The Way to the Sea
Caroline Crampton, Granta, £16.99
The Frayed Atlantic Edge
David Gange, William Collins, £18.99
Seawater pulses through the veins of our islands, the tang of open water reaching to the furthest points inland. Insularity has always been our destiny, determining daily life and deepest meanings even before Albion loomed out of the haze. Early Britons took to boats from necessity, but also from sheer curiosity about what lay behind horizons, whether markets for goods, countries for converting or lands of eternal youth.
These two books compare the Kingdom’s coastline in its vastness and variety, and show the marked contrast between ambiguous east and tumultuous west. Their longitudes are different, but both authors share a passion for re-orienting mainstream histories and making us look to our littorals.
Caroline Crampton’s source-to-sea exploration of the Thames starts in Gloucestershire, at the unexpectedly indeterminate spot where the river seeps forth from Stygian springs to start its 215-mile descent through the English imagination. The river gathers significance and strength as it passes William Morris’s Kelmscott, Oxford’s ‘lost causes’, Paul Nash’s Wittenham, Wind in the Willows country, Stanley Spencer’s resurrections, brooding Windsor, Magna Carta’s meadows, dissolved abbeys and Cardinal Wolsey’s hubristic Hampton Court, before even reaching London. There, it gains innumerable new tributaries before escaping out the Essex side, to flow through ever-widening flats until somewhere beyond Shoeburyness, where brackishness finally turns full salt.
The author’s parents owned a yacht in the Medway and many of her youthful days were spent between places and states of mind, channel-finding, watching ships and seeing the banks change, tacking and thinking, yawing and yarning. She saw the Docklands ‘regenerated’ and learned indignantly of earlier displacements of superfluous communities. Her Thames is tainted with secret shames, its course a palimpsest of lingering class resentments, its estuary a repository of industrial toxins, unmarked graves and unexploded bombs. But she also finds treasures, such as aquamarine 5th-century glassware retrieved from sucking ooze, discovers fascinating stories, and recalls enchanted hours when sea, shores and sky combined in brilliant tableaux.
Like his chosen coast, David Gange’s book is harder-edged. He resorts courageously to a kayak, entrusting this cockleshell to the rigours of the Atlantic, from Out Stack to Land’s End. By day, he combats cross-currents around the feet of Scylla-like cliffs, creeps awestruck through sea-arches reminiscent of cathedrals, is glared at by gannets, meets whales uncomfortably close to and tries not to turn turtle, until his shoulders and torso ache with tiredness. At nights, he reads and rests beside desolate tidelines or casually ascends some summit, almost as if he believes he might wake to the sight of Avalon. Orcadian navigators, Irish saints and Welsh pilgrims paddle out from his pages, taking us to reaches that were roads when London was a rumour.
He conjures up cruelty and ‘dark histories’. This is an intensely political book, ruing the ‘urban, inland ascendancy’ that has made the far west culturally as well as geographically marginal, in the interests of commerce and the name of modernity.
But there is also uncomplicated beauty, and wonderful descriptions of elemental moments when survival depends on skill and the boat becomes the author’s homeland. His sea is stormy, but it is also ‘a great heart’, its islands wombs as much as tombs. Strewing poems in his wake, he finds keening sadness along these frayed fringes, and causes for righteous anger, but also optimism in a world wanting landfall – new ways of living and of viewing the future, with more space for small communities and individual freedom. As he struggles to stay afloat, he dreams of a time when the wave-battered west is less a land of legend than a launch-pad into immensity.
This review first appeared in Country Life, and is reproduced with permission