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Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life.

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. It exists minutely, as the film of bacteria that spreads over a rock surface or a wharf piling as spheres of protozoa, small as pinpricks, sparkling at the surface of the sea and as Lilliputian beings swimming through dark pools that lie between the grains of sand. It encrusts weeds or drifting spars or the hard, chitinous shell of a lobster. It tunnels into solid rock and bores into peat and clay. Invisibly, where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways. Visibly, it carpets the intertidal rocks or half hidden, it descends into fissures and crevices, or hides under boulders, or lurks in the wet gloom of sea caves. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche. Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. On the flood tide it is a water world, returning briefly to the relative stability of the open sea. On the ebb tide it knows the harsh extremes of the land world, being exposed to heat and cold, to wind, to rain and drying sun. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth’s crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. “ No other writer speaks so unabashedly about beauty and wonder.” John Burnside, New Statesman