“It’s only an island if you look at it from the water” – Chief Brody, Jaws
If your cross-Channel ferry sinks somewhere between Dover and Calais, stay near the radar tower. The waters are shallow enough at only 45m that when the ferry’s keel hits the seabed, you might not even get your feet wet. By comparison, at 227m Loch Ness is almost five times as deep.
Being an island nation is a core part of the British identity. An estimated two thirds of the world’s population have never seen the sea, but in the UK that drops to nearly 10 per cent. Yet most people don’t appreciate the impact our unique position on the edge of a continental shelf has had on our history, going back thousands of years.
Our coast neither starts nor ends at the beach, and this eye-opening book takes a look beneath the surface to explore the forces of nature that have made Britain what it is. We experience some of the highest tides on the planet and we are battered with waves that have travelled halfway around the globe before they get here, but most of what we understand about our unique waters has only been discovered in living memory.
In this fascinating guided tour of the fantastically varied British coastline, Professor David Bowers combines oceanography with maritime history, explaining tides, currents and waves in an accessible way whilst revealing how they have been responsible for both salvation (the Channel alone checked the Nazi advance in 1940) and disaster (such as the catastrophic 1953 flooding that led to the ingenious development of the Thames tidal barrier). He covers everything from how ocean swell waves were first recorded here in preparation for the D-Day landings, to how the first underwater light measurements paved the way to modern ocean satellite observation.
This is a story 8,000 years in the making, ever since the country broke away from mainland Europe in the Mesolithic era, and in his insightful and irreverent telling of it Professor Bowers shows that the British Isles are defined by the sea, regardless of whether you look at them from land or water. He encourages you to visit all the places explored in the book, but when you stand on the beach or clifftop you will never think of Britain in quite the same way again.
