It was in the evening, two hours or so before sunset, that these masted crafts would come to life, filing out one-by-one beyond the familiar harbour wall. By early morning next day, they’d be tucked inside their cluttered woody haven once more, the night’s catch already off-loaded into the eager hands of curers, gutters and packers. For a scarce few decades when the good times rolled, this was the rhythm of life in Britain’s herring ports, from Wick, Fraserburgh and Peterhead in the north, right down to Yarmouth and Lowestoft in the south. An 1876 source describes the distinctiveness of these places with colour:

The aspect of one of our fishing-ports during the herring-season is very singular to the unaccustomed eye. The place smells of herring, thinks of herring, talks of herring. Of what importance to its inhabitants are the contest between Pope and Kaiser, the struggles of the Revolution in France, or even the banter between political parties at home, when weighed with the amount of the “take” of last night, or the prospects of a good haul to-morrow?1

Like most of the herring, the smacks and their masts have long since disappeared, along with a way of life. Each mast, however spindly, stood for a crew of hardy men after all — five, six or seven, maybe more. Fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, neighbours, friends, thrown together in their pursuit of the fickle fish which graced the inshore waters when it pleased.

Many of the harbours built for that slim era of abundance are now bald, mirroring the treeless grasslands on shore. They are largely empty, save the odd mastless modern motorised vessel. Around this time two years ago, I stayed a night at Lybster, a strange if charming village on the Caithness coast, squeezed between the sea and the A99 bound for John o’ Groats. The village boasts an early-medieval carved stone thought to date from the eighth or ninth century. Lybster itself, however, is much, much younger — a planned settlement founded by local laird Patrick Sinclair in 1802 during the so-called ‘Age of Improvement’, which saw inland straths cleared and their inhabitants making acquaintance instead with the harvest of the sea. These are the people immortalised in Neil Gunn’s historical novel The Silver Darlings (1941), Gunn himself a son of the Caithness coast, his father a herring-boat captain out of nearby Dunbeath:

The landlord who had burned them out in order to have a suitable desolation for sheep, had set about making a harbour at the mouth of the river, the same river that, with its tributaries, had threaded their inland valleys (…) All along these coasts — the coasts of the Moray Firth — there was a new stirring of sea life. The people would yet live, the people themselves, for no landlord owned the sea, and what the people caught would be their own — or very nearly...2

By the late 1830s, a scarce few decades into Lybster’s existence, there were 101 fishing boats operating out of its modest harbour, sealing its place on the map as Britain’s third busiest herring port.3 Such industrious scenes are hard to imagine from the tranquil, supine setting one finds on a calm summer’s morning there today.

It was a conspiracy of factors that ultimately put paid to Britain’s herring boom: over fishing, yes, but also changing tastes and the turmoil of two world wars, which cut off key European export markets and took fishermen with their valuable knowledge of the seas away to the Royal Naval Reserve. Meanwhile, on the other side of the North Sea, Dutch herring fishers — longtime rivals of their Scottish and English counterparts — faced their own unique challenge. The towns and villages which skirted the edge of the Zuiderzee, that curious brackish southern bay of the North Sea, had profited from their own spring-race of Atlantic herring for years. As in the British herring ports, locals here thought and talked of little else from March to July, when the shoals would surge into the bay and return to their favoured spawning grounds among its sandy shallows.

But even the fickle herring could not have foreseen the trick that the Dutch engineers, enterprising as ever, had up their sleeve. In 1927 a grand plan was embarked upon to close off the entrance to the Zuiderzee, a bid to safeguard a flood-proof future and feed a growing population. By 1932, two years earlier than initially thought, the final gap in a new 32-kilometre-long dyke was filled in, and the Zuiderzee (as part of the North Sea at least) confined to history. Some spring herring must have still found their way through the bay’s ever narrowing entrance that year — the total herring catch for 1932 came in at a fair 9,985 metric tons. By 1933, it had fallen to just twelve.4 And by 1934 it was clear that the days of the famous Zuiderzee herring were well and truly over.

Nowadays, the masts which sail the sweetened waters of the IJsselmeer (as the Zuiderzee is now known), or along the British coast from Caithness down to East Anglia, are mainly for pleasure. Wealth and riches in the twenty-first century are to be found in much loftier enterprises, seemingly far removed from the coarse crudeness of the humble salt herring.

But let’s not kid ourselves — failure and loss can still come thick and fast. And as the end days of the North Sea herring boom drift out of living memory, we’ll be in need of new reminders not to take the abundant times for granted.

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As in mountainous parts where there are myriad names for the different types of humps, lumps and bumps on the horizon, the Netherlands’ man-made watercourses come in a variety of flavours. In the city, there are the grachten (civilised urban canals) and singels (defensive moats from a more violent age). Out by the fields and polders, one comes across the narrower sloten and even shallower greppels (drainage ditches), besides ever more nuanced and region-specific terms: weteringen, tochten, diepen among others.

This rich Dutch nomenclature is matched on the other side of the North Sea in England’s fens, which boast their own array of dug-ditch terms — drains, grips, leams, lodes to name but a few. I recently spent a wonderful morning visiting the studio of British Amsterdam-based artist Annabel Howland, who has long looked back on the East Anglian fens from her equally flat, adopted home. I am fascinated by her work exploring the Fens’ intricate networks of waterways and field systems. It seems that, as an English resident in the Netherlands, one cannot help but be drawn to the fenlands of that other home across the water.

On both sides of the North Sea, these are the waterways that drain the land and at the same time transport goods and people to and fro, from which farmers draw water for thirsty crops and which also serve as wet sanctuaries for fennish flora and fauna amongst the agricultural expanses. At least in normal times. Now, some way into this dry, hot summer, even the ditches themselves are in danger of drying out. The Netherlands this week announced a move to Level 2 on its water scarcity scale, feitelijk watertekort — ‘actual water shortage’. The next and top rung of this ladder which no-one seeks to climb is Level 3, ‘national crisis’, last deployed in 2003 following the baking hot summer that year.

So here we have it, a long-sodden landscape drying out at last, after centuries of struggle to drain and keep the waters at bay. Great news, one might think, and a just reward for all the hard digging and innovative thinking that has gone on in this soggy part of the world through the ages. But the fenlands even now remain dependent on the right amount of water: too much and the consequences are obvious; too little and the whole thing can also quickly unravel, quite literally collapsing in on itself. At the end of that long, hot summer of 2003 — the driest for fifty years — a dike running through the village of Wilnis between Utrecht and Amsterdam collapsed in the middle of the night, allowing water from the adjacent canal to flood into a nearby residential area. Two thousand residents were evacuated, and by the time the canal was closed off again, six hundred houses stood in half a metre of water, to the great surprise of many nervous onlookers.1

To those who make it their business to understand such matters, there was a clear explanation. The Wilnis dyke consisted of peat, which — as we know from Dutch attempts to drain the East Anglian fens in the seventeenth century — shrinks as it dries, growing weaker with every lost drop. By the night of Monday August 25th 2003, following weeks of unrelenting summer sun, the parched dyke in Wilnis could simply no longer hold. Today, on the spot where it broke, stands a monument seat inscribed with personal experiences from locals who recall that surprising flood amidst the drought.

Over two decades on from that curious night in Wilnis, this latest summer without rain is a reminder of the incongruous future facing the lowlands which surround the Southern North Sea: half the year spent cowering from ever stronger and more devastating storms, the other half spent shielding from the sun and willing the rains and storm clouds to swiftly return.

It’ll no doubt be about learning to live with either too much or too little of something we’ve long taken for granted, at least in this relatively mild, temperate part of the world — a daunting path to tread amongst the rising tides, crumbling coastlines, cracked-dry ditches and shrinking soils. I cannot speak for my fellow lowland-dwellers but I, for one, am not at all sure we’re ready for it.

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This round of dispatches takes in the lost, the freshly adapted and the newly protected. All testament to just how much the North Sea still matters.

Bass Rock changes hands

Bass Rock, the 100-metre-high, guano-topped isle at the entrance to the Firth of Forth has been bought by British bird conservation charity the RSBP. The white bird droppings which dust the otherwise brooding, grey-black rock are a clue as to the reason for purchase: the Bass is famous for its colony of Northern gannets — one of the largest in the world.

So close is the Northern gannet’s association with Bass Rock that the bird’s scientific name, Morus bassanus, in part derives from it. Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner gave it the binominal Anser bassanus in the sixteenth century; Carl Linnaeus had it in his 1758 Systema Naturae as Pelecanus bassanus. The species has since been reclassified under the Morus genus — uncharitably from the Greek for ‘foolish’, likely inspired by the birds’ apparent lack of fear while breeding. All the while though the bassanus epithet has remained constant, the Bass Rock connection never in doubt.

It was on remote Scottish isles such as Bass Rock (besides St Kilda and Sula Sgeir in the west) that the Northern gannet was harvested for meat — a perilous enterprise, given the birds’ favoured cliff-edge habitat. In the Scots language, the bird was traditionally known as the Solan Goose (from the Norse súla, ‘gannet’). Walter Scott, in his 1816 novel The Antiquary, includes a line about the fact that the Solan’s smell “is so powerful that he is never cooked within doors”.1 And as for the eating, Englishman Sir William Brereton gave a fascinating account in his 1635 travelogue of the table manners involved:

so extreme fat are the young, as that when they eat them, they are placed in the middle of the room, so as all may have access about it; their arms stripped up and linen cloaths placed before their clothes, to secure them from being defiled from the fat thereof, which doth besprinkle and besmear all that near unto it.2

Besides the Solan Goose, other local names for the Northern gannet include the Mackerel Gant in Yorkshire and the Herring Gant in Norfolk — both clues as to the bird’s favoured prey.3 The Dutch name is however my favourite: the enigmatic Jan-van-Gent, which appears to have nothing to do with either the city of Ghent nor its famous son, John of Gaunt. Whatever you want to call them, the Scottish Seabird Centre offers a live feed of the seabirds, direct from the Bass.

Up until its recent sale, Bass Rock was privately owned by the Hamilton-Dalrymple family, as it has been for the last 320 years. Seller Sir Hew Dalrymple — brother of writer and historian William Dalrymple — recently told the Times that he wanted the clout of a large organisation like the RSPB to help protect the rock’s birdlife, with a particular eye on Berwick Bank, the large offshore wind farm planned nearby. “When it comes to something like Berwick Bank, an individual like myself is not going to be listened to,” Dalrymple told the Times.

Well beyond Westminster and Holyrood, the tricky navigation of the North Sea’s energy transition continues.

Farewell to the Hindenburg Damn

Meanwhile, in the east, an important piece of North Sea infrastructure is undergoing a rebranding of sorts. With its 100th birthday in 2027 fast approaching, the 11-kilometre-long railway causeway which connects the North Frisian island of Sylt to the German mainland will now be known as the Syltdamm, in place of the name it has had since its creation — the Hindenburgdamm.

The causeway took its traditional name from the fact that Paul von Hindenburg was present at its official opening in 1927, as President of the then Weimar Republic. The first train across the thin embankment poking just above the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea marked a significant moment in the island’s history, and is still a vital transport link in the twenty-first century. Each week upwards of a hundred trains run across the track which forms part of the Marschbahn (‘Marsh Railway’), a good half carrying vehicles (there is still no road link to the island). On my recent travels with Deutsche Bahn through Germany, an announcement popped up somewhere in the sweltering urban heat of the Ruhr advertising direct trains to Sylt, the country’s most northerly island — an enticing offer if ever there was one, and one I had to try hard to resist as I headed south towards ever higher temperatures.

The debate over whether to rename the causeway has been rumbling on for some time in this corner of the North Sea. This latest announcement comes in the wake of similar decisions to remove Hindenburg — seen as an enabler of Hitler and all manner of horrors — from German toponymy: Hindenburgstraßen or -streets in Hamburg, Darmstadt, Trier, and Lüneburg no longer exist, at least onomastically speaking. In their place now are street-signs which remember survivors of the Holocaust, Nazi prosecutors and prominent members of the resistance movement.

Despite an uncertain European future, in our largest and most-heavyweight North Sea neighbour, Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the process of coming to terms with the German past — continues with an earnestness and frankness one cannot help but admire.

Tracing Britain’s lost ferry crossings

And finally, a new project exploring Britain’s lost ferry crossings, recently launched by right here on Substack. Like me, Rosie hails from the North East of England and we both share childhood memories of the overnight Newcastle-Esbjerg ferry, long since discontinued.

For the project, Rosie will be exploring this and other ‘ghost crossings’, visiting the places left behind after the ferries disappeared. She’ll be sharing stories of the people she meets along the way, but is also looking to hear from anyone with memories of our lost ferry routes — no doubt many among North Sea Nexus’ readers have a good tale or two here to tell!

The best of the rest

• Read: How Bruges became a pearl of the medieval world

• Watch: Small but Mighty: 20 years of sustainable North Sea herring

• Read: Running the Thames from source to sea

• Watch: Archive video of 125-year-old pier over the years

• Good news: How Lindisfarne reserve is helping a rare bird survive tourism

• Watch: Annual beachside kite festival on the island of Fanø

• Read: Shipwreck discovery off Norway: Intact Chinese porcelain and chandeliers at a depth of 600 metres

• Watch: The Sutton Hoo Ship's Company: A Ship beneath the Soil

• Read: Art of the Marsh

• News: Funding to restore native oysters in Orkney

• Watch: The Heart of the Headland: St Hild in Hartlepool

• Help out: ‘record-breaking’ rocket lost in the North Sea

• News: Grave in Norfolk of 119 sailors may be exhumed due to coastal erosion

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Growing up, the window of my childhood bedroom faced North-North-West, with sweeping views out beyond the edges of the town and up towards Northumberland’s wilder inland reaches. I would often steal myself a last look between the curtains before bed at this time of year, to check on any remaining patches of light faraway on the horizon. There’s still light in the North, I would hope. And there always was. These words became a sort of summer refrain in my head, soothing me to sleep and later tumbling through my dreams.

Of course, I was not alone in my summer sky-watching, and not the first — nor the last — to be cast under the spell of northern summer light. When I heard recently of the death of David Hockney, I thought of his 2003 painting Midnight Sun, one of a series of watercolours inspired by the artist’s visits to Norway and the High North at the beginning of the century. I remember stumbling upon the work by chance in 2012 at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, having followed my childhood quest for northern light to its natural conclusion in one of the long summer breaks from university.

“There’s a place where you can watch the sun at midnight that is like the edge of the world,” Hockney recalled of his time in northern Norway in a 2009 interview with the Guardian. Further south, he had encountered Edvard Munch’s monumental painting The Sun in the University of Oslo’s decadent Aula, where it forms the centrepiece of eleven murals. It depicts a sunrise over the rocky archipelago off Kragerø, a coastal town in southern Telemark. Munch’s eye for the sun apparently made quite the impression on Hockney when he experienced the work in-situ:

"He'd got lines in it that cameras could never see, but we could – and of course in Oslo in June, Munch could look at the sun for a lot longer than Van Gogh could at Arles."1

The painting was no doubt an influence for Hockney’s own Midnight Sun, which sends out its yellow rays in some very Munchian lines.

Hockney was himself a summer baby, and to mark his 80th birthday in July 2017 a portrait of him was installed on a gable end wall in his home city of Bradford. The portrait, by local artist Marcus Levine, is made entirely of painted nails and recalls Hockney’s polaroid period in the early 1980s. It has recently been restored and moved to a new indoor location in the city, but in its first years the artwork was on display in what is known as Little Germany, the city’s historic mercantile quarter. The area owes its name to the many German immigrants who helped transform it into a bustling commercial zone in the nineteenth century. Among them was wool merchant Julius Delius, father of one Fritz aka Frederick Delius (1862-1934) — composer and another of Bradford’s famous sons to be captured by the landscapes of Norway.

Like Hockney many decades later, the young Delius attended Bradford Grammar School. At home, heavy expectations that he would enter the family business in the wool trade were off-set by the joys of music — father Julius was a keen concert-goer and often hosted chamber concerts in the family home. It was the music of Edvard Grieg in particular which left a lasting impression. Of his first encounter with the Norwegian’s National Romanticism, Delius later recalled: “it was as if a breath of fresh mountain air had come to me.”2 Growing up amidst the smells and sounds of Victorian Bradford’s booming industries, this must have been quite some escapism.

Like my own childhood hankering for the north, Delius’s boyhood dreams of Norway would soon be realised. The composer made some twenty visits to the country during his adult life, which his wife Jelka described as “the land of Fred’s constant longing”.3 Not only that, but his hero Grieg would in time become a dear friend. The two first met in Leipzig, when Delius was already acquainted with Norway, and before long they found themselves comparing notes of mountain trips among the country’s wild interior. Grieg was particularly surprised — perhaps impressed — that his new English friend camped out on Hardangervidda for fourteen days, the high mountain plateau at the heart of southern Norway. From then on he would refer to Delius, with affection, as the Hardangervidda Man.4

Appropriately, it was Delius’s symphonic poem Paa Vidderne (‘On the Mountains’), after Ibsen’s poem of the same name, which was his first composition to be performed in public, in Kristiania (Oslo) in 1891. Grieg and his wife Nina were in attendance, as was Edvard Munch with all likelihood, another close friend of Delius. A review of the work in a Norwegian newspaper — accompanied by a portrait of the composer drawn by a mysterious “E. M.” — wrote: “Through his admiration for our art and landscape he has come to love our country, and few foreigners know it and its people so well.”5

Later in life, both Delius and Hockney would also find inspiration closer to home — Delius in the traditional folksong Brigg Fair from mountain-free Lincolnshire, Hockney in the woods and wolds of East Yorkshire. Both landscapes are somewhat tame by comparison to the high drama of Norway and the Far North, and yet none the less interesting, if you know where to look.

As for myself, it’s a good few years since I’ve been to Norway, but for now I too have found my new spots of unlikely inspiration, here among the lowlands.

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My relocation to the Low Countries was a rather unexpected turn in a life thus far carefully plotted, at least as far as foreign grammars go: German and Scandinavian languages I had intentionally set out to learn, but Dutch? Well, that was honestly never part of the plan.

It’s been an interesting and humbling experience facing up to the blind spot on my personal linguistic map, that dark smudge at the southern, sandy bottom of the North Sea basin. My life in Dutch involves a constant process of triangulation, working outwards from the known points in my mind — a German word order pattern here, a Norwegian cognate there — to estimate where the sounds and structures of this less familiar language might lie. Like the tide, my mind rolls day and night around the North Sea rim, scanning for distant clues to help me find my voice in this surprising new home. Beach by bay by cove, I gradually locate the ingredients of a recipe for connection with the strikingly tall strangers I now live among. (I’m afraid the German accent, so carefully trained in my youth, I will likely never shake off though.)

I’m all too aware that my linguistic to-and-fro across the North Sea is just a tiny speck in a much grander narrative: a shared bedrock of common Germanic inheritance, coupled with compounding centuries of human-to-human language contact are what enable my handy triangulation method. In my exploratory linguistic day-to-day, I’m standing on the shoulders not so much of giants, but of ordinary people who like me crossed the sea and had to contend with linguistic strangeness in a new land: traders and merchants, sailors and fishermen, saints and scholars, soldiers, slaves and exiles — many of the characters I’ve been drawn to writing about on here so far.

Of course, not all of these individuals and encounters forged a pathway of change — much academic research on language change seeks to understand why certain innovations catch on, while many others don’t make it. But with every voyage and encounter, the potential for a linguistic change somewhere down the line was there.

An adult life lived between languages is always an adventure, sometimes a joy and often a humbling uphill battle. But at least we can be buoyed by the thought of the many others who have tried it before us. One person who springs to mind is North Sea traveller William Caxton, whose introduction of the printing press to London from the Low Countries in 1476 would drive a new push towards a standardised written English, and bolster the rising prestige of a London-centred variety.

We know relatively little of Caxton’s early life, but that he was born in Kent and apprenticed as a boy to a London cloth merchant. The cloth trade inevitably took him to Bruges (at the time the place to be for all things textile), where Caxton quickly became influential in local mercantile circles. He would spend a good thirty-odd years of his life on the other side of the water, in time encountering the fledgling printing industry in Cologne and setting up his own printing press in Bruges. It was there in 1475 that Caxton produced the first ever printed book in English — a translation of Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which Caxton had himself translated from the French. Linguistically aware as any other international traveller or migrant, in the introduction to the work Caxton apologises for the state of both of his French and English:

For in France was I never, and was born and learned my English in Kent in the Weald where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as in any place of England, & have continued by the space of 30 years for the most part in the countries of Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zeeland1

The next year Caxton returned to England, bringing the new printing technology with him and establishing his famous press at Westminster. After so many years away, here was a ‘re-migrant’ from the Low Countries, and in many ways one still caught between languages. His 1481 English translation of the Reynard the Fox allegory from Dutch has, over the years, seen him criticised on all fronts: for being too well accustomed with Dutch and retaining Dutch words in the translation ‘as if they were pure English’, but at the same time being singled out for his ‘many examples of an imperfect command of Dutch’.2

Such is the double bind of the adult migrant — losing touch with the home language but never truly finding one’s feet in the new one.

Looking to the future (as one must now and again), I’m left wondering where the next century of disruptive technological change will take us in the language game. Already for a couple of years now, we’ve no longer been talking amongst ourselves. The machines have entered the conversation in a way that Caxton, pioneering though he was, could never have imagined.

I left linguistic research behind in 2024, just after the arrival of ChatGPT. Perhaps I’ll look back and think I was lucky to be studying language change when I was, before the storm rolled in.

And finally an interesting event happening next weekend on the Suffolk Coast, which can’t wait for my next round of Dispatches at the end of the month:

At Lowestoft’s First Light festival, artists Arieh Frosh and Ed Compson will be presenting a large-scale public sculpture on the beach as part of their Hotel Kittiwake+ project. It’s an artistic response to artificial nesting towers which have been installed locally, as compensatory habitats for seabird populations affected by offshore wind development.

An interesting chance to reflect on nature, technology, and the march of the wind turbines currently advancing across the North Sea.

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With summer just around the corner, this round of dispatches takes in the rare, the left-behind and the enduring. All testament to just how much the North Sea still has to give.

Normal service resumes in June.

A herring king surfaces in Jutland

In last month’s dispatches, I wrote about the surprise visit of a walrus named Magnus to an Orkney harbour, and to coastal towns along the Moray Firth. Magnus himself has since left Scotland for Norway, but out in the east another unusual creature has washed up on a North Sea shore.

On a beach not far from the northern tip of Jutland, a Dutch family recently came across a striking sight: a ribbon-shaped headless fish, some two metres long. It turns out to be an oarfish, only the fourth time such a creature has ever been recorded in Denmark with its shallow waters, the species generally being found in the deep ocean. It certainly looks like a visitor from another world. To the south, a German newspaper — in landlocked Berlin no less — ran with the headline: Simply terrifying! Sea monster found on beach.

It’s not the first time an oarfish has caused a stir in the North Sea. In March 1849, a specimen more than three-and-a-half metres long was caught off Cullercoats in North-East England, causing quite a sensation. The local headline then read: The Great Sea Serpent caught at last. Many thought it to be a dreaded sea-snake, surfacing from deep within their worst nightmares.1

Traditionally the oarfish was known to many as the herring king, since it was thought to guide the fickle herring shoals through the waves and towards those hungry and waiting along the coast. As a local tale from Argyll on the west coast of Scotland puts it:

it was a matter of faith with every fisherman in Glenfyne that the herring shoals were led by a fish who was their king, and who was two or three times larger than the ordinary herrings. So that, if you were lucky enough to spy the Herring King, you might be safe to make a great haul among the shoals that followed him.2

So went the traditional faith in the herring king that, should one be accidentally caught, it was believed that the best thing to do was throw it straight back whence it came, lest its valuable shoal of subjects be left lost and adrift. With herring stocks in the eastern North Sea under pressure of late, the Jutland beach find is certainly an unfortunate coincidence, heavy with the weight of bygone superstitions.

The conundrum of ghost nets

Meanwhile, new research on the effects of ‘ghost nets’ — fishing nets abandoned or lost at sea — has revealed that removing such debris might not always be in the best interest of the sea and those living within it.

While some ghost nets do cause problems for marine life, continuing to ensnare fish and other creatures in a phenomenon known as ‘ghost fishing’, in other cases the lost equipment can become a convenient habitat to support biodiversity beneath the waves. This was the finding of a pilot study carried out in the North Sea and the Adriatic.

It’s another example of how, in matters of the sea, the seemingly obvious clean-up solution is not always the best course of action.

A poet in every port

And finally back to land and those that live at its edges. There’s something particularly evocative about coastal settlements — not least ports, especially the grubbier, grittier kind. Perhaps it’s the constant comings and goings. Facing the sea and defined by distant opportunities as much as anything closer-by, these are places set apart from the normal run of things, and often all the more interesting for it.

The latest project to recognise this is A Poet in Every Port, a new summer-long series of events celebrating poetry in coastal communities around the UK. On tour across eleven different coastal towns and cities from now until September, the project will bring free workshops, poetry readings and other public events to these harbourside communities.

The tour kicked off this week in Great Yarmouth, with later stops planned for Dundee (20th/21st June), Chatham (26th June), Southend (27th/28th June) and South Shields (18th/19th September), as well as other ports in the west. Poet and son of Liverpool Roger McGough is an ambassador for the project, while in each of the locations local poets will be on hand to celebrate regional stories and dialects.

Of course, many of the North Sea’s port cities already have a strong track record when it comes to poetry, from Philip Larkin’s Hull to Heinrich Heine’s Hamburg, not to mention Henrik Ibsen and Theodor Storm, both previously featured in my ongoing series North Sea Friday Folk.

In these parts, port poetry is an enduring tradition, and one no doubt still worth investing in, for the benefit of us all!

The best of the rest

• Read: A perfect day out on the world’s longest coastal tramline

• Contribute: Recording the impact of coastal change in England at Coasts in Mind

• Read: The mystery ship stranded in Sanday, Orkney, 1776

• Try: A coffee recipe from the North Frisian island of Nordstrand

• News: Dutchman wins historic British downhill race

• See: How Viking clinker ships were actually built

• Read: A Scottish tidal pool revival from Fife to Wick

• News: Coastal dunes named as Netherlands’ newest national park

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On the wall above the table hangs a family calendar and — this being Italy — the Catholic church has left its mark. Each day comes pre-annotated with the name of a saint whose feast day in the liturgical calendar falls on that date. I enjoy scanning the month’s names each time I visit this adopted home of mine, many of them mysterious and strange to me. But this week the name marked for May 25th jumped out immediately — Beda. Saint Bede the Venerable (672/673-735), or as I and no doubt some other Northumbrians like to think of him with great affection — wor Bede (‘our Bede’).1

There aren’t many Anglo-Saxon saints who make it onto the calendar. Beda is one of the few, alongside Osvaldo (Oswald of Northumbria, August 5th), Bonifacio (Boniface of Wessex, June 5th) and Etelberto (Æthelberht of Kent, February 24th). Despite the Italianisation, these northerly names are easily spotted among the rest.

Even though Bede was only formally canonised in 1899 by Pope Leo XIII, the Northumbrian had long since secured his place south of the Alps. Indeed, besides having his own station on the Tyne-and-Wear metro, Bede also has the (equally prestigious) honour of being the only Englishman mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy.2

Bede himself never made it to Rome, nor the Mediterranean for that matter. Had he done so, he would no doubt have been surprised by the seemingly tideless sea. The far more dramatic ebb and flow of the North Sea along his patch of coastline was an object of fascination for the holy man who, as far as we know, spent the vast majority of his life at the twin monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth — a stone’s throw from where the rivers Tyne and Wear find their journey’s end at the sea.

But we who live at various places along the coastline of the British Sea know that where the tide begins to run in one place, it will start to ebb at another at the same time. Hence it appears to some that the wave, while retreating from one place, is coming back somewhere else; then leaving behind the territory where it was, it swiftly seeks again the region where it first began.3

So wrote Bede in his De temporum ratione (‘On the Reckoning of Time’) from the year 725, in a chapter on the ‘harmony of the moon and the sea’. Bede was much better placed than his Mediterranean counterparts to observe the daily workings out of this harmony — it has been suggested that he enlisted the help of his fellow monks up and down the coast to gather information on the local timing of the tides.4 And so, from his home on the Northumbrian coast, Bede was able to refute the long-held assumption that high tide occurred at the same time all over the world.

We’ve learned a lot more about tides since Bede’s age, not least from many detailed observations of the shallow North Sea. Sail east from the mouth of the river Tyne and one will eventually arrive, still some way off the west coast of Jutland, at one of the North Sea’s amphidromic points — one of the few places where there is no tidal rise and fall.

There are three of these in the North Sea, tidal nodes around which the churn of high and low tides rotates counterclockwise (amphidromus being from the Greek, ‘running around’). Displayed on a map, these points appear as the invisible bodies of strange spiders, their spindly, oddly curved legs radiating out in search of the shore. These ‘legs’ are the co-tidal lines, connecting those locations where high tide does occur simultaneously.

English polymath and Lancashire lad William Whewell (1794-1866) was the first to hypothesise these strange points of inertia far out in the sea — where his carefully drawn co-tidal lines must at last come together. Besides contributions to mineralogy, astronomy, philosophy of science and theology, Whewell too had a dogged interest in the tides around Britain, and sought to pin down what had eluded scientists and keen observers ever since the age of Bede — ‘to connect the actual tides of all different parts of the world’.5

To achieve this ambitious goal, in June 1835 Whewell coordinated a fittingly grandiose initiative to record simultaneous observations of the tide across the great maritime nations of the Northern Hemisphere. Under ‘the direction of intelligent officers and men of science’, recordings were made at an impressive 318 locations across England and Scotland — including, in Bede’s part of the world, on the tidal and holy island of Lindisfarne. These observations from home shores were complimented by further recordings from 219 sites in Ireland, 28 in America, 24 in each Denmark and Norway, 18 in the Netherlands, plus a few more across the coasts of Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal. In all, a total of 1,000 tides were observed by the various volunteers every day for twenty days, presumably sometimes at inconvenient hours.6 The result was a series of maps charting the pattern of tides and showing familiar seas like never before.

With Whewell’s nineteenth-century Great Tide Experiment, citizen science made a lavish early entrance into the arena of human knowledge. The sheer scale of international collaboration and synchronisation involved would be impressive even today.

And presumably Bede himself — that early watcher of North Sea tides — would only have approved.

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There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,

Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.1

By the year 1896, when these lines were published in Kipling’s poem The Deep-Sea Cables, man’s colonisation of the bottom of the sea was on a roll. The telecommunications revolution had well and truly broken out from the land and, at strategic points around Britain’s shores, dozens of telegraph cables now disappeared into the abyss. Though impossible to witness with one’s own eyes, the mere thought of these subsea cables stretching out far across the seabed, buffeted by the steady wash of shells and whatever else lay down there, must have been quite something.

The first subsea cable in the world had been laid four decades earlier in 1850, by brothers John and Jacob Watkins — a single thread of copper wire spanning the English Channel. In a plan to bring two old foes closer together, it linked the iconic chalk cliffs of Kent with Sangatte in France, whose Flemish name derived appropriately from ‘hole in the sand’. The initial attempt failed almost immediately due to a fault at the French end — rumours at the time blamed the meddling of a French fisherman — and within a couple of years recovered sections of the failed cable were being sold as souvenirs to an intrigued public. After all, at that time, to touch something which had known the strange sodden depths of the seafloor was about as astonishing as holding a piece of the moon.

But the fisherman’s meddling across the far side of the Channel — or whatever it was that stymied that first attempt — proved a mere hiccup. The cross-Channel cable was swiftly relaid with thicker wire, and over the next few years the new ‘pathways for thought’ swept across the Atlantic and up through the North Sea.2 First came the 115 miles from Orford Ness in Suffolk to Scheveningen on the Dutch coast in 1853, a feat which took thirty-four long hours in a heavy gale and rough sea. From there on the cables crept ever northward up Britain’s east coast, linking Cromer with Emden and Heligoland in 1859, later Northumberland’s Newbiggin with Jutland (Sondervig, 1868) and Scotland’s Peterhead with Norway (Skivoldsvig, 1869).

And so it was that odd and unlikely spots here and there on the British coast, far from London and the halls of power, became the nation’s gateways to a world dizzy with collapsing conceptions of space and time. As Kipling wrote, the cables ‘had killed their Father Time, joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun’. And all of this was taking place in a most mysterious environment, fit for what remained — to the common man at least — a mysterious technology.

Out of grasp though hardly out of mind — this had been the place of the seabed up until this curious new turn in human history. A place of imagination, superstition and rumour, not least for the world’s seafarers, for whom it posed a peculiar double bind: alongside nightmares of a bottomless void, there was also the fear of a vessel grounded. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, a grounding or stranding was still the most frequent reason for a ship to be lost.3

At the same time, clues dredged up from the seabed itself could help avert such a catastrophe. When sounding for depth with a lead and a line, animal fat was often smeared on the bottom of the lead so as to snatch a smattering of whatever made up the floor below. Whether sand, shell or Kipling’s famed ooze, an experienced mariner could tell a fair deal about where he might find himself. An 1828 guide to maritime navigation gives the following example, just a tiny fraction of the knowledge a young sea officer would be expected to know at the time:

Q. In thick weather, how would you know when you are to the northward of Scilly?
A. By having 45 to 50 fathoms oozy bottom.
Q. What soundings would you get in the fairway of the Channel?
A. White sand, small yellow stones with black specks and broken shells.
Q. How do you know when you are on the French coast in thick weather?
A. By having deep water with large stones and red sand.4

But what of the floor of the North Sea? Is it in fact a great grey level plain of ooze? Well, ooze it turns out, beyond the realm of poetic license, is a technical term with an expectedly precise definition to match: a seafloor sediment made up of at least thirty percent biogenic material, fallen skeletons of tiny organisms long since dead. According to one oceanography textbook, it has the delightful consistency of toothpaste mixed about half and half with water.5

The formation of such ooze requires the quiet left-aloneness that only the deep ocean far from continents can provide; water too shallow and close to a coastline, and sediments washed down from the land disturb the slow and steady ooze-forming process. Thus, despite what the North-European imagination might be tempted to conjure up, the floor of the narrow North Sea — where land is never too far away — is far from an ooze-friendly environment.

In the end, even if the ‘great grey level plains of ooze’ of the nineteenth century are not quite as advertised, I still rather like Kipling’s poem, not least for how it anchors a new innovation in nature’s much older, primordial setting. In our own age of rapid and disorienting technological change, I should like to meet the poets writing about the AI data centres now sprouting in once glacial valleys and besides timeless native woodlands.

The Deep-Sea Cables, Rudyard Kipling (1896)

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar—
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world—here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat—
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth—
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’ 

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As an uncommonly dry spring continues here in the Netherlands, this round of dispatches takes in a season of unusual sightings, both off- and onshore. A testament to just how much the North Sea can still surprise us.

A springtime pioneer heads south

Spring is, as for many of us, a time of transitions at the coast. But while some of our most iconic spring returners — puffins, for example — are expected to be fewer in number this year, the season has already seen some more unusual visitors dropping in to catch the lengthening days and rising temperatures.

Drawn down from the Arctic and its ever-shrinking ice floes, a walrus was spotted in mid-April resting on a pier on the island of Stronsay in Orkney. Since then, the 8-foot-long creature — now affectionately referred to as Magnus — has ventured even further south, to the Moray Firth, popping up in Lossiemouth, Macduff and Fraserburgh in recent days. Balmy climes in comparison to his usual habitat, no doubt.

According to a 2025 study, the number of marine mammals being found outside their natural range is increasing, likely due to a range of wearily familiar reasons — climate change, habitat degradation and loss. Apparently, some may even be pioneers exploring potential new territory.1 It wouldn’t be the first time visitors from the North have arrived on Scotland’s shores with heady ambitions.

Swapping deep ocean blue for the grey-brown shallows

Meanwhile, the other end of the North Sea has also been hosting some unexpected guests. Along the dune-backed beaches of the Netherlands, record numbers of European flying squid were washed ashore in February and March. It’s a surprising phenomenon, considering that the species tends to prefer the truer blues of deep ocean waters over the grey-brown shallows of the Southern North Sea.

Two particularly good specimens have been photo-logged from Noordwijk and Ameland on the Dutch citizen science website waarneming.nl, where they’re flagged as “incidental migrants”, though I prefer the Dutch term zwervers — “drifters” or “wanderers”.

Unusual signals in East Frisian waters

And finally to East Frisia, to the island of Norderney, whose lighthouse has been showing some unusual behaviour of its very own. Earlier this month, a notice to mariners warned that the familiar pattern of three white flashes was now showing at fourteen-second intervals rather than the usual twelve. The cause: a sluggish gearbox turning more slowly than usual.

Even on a normal day, the Norderney lighthouse — built between 1871 and 1874 on a raised dune in the middle of the island — is unusual, it being the only left-turning beacon on Germany’s North Sea coast. It was merchants from Bremen who first demanded a lighthouse for the barrier island in the nineteenth century, to resolve a well-known black spot in the local light chain.

‘From here on total darkness reigns’, Dutch engineer Jacobus Johannes van Ronzelen had written of Norderney in 1857.2 As well as designing a North Sea harbour for the city of Bremen (today’s Bremerhaven), Van Ronzelen was involved in planning the new lighthouse on Norderney. By the time English writer Edward Frederick Knight was taking a small yacht from London to Copenhagen in summer 1887, the still relatively new light on Norderney was a welcome sight:

And ahead of us, some seven miles away, gleamed the yellow sand dunes of Norderney, above which towered a great lighthouse two hundred feet in height, a most important landmark to vessels that approach this perilous coast.3

For now, the light’s aberrant fourteen-second intervals will continue, until repairs are made and the critical extra two seconds can be shaved off.

The best of the rest

• Revisiting Dunwich: The city that fell off a cliff

• Stowaway baby rabbits found on North Sea drilling rig

• Radio Caroline comes second in public poll to decide Britain’s most iconic trade marks, ahead of Twinings and Cadbury

• Oostduinkerke’s mounted shrimp fishers open new season in West Flanders

• Soldiers take North Sea ferry to Nato exercise

• Amber rush: spring storms bring semiprecious stones to British coast

• Princess Anne enjoys fish and chips in South Shields

• Lost Cold War bunker uncovered at Scarborough Castle

• Closing the gap between the East Anglian and Scandinavian ship burial traditions

• Girl’s ‘mammoth’ bone find from Felixstowe beach may be 500,000 years old

• Beverley church organ finds a new home in Norway

• How a podcast joke gave an English club 450 Dutch co-owners

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How times change. Long before Captain Cook’s exploration of the Antipodes, Zeeland’s tangled web of channels and isles was well known to the English, especially among merchants. With thriving ports at Middelburgh (Middelburg) and Flushing (Vlissingen), this spot of particularly untidy geography was an enticingly accessible gateway to the major trade routes spanning the Continent. Wool, cloth, tin, lead, salt, beer— much of it came through here. Not for nothing did Chaucer’s merchant in the Canterbury Tales, with his forked beard and Flemish beaver hat, want the sea guarded at all costs ‘bitwixe Middelburgh and Orewelle’.1

But, though much changes, some things remain the same, and the importance of maritime trade and navigable seas is a case of the latter. The seafront promenade at Vlissingen happens to face onto the busy shipping routes of the Western Scheldt estuary. An information board I came across overlooking the grey, wake-heavy water and outlining the various invisible shipping lanes and anchorages before me laid it out in plain detail: turn left for Antwerp, turn right for England — and good luck navigating around the sandbanks and other obstacles in the meantime.

And navigate they do, one batch in, one batch out, at times crossing tantalisingly close in front of me. Down at the water’s edge, warning signs in four languages remind walkers and unhurried picnickers of the delayed wake of these passing giants.

When I studied for a year at Aberdeen, I spent many hours working from the upper floors of the university’s wonderful glass-fronted library, getting there early (at least by student standards) to secure a window seat with views out to sea. Amongst all the reading and note-taking, the appearance and disappearance of a boat on the horizon became a novel way to measure time, and certainly helped me adjust to the long, drawn-out timelines of academic research. In Vlissingen now, as then, my eye is eager for the next surprise to come into view.

The sight of a ship in the offing poses many questions. Where has it come from? Where is it going? Who and what is on board? Do they bring oil? Have they had to turn around in the Gulf? The Strait of Hormuz seems a long way away and yet at the same time, from all the news headlines and the question-posing vessels in front of me, worryingly close.

As I’d hoped, my choice of reading for this brief sojourn besides this busy waterway — Horatio Clare’s Down to the Sea in Ships (2014) — is the perfect companion. As Clare writes of the global shipping industry in his author’s note to the book:

Just beyond the horizon there is another world. It runs in parallel with ours but it obeys different laws, accords with a different time and is populated by a people who are like us, but whose lives are not like ours. Without them, what we call normality would not exist.2

As recent events tell us, this parallel world remains out of the mind only as long as the ships are on the move.

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As the clocks spring forward, this round of dispatches sees us travel to the future as well as to the near and distant past. A testament to just how much the North Sea still has to give.

Normal service resumes in April.

March of the wind turbines

We head first to my home patch of North East England, where plans for a major expansion in offshore wind have recently been announced.

Fittingly, the announcement by The Crown Estate was made in the Northumberland town of Blyth — not only Northumberland’s premier port (as the welcome signs driving in proudly boast), but also the site of the UK’s very first offshore wind farm, commissioned in the year 2000. Back then, the pioneering project brought the optimism of the new millennium to Blyth’s horizon in the form of two lonely turbines. At the time, they were the largest offshore turbines ever erected anywhere in the world.

I can remember the instalment of these trailblazing turbines being reported on the local teatime TV news as a child. After so many headlines of regional decline — the last closure of this, the final demolition of that — it was wonderfully strange to see things being added to our North East skylines for once, rather than taken away.

These two trailblazers have themselves since been decommissioned, and yet the twenty-fifth anniversary of this energy first was still celebrated last year, as a “hugely important moment” in the overall story of offshore wind.

As many readers will know from the evidence of their own eyes, the march of the wind turbines across North Sea horizons continues apace. Earlier this month, an interesting paper caught my eye on the possibility of a coming spatial squeeze, if national ambitions for increased offshore wind energy are realised on all sides. Even without the latest announced expansion off North East England (presumably too recent to be included in the study), the authors provide a striking picture as to where we might be come 2050.

Remembering the diggers of the Noordzeekanaal

Meanwhile, this year sees a significantly older engineering anniversary on the Dutch side of the North Sea. 2026 marks 150 years since the Noordzeekanaal or North Sea Canal was opened by King Willem III of the Netherlands.

Designed to solve Amsterdam’s long-standing struggle for sufficient access to the North Sea, the 21-kilometre-long channel running east to west took just eleven years to complete. Many of Amsterdam’s elites had been sceptical about the bold plan, and so the financing of the canal relied on the cooperation of English contractor Henry Lee & Sons, as well as others from across the water.1 The Dutch, who had previously helped dry out the English fens, were now reliant on their western neighbours for their own latest attempt to override mother nature.

The canal, of course, relied on huge amounts of gruelling manual labour. As a source from 1866 observed:

When we go towards the dunes, we see life, where previously silence and rural tranquility reigned: a colony of 1200 workers, many of whom have led their wives there, living just below the peaceful village of Velzen in huts and cottages, in clay-built shelters and neater buildings, and working tirelessly with spade and cart, with horse and traction engine, in a manner that certainly inspires the interest of the visitor when he chooses to visit on a working day; then the inns, coffee houses and pubs, reading rooms and shops are empty, but through dune and field the entire crowd moves busily like an industrious but well-regulated colony of ants.2

With this work all too easy to forget, it’s fitting that the statue that commemorates these canal-diggers or kanaalgravers was recently unveiled at a new location in this anniversary year — opposite Sluisplein 22 in IJmuiden, where the very first spade broke ground in March 1865.

A chance find in a ditch at Wijk bij Duurstede

And finally into the Dutch hinterland, to the town of Wijk bij Duurstede, south-east of Utrecht, where a chance find has turned up during excavation work to replace a local sewer, exciting local archaeologists.

The wooden beam over three metres long and thirty centimetres thick is presumed to belong to the remains of a ship, though more research is needed to determine exactly what and how old it is. An early estimate, based on the location of the find and pottery fragments recovered nearby, suggests it could date from the Carolingian period, when nearby Dorestad was then the largest settlement in the Low Countries, a flourishing trading hub strategically positioned between Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish empire.

Today, there is nothing to see above ground of the Dorestad of old — only the much later Wijk bij Duurstede (‘neighbourhood by Dorestad’). But every so often, a find like this from beneath the ground offers us a glimpse into what once came before.

The best of the rest

• Wanted: ‘Resourceful’ tenants for croft on Fair Isle

• Beyond low water: Lost villages of the North Kent Coat’s Swale Estuary

• Have a conversation with the voice of Doggerland

• Watch: The arrival of the Strangers in Norwich

• Rare beluga spotted off the Flemish coast at Blankenberge

• Seabirds as architects of the landscape

• Funding to help future generations of stargazers on the Northumberland coast

  

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North Sea Friday Folk #12 (July 31st 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #12 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today’s the turn of geologist & palaeobotanist Clement Reid (1853-1916), one of the first to postulate a drowned land bridge across the southern North Sea.

Reid and his wife Eleanor studied plant remains stored in the tough peat or ‘moorlog’ brought ashore by fishermen from Dogger Bank: bog-bean, fern, willow, white birch, sallow and hazel.

Their conclusion: the deposits must come from ‘the middle of some vast fen’ — now known as Doggerland.

North Sea Friday Folk #11 (July 24th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #11 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today’s the turn of Dolly Peel (1782-1857), legendary fishwife of South Shields.

A notorious smuggler of brandy, tobacco, lace and scent, she also fiercely resisted the press gang, scuppering their efforts to seize local men. When her own husband Cuthbert was pressed, Dolly followed him to sea on board his man-o’-war, helping the ship’s surgeon with her customary ‘nerve of iron’.

According to a local source, she was also famed for ‘her ability to rhyme extempore on any subject’, a skill she no doubt used to her advantage on numerous occasions throughout her colourful life.

North Sea Friday Folk #10 (April 24th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #10 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today’s the turn of Scottish novelist Neil Gunn (1891-1973), son of the Caithness coast, his father a herring-boat captain working out of Dunbeath.

As Gunn wrote of his childhood in his autobiography The Atom of Delight (1956):

If his mother was the earth, his father was the sea. In fact he could hardly think of his father without thinking of the sea. Out of the sea came the livelihood of the household. They depended on the sea, and of all the elements in nature it was the least dependable.1

The Highland Clearances and the dawn of the Caithness herring fisheries form the backdrop for one of his most popular novels, The Silver Darlings (1941):

All along these coasts...there was a new stirring of sea life. The people would yet live, the people themselves, for no landlord owned the sea...2

A kind soul on here told me about The Silver Darlings last year, and I was delighted to come across a copy in a charity shop shortly after. Alas, I can’t remember who it was, so if it was you, many thanks!

North Sea Friday Folk #9 (April 10th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #9 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today’s the turn of Bergen-born Leif Andreas Larsen (1906–1990), also known as “Shetland Larsen” for his work on the secret Shetland Bus operation during World War II.

Larsen went to sea age 16, growing to know local waters well — useful knowledge for the war to come. From 1941 onwards he made 52 trips across the North Sea, ferrying special agents and supplies between Shetland and Norway, usually under cover of darkness.

For his work on the Shetland Bus, Larsen became the most highly decorated Allied naval officer during WWII.

He would also go on to star as himself in the 1954 British-Norwegian war film Suicide Mission, appearing alongside many of his previous crew members.

North Sea Friday Folk #8 (April 3rd 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #8 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of scientist and illustrator Dorothy Thursby-Pelham (1884–1972), who in the early twentieth century made extensive surveys of the plaice population in the southern North Sea.

Thursby-Pelham was England’s first female sea-going fisheries scientist, working on a government research trawler out of Lowestoft.

As a 1937 BBC radio programme reported:

This last summer she has been trying to prove — and has proved successfully — that it is worth while to return to the sea undersized plaice which are too small for the market, for, contrary to the general belief that they are mortally damaged in the haul, a great many of them live.

North Sea Friday Folk #7 (March 27th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #7 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of German poet and novelist Theodor Storm (1817-1888), a son of the Wadden Sea, born in Husum.

Storm’s most famous work Der Schimmelreiter (1888) — completed just a few months before his death — tells the story of Hauke Haien, a young North Frisian who envisions a new form of dyke to keep the sea at bay along the local stormswept coast.

Storm memorably described Husum as the graue Stadt am Meer (‘grey town by the sea’) in an 1852 poem dedicated to his hometown (full poem with English translation here).

North Sea Friday Folk #6 (March 20th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #6 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of Belgian artist and son of Ostend James Ensor (1860-1949).

Known for images of grotesque fantasy, inspired by childhood memories of his family’s seaside souvenir & curiosity shop.

Many of his works were influenced by his coastal surroundings — the Flemish seaside in its heyday.

Ensor remained in Ostend through both world wars, and in December 1942 a radio broadcast mistakenly announced his death. Ensor’s response to this bizarre event was to visit his own monument in the city to pay his respects, to great public surprise.

North Sea Friday Folk #5 (Feb 13th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #5 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of Shetland spinner and knitter Betty Mouat (1825-1918) who in January 1886 found herself alone and adrift in a North Sea storm on the Columbine, after the captain and mate were washed overboard.

What was supposed to be a routine journey to Lerwick for Betty as the only passenger on board turned into a 9-day trial, during which she made a meagre few biscuits and a bottle of milk last.

Eventually the Columbine ran aground off the coast of Norway near Ålesund, and Betty was rescued by some local fishermen.

The bay on the Norwegian island of Lepsøya where the Columbine finally ran ashore is still known as Colombinebukta — ‘Columbine-bay’.

North Sea Friday Folk #4 (Feb 6th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #4 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) who in his youth lived in Grimstad on the south coast of Norway, becoming friends with local sea pilot Svend Hanssen Haaø.

Like many in the region, Sven had run the British blockade of the Skagerrak strait during the Napoleonic Wars to bring back food from Denmark, an experience that would inspire Ibsen to write his poem Terje Vigen (as I wrote about in 2025).

North Sea Friday Folk #3 (Jan 30th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #3 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), whose 18-month stay in the fishing community of Cullercoats in North-East England took his painting to new heights.

During his time on the North Sea coast, Homer was particularly struck by the lives of the local women and girls, who he often painted on the shore with their creels, looking out to sea.

North Sea Friday Folk #2 (Jan 23rd 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #2 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Today it’s the turn of St Hild, first abbess of Whitby Abbey.

Shown often with ammonite fossils at her feet — a nod to the legend that Hild turned local snakes to stone.

The Yorkshire coast around Whitby is rich in ammonites, which perhaps inspired the legend. At any rate, the ammonite genus Hildoceras is still named after Hild today.

North Sea Friday Folk #1 (Jan 16th 2026)

North Sea Friday Folk #1 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep

Kicking us off is Krijn, the name given to the prehistoric owner of a skull fragment recovered from the bottom of the North Sea off Zeeland in 2001 — a young male Neanderthal living 50,000-70,000 years ago in the now submerged landscape known as Doggerland.

The fossilised fragment is now on display at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (RMO), alongside a recent reconstruction of his face.

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There is nearly always one figure to be seen upon “No Man’s Land”, working his way to and fro along the windings of the smaller creeks and over the mud, walking with careful measured tread, and never resting long upon either foot. This is the eel-spearer, who, with mud-pattens (or mud-shoes) firmly laced to his feet, tows behind him a box about two feet six inches long and slightly rounded at the bottom: he works carefully over the ground with his spear, like a pointer in stubble. This man knows every square yard of the mud for miles, and has earned a living upon it, and on nothing else, for the last forty years; his whole stock-in-trade being his mud-pattens, his spear, and the box that slips after him. When his tide is over he slings this box, with twenty or thirty pounds of eels in it, upon his spear across his shoulder — his pattens hanging in front — and so trudges to market.1

Robert C. Leslie’s 1886 description of the eel-spearer is an evocative one — a solitary figure labouring between the tides, out on the flats and reliant on little else but local knowledge, careful attention and some critical footwear. It’s the detail of the mud-shoes that most fascinates me. Leslie describes them as ‘two bits of elm planks some fourteen inches square’, which ‘sink and suck’ with every claggy step. As demonstrated in this video, while very effective, mud-pattens are far from comfortable. A 1919 dictionary of sea terms warns that ‘they are difficult for beginners to manage; and it is best, therefore, for anyone to take an oar or pole with him’.2

Apparently these ooze-friendly inventions were known as pawts or pights in the sludgier parts of East Anglia, as backsters on the estuarine silts and clays of Kent, and as Mersea pattens by Essex fishermen, presumably after Mersea Island, south of Colchester, where there are reports of women and child winkle-collectors wearing them:

In order to enable them to walk on the wet clay they [the women and children of West Mersea] wore flat boards cut into ovals under their soles and braced tightly over the instep and about the ankles. Walking or gliding on these, they stooped to collect the molluscs into a basket held in the left hand. Woe to such as slipped and fell. The adhesive clay held him or her fast by the arms.3

The children’s playground game Stuck in the Mud comes to mind.

Mud-pattens also turn up on the Essex coast in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water, the eighth book in the famous Swallows & Amazons series, where they’re wonderfully referred to as splatchers.4 In the story, the unusually large prints left behind by the splatchers are mistaken for the hoofmarks of a mammoth-like mastodon by the children — although there is much sensible discussion as to how such a heavyweight creature could have crossed the mudflats without sinking. They eventually discover that the prints are from the splatchers of something much more intriguing than even an ancient beast — a local boy.

With the mammoths and mastadons long gone, it is indeed enterprising humans who are the weightiest roamers of the mudflats. The fact that Leslie above, writing in the late nineteenth century, notes that the figure of the eel-spearer is ‘nearly always’ to be spotted out in the fickle flats of No Man’s Land tells us how relatively common intertidal labour was in the past. Winklers and cockle gathers, wildfowlers and seaweed harvesters, clay diggers and sea-dike builders, messengers and mudlarkers — all took their chances at some point for a day or night’s pay, as the tides allowed, in these workplaces of high risk though hardly high reward.

Unlike the North Sea’s fishwives though — honoured with an increasing number of shoreside monuments as I wrote last year — these tide-walkers seem to be less salient in our collective consciousness. Perhaps it is due to the far-off nature and impermanence of much of the labour itself, snatched between tides in the edgelands, any trace of human feet or mud pattens soon washed away.

To my knowledge the few public artistic nods that exist to mud-walkers and -workers are, unsurprisingly, along the coast of the Wadden Sea — a sea named after the mudflats themselves, and where various No Man’s Land activities seem to be still going strong (including silt-sledding, as documented here by the team). Admittedly, I’m yet to visit the IJzeren Wadloper (‘Iron Wad-walker’) or Slikwerker (‘Mud-worker’) on the northern coast of the Netherlands myself, though has recently written about his walk past the former.

Meanwhile, back on the other side of the North Sea, I wonder how much of the recently inaugurated King Charles III England Coast Path — now the world’s longest managed coastal path — will take in views of Robert C. Leslie’s No Man’s Lands. As he noted back in 1886, while the eel-spearer knew every square yard of his patch:

There are thousands upon thousands of acres of… foreshore left by the tide, commonly known as “mud”, of which the average seaside visitor knows less, perhaps, than he does of the central regions of Africa.5

I doubt this situation has changed much in the intervening one and a half centuries.

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This week I crossed the Pacific Ocean. It was as much a surprise to me as it perhaps is to you now. It wasn’t exactly planned. When my husband was invited to a conference in Australia, we thought to use the opportunity as an excuse for a holiday in New Zealand. When else would we get the chance? And so it was that we found ourselves on the other side of the world as the latest unprecedented turn in world affairs was announced. A return journey via Australia and the Middle East was swiftly swapped for the longer and — to us, at least — much less familiar way round via the Pacific.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, the thought of flying over the world’s biggest and deepest ocean would have brought me out in a cold sweat. All that water below. I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times, and even the short hop across the North Sea can be a psychological challenge for me. Luckily though, we’d just spent an enchanting few days immersed in the history and culture of the Pasifika, the peoples of the Pacific. Thanks to various museum displays and outdoor information panels, a windblown network of isles, atolls and communities was now superimposed on the vast expanse of blue in my mind, and on the 12-hour flight from Aukland to San Francisco I could happily distract myself by studying the in-flight map as these specks of land passed beneath us. It was certainly comforting to know there were scattered places and peoples down there somewhere.

There’s something special about flying over somewhere you know you’ll probably never set foot. (Though I’ve long been drawn to the remote, even I have my limits.) “Nu’utele is famous as a highly appreciated scenic landmark when viewed in the distance”, a surprisingly detailed pop-up panel informed me cheerily, somewhere off Samoa. Scenic when viewed in the distance — presumably from across the sea, rather than from above. After all, the default mode of travel for the Pacific Islanders, as for so much of the world, was long by boat.

Nowadays, given that first contact with a new place so often occurs in the dull, soulless surroundings of yet another airport or train station, arriving somewhere by sea is a rare luxury for most of us (apart from the few for whom sea travel remains a way of life, due to occupation or local geography). Since landing safely back in the Netherlands, I’ve been thinking about what this means for our perspectives on coastal places — how many are themselves scenic when viewed in the distance, if only we too had a chance to come and go by the water. Fond though we may be of them, many of the North Sea’s traditional seaside towns are somewhat shabby up-close. I can’t help thinking that if more folk had the chance to look back on them from the sea, they might improve in reputation. To know a place well is to know it from all sides, surely — from all approaches and all views.

It’s true that many of our coastal settlements still have striking visual identities when viewed from the sea, even if the collective frame of reference has shifted and the vistas have become confined to postcards for most of us (and even the postcards are on their way out). There are the fishing villages with their squat cottages tightly packed around a central harbour, designed to provide easy access to the sea and at the same time protect from the worst of it, and the odd protruding church spire to guide and comfort those returning home to shore.

Then there are the resorts, with their equally carefully planned promenades, grand hotels and curving seaward facades. There’s no doubt that these waterfronts were designed to be seen from a distance as well as close-up, their proud skylines perfectly positioned to project elegance, prosperity and sophistication on railway posters across the country — a striking contrast with how they are often viewed today.

Thinking back to my recent chance brush with Samoa, the North Sea certainly has its own Nu’uteles — uninhabited isles known in the main for their familiar shape on the horizon. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the ski-jump-like Copinsay across the water up in Orkney. There are others too, familiar from their outline profile rather than how they feel underfoot, not to mention the newcomers — the offshore wind farms popping up across North Sea horizons in recent years.

All these easily catch the eye and the imagination but, as my recent trip so far from home has reminded me, besides gazing out to the lonely sea, there is much to gain from looking back on the places we actually inhabit too.

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Even the short month of February has produced its fair share of coastal stories. This round of dispatches spans the timely, the timeless and the fortunate.

Normal service resumes in March.

Winter storms offer up treasures amidst the damage

As those living in the North Sea region’s more exposed spots know, this year’s winter storms have brought a good deal of damage and erosion, rough seas eating away at already crumbling coastlines at an alarming rate in many places. But, as well as depriving us of early morning swims, familiar footpaths and even homes, winter weather can on occasion offer up a stunning seaside surprise.*

Typically, it’s the most frequent visitors to the shoreline who are rewarded with first sight of these freshly uncovered treasures — the dog walkers, the runners, the swimmers, the anglers, the beachcombers. At Lunan Bay near Montrose it was thanks to two dog walkers that footprints some 2000 years old were spotted among blasted sand dunes, imprinted in a freshly exposed layer of clay.

Jenny Snedden and Ivor Campbell contacted council archaeologist Bruce Mann, who in turn called in colleagues from the University of Aberdeen. With the footprints thought to be something pretty special — there are very few sites like this in the UK (perhaps mostly famously Happisburgh in Suffolk) and none previously reported for Scotland — the race was on to document the prints before the sea reclaimed them like so much else this winter.

The response to this archeological emergency looks to have been quite something, as Professor Kate Britton of the University of Aberdeen explains in the video below. They were right to hurry — by the following week the footprints had already disappeared.

*The weekly swim reports from on the Suffolk coast are well worth a read!

A lucky escape from the mudflats

In a place of tides, even a few hours or minutes can make a difference, as one Amazon delivery driver recently found out when she became stranded on the Broomway in Essex.** The track — named after the bundles of twigs which once marked its way across the mudflats of Maplin Sands — provides access to Ministry-of-Defence-owned Foulness Island at low tide.

“Access” is a somewhat misleading term though. The Broomway is notoriously hazardous and, before the opening of a road bridge alternative in 1922, is known to have claimed at least a hundred lives. As a local source from 1867 recorded:

It is extremely perilous for any stranger to attempt the passage to or from this island without a guide, but the dangers attending it have been a pleasurable excitement to many. Some farmers would stay to the last, and then race the tide, and swim the creeks. Some of those who have been used to the sands all their lives, have there yielded up their breath, and many hairbreadth escapes are recorded… Fogs are liable to come on, the tide out of course, and other accidents occur, so that the most experienced may lose their way.1

Today the navigational brooms may be long gone, but the Broomway is still apparently signposted by modern GPS systems, especially when the modern road bridge to Foulness is closed — the apparent reason behind the latest mishap. Reaching the sea wall en route to the island, the Amazon driver reportedly questioned her SatNav’s alternative directions across the sands, but upon phoning her (remote) supervisor was told to carry on. When the path broke up into impassable mud, she was forced to abandon the van and fortunately made it back on foot to dry land.

A lucky escape, and yet another reminder that modern technology is far from infallible.

**Many thanks to North Sea Nexus reader for bringing this story to my attention!

Trapped by coastal geometry

And finally to the timeless. A new study which analysed over 300,000 fossils may help us better understand how certain marine species respond to climate change — in the future as well as the past.

The results indicate that, among shallow-water invertebrates, a species’ chance of extinction is influenced by the shape and orientation of the coastline it calls home. Species living along coasts running north-south were less vulnerable to extinction than those living along east-west oriented coasts, or off islands.

It’s a striking finding, and one which the researchers explain in terms of the ‘latitudinal trap’. Faced with environmental changes, a species’ ability to migrate through shallow waters to a different latitude — i.e. north or south — can be vital for its survival. Coastlines which run north-south conveniently provide such an escape route, while east-west coasts or island environments offer no such shallow way out, effectively trapping species at the same, increasingly inhospitable latitude.

The next step is to see whether this effect of coastal geometry can be observed today, in our world of warming seas. One presumes that creatures living along North Sea coasts — with their dominant north-south configuration — may well fare better than those elsewhere. A hopeful thought for the future of the region.

The best of the rest

• Game: play Rest-Coast’s Coastal Challenge and explore how different choices influence coastal resilience over time

• Explainer: read about how the UK responds to maritime emergencies

• Event: Ostend launches new 3-month-long food festival celebrating lesser-known North Sea fish species

• Anniversary: Bridlington remembers sailors lost in the Great Gale of February 1871

• Seaside heritage: Scarborough's Clifton Hotel, where Wilfred Owen wrote some of his most famous poems, has been listed at Grade II

• Research in progress: investigating how Norwegian red sea cucumbers communicate with each other

  

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If such an inflow occurs, it will run east via the Skagerrak, the North Sea’s stubby right arm. It’s funny to think of a sea having arms, not least since this variety rarely come in pairs of equal size. As a shore-dweller who travels more frequently by air than water, I’m prone to thinking instead of the land extending out into the sea — headlands, nesses, tongues, spits. Though, at a different time and in a different life, I can imagine how the reverse perspective — eyes seeking bays, inlets, arms — could creep in.

In fact, it strikes me now that I have long been living in the shadows of such sea-heavy lives and times, almost without realising — hours spent amongst terse Norse sagas and dry Low German charters from the golden age of the Hanseatic League. And now my time is happily split between the Netherlands, North-East England and Genoa, erstwhile maritime heavyweights navigating new and somewhat tricky futures in their own ways.

Still, even with these regular reminders, the sea-before-land perspective is for me, like many others, hard to fully grasp. At least without the jolt of a visual twist. One such twist recently went on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich — an ocean-centric map based on the Spilhaus cartographic projection. Here, the world’s oceans and seas show up as a mass of mottled blues bounded by ghostly, seemingly incidental coastlines and continents. Named after its creator, Cape Town-born oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus (1911-1998), Spilhaus is certainly an appropriate label for it. The world’s waters spill out across the map into any bay, gulf or arm they can find.

Viewed this way, the North Sea is a shallow pocket tucked away at one end of the Atlantic. Small though it is, it is enticingly open at one end — perhaps dangerously so. Meanwhile, its mismatched arms or sleeves — the Skagerrak and the Channel — are strikingly slim. No wonder they each host some of the busiest shipping routes in the world.

To see the oceans, slice up the land — this was the mantra of Spilhaus when he came up with the idea of a map ‘interrupted within the land masses’.1 His mind may have been on ocean currents and other sea-bound phenomena but, as always, a better understanding of the world around us only gives greater perspective on our narrow place within it.

Some snatches from my travels through sea-heavy lives and times:

The ring of the world, which mankind inhabits, is deeply scored by bays; large bodies of water run from the ocean into the land

— opening to Ynglinga saga (Heimskringa), Old Norse-Icelandic, early 13th century2

~

Alle kleine water lopen in de groten [All small waters run into great ones]

— Low German proverb, early 16th century3

~

They told me last night there were ships in the offing,

And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea

— Blow the Wind Southerly, Northumbrian folk song, early 19th century

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Four hours and 10 minutes later, Gran reached the south-west corner of his native Norway, landing safely at Revtangen in Jæren near Stavanger, presumably mightily relieved. With 320 miles of sea behind him, Gran’s journey in a small Blériot monoplane was officially the longest flight ever taken over open water.

Leaving and arriving on the wing — migrating birds had been doing it for as long as anyone could remember along these northern coasts, but now one of their own had managed it too. To locals hearing of this latest chapter in the fledgling story of human flight, their neighbours across the sea must suddenly have felt much closer by.

In fact, in the more daring corners of early twentieth-century British society, Trygge Gran was already a familiar name. A keen skier since childhood, he had participated in Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica from 1910 to 1913, having been personally recommended for the task by Fridtjof Nansen.

Gran had signed up for Scott’s expedition before it was publicly known that his fellow countryman Roald Amundsen would be competing for the prize of the South Pole. In the end, having decided not to join the final push for the Pole — perhaps out of national pride — Gran was in the search party that found the bodies of Scott and his companions Wilson and Bowers in their tent on November 12th 1912.1

‘I will never forget it so long I live — a horrible nightmare could not have shown more horror than this Campo Santo,’ Gran would write of this moment in his diary. He would complete the sombre journey back to base camp on Scott’s own skis — ‘they must finish the journey — and they will,’ he wrote on November 17th.

Thus, by the time he was on the sands at Cruden Bay less than two years later, Gran was already well hardened by adventure and far from naive of the dangers of trying to be first, whether in the sky or on land.

The success of Gran’s flight across the North Sea was overshadowed by the beginning of the First World War that same summer — during which the Norwegian would serve in the British Royal Flying Corps, initially under the guise of Canadian “Teddy Grant” and eventually as a British officer by his own name.

But, by 1944 and the thirty-year anniversary of his pioneering North Sea flight, a great deal had changed. Norway had been under Nazi occupation for four years and Gran — despite his Norwegian patriotism and prior British connections — had aligned himself with Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationist fascist party Nasjonal Samling. The anniversary of the 1914 flight was a convenient milestone ripe for propaganda and a commemorative stamp was issued, with still a long year to go before Norway’s liberation.

Like many Norwegian collaborators, Gran was later arrested and tried for his war-time activities, and given an eighteen-month prison sentence for treason in 1948. Nevertheless, a stone monument still stands in Cruden Bay (despite some local opposition) — a reminder of a time when a plane ride across the North Sea was a daring first, and when Gran himself was — for the time being — on the right side of history.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, the cairn built by the complex Norwegian to mark the graves of Scott, Wilson and Bowers has long since disappeared beneath the drifting snow.

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This round of dispatches spans the nostalgic, the unwanted and the saved. All are testament to just how much the North Sea still matters.

Normal service resumes in February.

Letters from Denmark

Denmark has been in the news, and not only for the obvious reason you might think. Apparently, the 400-year-old Danish postal service is no longer delivering letters. Citing a decline in letter writing familiar to many beyond Denmark’s shores, PostNord has abandoned the service in order to focus on parcels instead. As ever, online shopping wins the battle of the day.

Unsurprisingly, the historic decision — which came into effect at the end of last year — prompted much reaction, not just in Denmark but also abroad. For British paper artist Gillian Taylor, this was a chance to create a collaborative cross-North Sea artwork. During the final weeks of the service, Taylor — who previously worked in Denmark herself — invited the people of Denmark to write to her in Devon, and is now collecting the submissions together under the title Med Venlig Hilsen (‘With Kind Regards’).

The artwork will hopefully be displayed on both sides of the North Sea, continuing the paper exchange between the two countries, even if the letters have stopped.1

Floating down the Rhine

Post aside, Europe’s inland waterways have their own way of transporting things long-distance, much of which unwanted.

A recent citizen science project in Germany has discovered that the amount of litter floating down the Rhine is much larger than previously thought. Over a 16-month period, some brave volunteers in Cologne gathered and sorted the debris caught in a floating trap on that famous stretch of the Rhine.

A staggering 20,339 items of rubbish larger than 1cm were collected — the inevitable plastics but also glass bottles and flower pots, as well as wooden remains of fireworks (which peaked unsurprisingly just after New Year’s Eve). Based on their findings, the team behind the study estimate that between 27 and 42 million items are transported down the Rhine each year. The ultimate destination for much of this waste: the North Sea, via the river’s sprawling delta in the Low Countries.

I myself made this journey along the Rhine in late 2021, when I moved from Konstanz to the Netherlands, via an overnight stay in Mainz. If I’d have known, I would have stopped to pick up some rubbish along the way!

Keelmen on the Tyne

And lastly, a more positive fluvial story, from the banks of the Tyne in my native North-East England. Apparently the historic Keelmen’s Hospital in Newcastle is to be preserved, after 15 years of neglect. Thanks to a £4.6million National Lottery Heritage Grant, the currently run-down building will be carefully restored and transformed into affordable housing.

The social housing plan is nothing but appropriate for a site built in 1701 to provide shelter, food and care for Tyneside’s famous keelmen — those who would ferry coal on flat-bottomed boats or “keels” to the collier ships waiting out at sea. Besides the hospital building, Newcastle’s keelmen are remembered in a Turner paining, as indeed in the well-known song The Keel Row:

O, weel may the keel row,
The keel row, the keel row,
O weel may the keel row
That my laddie's in.

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• Often brutal, always beautiful: the sea hounds of the Frisian Islands – in pictures

• Nuclear bunker nears collapse due to erosion on the Holderness coast

• A new statue of Benjamin Britten as a boy looking out to sea in Lowestoft (many thanks to for telling me about this!)

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Of course, plants travel too, especially when coaxed by a changing climate. At the end of the last Ice Age, as northern Europe emerged from its deep freeze, the native tree species we know and love today were yet to arrive. The retreating ice sheets left a treeless, scrubby tundra in their wake — an arboreal blank slate still to be colonised by species which had clung on in southern Europe, in ice-free pockets here and there.

From these isolated refuges the trees crept northwards over a warming continent. The hardiest came first — birch and pine, juniper and rowan — then oak, hazel, alder and elm (of which more later). Doggerland, the low-lying land which connected Britain to the continent at the time, formed a convenient route for the advancing trees — an arboreal bridge where we now find the southern North Sea. With time, the encroaching trees merged into a dense prehistoric wildwood spanning most of Britain, familiar to mesolithic hunter-gatherers but quite unimaginable today.

But, with an ever warmer climate came ever-rising seas, and one which breeched Doggerland. Britain’s connection to the continent was interrupted, and with it the advance of the trees. From that point on, new plants species arriving on our shores wouldn’t be so much carried on the wind, wing or fur, but largely in human hands.

With the first farmers came novel crops to be grown in clearings in the forest, and the new arrivals continued through the ages. By the medieval period, a serious trade in plant seeds had developed, bound for monastic gardens and medicinal or culinary use.

But it was in the early modern period that botanical exchanges really took off. Even John Locke was at it, as we know from his journals from the early 1680s, which record the seeds he distributed to friends and acquaintances, in particular Jacob Bobart the Younger (1641-1719), Keeper of the Oxford Botanic Garden.1 Jacob’s German father had been the first appointed keeper of the Oxford “physic” garden, and came from a long line of merchants.2 Likely he had left the German lands behind in a bid to make his own contribution to the family trade, perhaps with a good few plant seeds in his possession.

Migrants from the Low Countries also contributed to the botanical culture of early modern England. By the sixteenth century, growers in the Low Countries were exporting garden seeds to their nearby neighbours across the North Sea — a light, compact cargo that was easy to transport, provided it could be kept dry. In the 1570s, clergyman William Harrison wrote in his Description of England of ‘merchants, gentlemen, and the nobility, who make their provision yearly for new seeds out of strange countries, from whence they have them abundantly’.3

Among the Dutch immigrants arriving in England at this time were gardeners, bringing with them their innovative growing techniques. At Sandwich in Kent, where many of the newcomers first lived, local strains of beans, peas, radish and carrot were developed and sent up to London in seed form. And at Norwich, where many Dutch Strangers eventually settled, their production of vegetables in 1575 is reported as having provided ‘grete succor and sustenance for the pore’.4

The Dutch influence on Britain’s flora would only continue. A century or so later, with William III of Orange on the throne following the Glorious Revolution, Dutch elms (Ulmus x hollandica) were introduced into England from the Netherlands, especially coveted by those in favour of the new political order.

Alas, many of England’s elms have since succumbed to Dutch elm disease — so-called because it was first identified in the Netherlands in 1921 by plant pathologist Bea Schwarz. Appropriately, Schwarz has her very own elm cultivar named after her — Ulmus minor 'Bea Schwarz' which, for a time at least, was resistant to the very disease first isolated by the talented doctoral student.

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Of course, it’s not really the best we can do. In the quiet corners of every family, friendship group, club and community, there’ll have been much more going on in 2025, and a great deal of it timeless: spontaneous acts of kindness and generosity, good-hearted neighbourliness and charity, green shoots of creativity, hope and hard work. I know this just from being part of this Substack community, with all the wondrous goings-on to be found on my favourite platform by far.

Still, to me, this isn’t always the best time of year to take stock, look back or look ahead. Outside, behind the fairly lights and fireworks, nature is stubbornly still, with no hint of stirring. No fresh start out there, no fresh start in here — at least not yet.

But the turning of the year has got me thinking about time, and gives me an excuse to write about something that caught my eye towards the tail-end of 2025. It was a story about the Three Norths — True North, Magnetic North, Grid North. If you’re not familiar with this triplet of terms, here’s a very quick crash course:

• True North is the direction towards the geographic North Pole at the northern end of the Earth’s rotational axis

• Magnetic North is the direction that a compass points towards in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field

• Grid North is the northward direction along the vertical grid lines shown on flat map projections

While True North and Grid North are stable and settled, Magnetic North is a wanderer, drifting across the Earth’s surface in response to the ongoing — and unpredictable — churn of molten iron in the planet’s core. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, Magnetic North is an erratic traveller, and her surprise movements have made the headlines several times in recent years.1

In the British context, a significant milestone was reached in 2014 when — for the first time since the 1660s — Magnetic North moved from being to the west of Grid North to the east of it, the change starting at the very far tip of Cornwall. Since then, Magnetic North has continued her journey eastward across the country, reaching another key milestone in November 2022, when she first came into alignment with the special line where the other two norths (Grid North and True North) already converge, two degrees west of the Greenwich meridian. The triple alignment has been slowly making its way across England in the three years since, passing through Poole, Birmingham, Hebden Bridge and the Pennines on its way.

I admit I had been totally unaware of this unusual geographical occasion until a couple of weeks ago, when I read that the alignment of the Three Norths was about to leave England and head out into the North Sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed in my native Northumberland, having seemingly just skirted my hometown of Hexham some time in the summer, perhaps while I was there myself even.

There’s still time to catch the Three Norths in Scotland in 2026 though, as they’re expected to make land again in October 2026, near Newburgh in Aberdeenshire (just north of a certain US president’s golf course incidentally), before making a last stop at the fishing port of Fraserburgh. From there, the triple alignment will once more drift out into the North Sea, unlikely to return to Britain for another several hundred years or more.

As ever, the Earth we inhabit for a fleeting moment gives us a fresh perspective on the passing of time. I’ll choose that over the current crop of ‘words of the year’ any day.

Here’s wishing you a very Happy New Year, whether you’re ready for it or not. And whatever month, season or weather you prefer, I hope you can find reassurance in Dave Goulder’s calendrical folk song The January Man, which I often think of at this strange time of year. If you want to hear it sung, try this version by Lau & Karine Polwart () here.

Dave Goulder, The January Man

The January man he walks abroad
In woollen coat and boots of leather
The February man still shakes the snow
From off his hair and blows his hands
The man of March he sees the Spring and
Wonders what the year will bring
And hopes for better weather

Through April rains the man goes down
To watch the birds come in to share the summer
The man of May stands very still
Watching the children dance away the day
In June the man inside the man is young
And wants to lend a hand
And grins at each new comer

And in July the man in cotton shirt
He sits and thinks on being idle
The August man in thousands takes the road
To watch the sea and find the sun
September man is standing near
To saddle up and lead the year
And Autumn is his bridle

The man of new October takes the reins
And early frost is on his shoulder
The poor November man sees fire and wind
And mist and rain and Winter air
December man looks through the snow
To let eleven brothers know
They’re all a little older

And the January man comes round again
In woollen coat and boots of leather
To take another turn and walk along
The icy road he knows so well
The January man is here for
Starting each and every year
Along the way forever

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