway at low tide, Severn Estuary

Tides and art (many examples)

“Another Place” by Anthony Gormley. 100 cast iron figures on Crosby beach. UK.

(http://weblog.girasol.co.uk/_photos/2%20men%20in%20raging%20sand.jpg)
Penzhinskaya Guba
The Bay of Fundy