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Owain Jones, Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of the West of
England, owain.jones@uwe.ac.uk
Tides are an exciting and dramatic feature of many parts of the UK coast, and
coastal areas globally. They are profoundly important in shaping the
physical, economic, social and cultural geographies of the coast, and are
so in ways which connect all these together. Thus they are important for
those with responsibilities for managing the coasts, littoral areas, and sea
margins (with an eye to sustainable management). And for those seeking
to deepen our ‘socio-ecological’ understandings of the coasts more
generally – understandings which acknowledge the complexity of any
environmental issue and how they are always constructed from interacting
natural and social processes. Intertidal areas - from marshy areas, sand
dunes, beaches, to estuarine mud flats - are subject to a wide range of
pressures and loss.
Estuaries are particularly important in the UK context, are highly tidal, have
very powerful and important physical, economic and cultural forces at work
within them, yet are often seen as empty, ugly, and thus ripe for neglect
and or development of one kind or another.
This paper draws upon my cultural geographical work on what I term ‘tidal
culture’, and Natasha Barker’s work on the culture and management of
estuaries in UK Russia and Canada which have the other highest tides in the
world, which was conducted as part of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust
Travelling Fellowship (Barker 2008). The Severn Estuary is used as an
example as it familiar to both, and is the subject to the second highest tides in
the world and the highest in Europe.
2 Tides (a brief introduction)
The sun and moon exert "tractive" force on the oceans, drawing the waters
towards their ever moving "sublunar" and "subsolar" points. Tides occur in
all the oceans (to varying degrees) but vary markedly, and becomes very
apparent and significant when more affected water meets land.
Variously, around the world’s coasts, the all important sea level continually
rises and falls to make either microtidal coasts (under 2 metre range);
mesotidal coasts (2 – 4 metres); or macrotidal coasts (4 metres and higher)
(Haslett 2008). Tidal areas can be diurnal (tides rise and fall roughly once
every 24 hours, e.g. Gulf of Mexico), semi-diurnal (tide rises and falls
roughly twice in 24 hours, e.g. Atlantic coasts of Europe and North
America), or ‘mixed’ where the rhythm is more syncopated, as in one low
tide followed by two higher tides (e.g. west coast of Canada and the United
States).
Before I give a few examples, I set out the anatomy of the tide
Within this base rhythm there is local variation caused by factors such as
the shape and orientation of coast, air pressure, wind speed and direction,
how they have been ‘engineered’ (sea walls etc).
Importantly tides have rhythm signatures which differ form the more
ubiquitous rhythms of season and day night. The pattern of high and
low tides migrates across the day night timetable.
The temporalities of everyday life are often claimed to be changing (e.g.
Kreitzman, 1999).
Smoothing out - floating free from the rhythms of natural life - becoming
social, abstract, economic (24/7)
Serres (1995: 28) in the Natural Contract puts this down to the retreat of two
ways of life – ‘the peasant’ and ‘the sailor’ and sees it a defining aspect of
modern life.
‘how they spent their time, hour by hour, depended on the state of the sky and
on the seasons. We have lost all memory of what we own these kinds of men. [
] The greatest event of the 20th century incontestably remains the
disappearance of agricultural activity at the helm of human life in general and of
individual cultures’
There are clearly changes and in some ways we are more isolated from natural
rhythms (some examples comes later).
BUT, for various reasons, life remains much more temporally rhythmic and
various, than is often acknowledged. Not least because of;
the depth, scale, power and ubiquity of natural temporalities embedded in the
life world. They cannot be so lightly thrown off, they are deeply engrained in our
bodies, our everyday lives and in relational formations which pattern life.
As Harvey (1996. 210) states ‘Night and day, the seasons, lifecycles in the
animal and plant world, and the biological processes [of the body] are typical
encounters with various kinds of temporality’.
These are still very understudied. In the excellent Timespace book by May and
Thrift ‘natural times’ are mentioned in the introduction but all the chapters are
more or less about social/human time. A similar pattern appears in the papers
published in the journal Time and Society.
Tides
Lefebvre’s (2004) ‘rhythmanalysis’ is a call to study temporality and also the use of
rhythm to analysis everyday spatial practices.
He raises tides as an example. He says that European cities on the Atlantic coast
have differing qualities of life (rhythms) to those on the Mediterranean coast
because of the much more extreme and varied tidal ranges that affect them.
Tides, in the UK, and elsewhere, are a key form of natural temporal process bringing
differing space/time patternings to many aspects of everyday life.
Tides are a response to the relational movement of sun, earth and moon.
They generate extraordinary inter-tidal spaces. (These can be very dangerous and
scene of exploitation and tragedy, e.g. Morcambe Bay).
“Then there is Michael Marten, a photographer who has become fascinated by the
lost tidal land - amphibious, unowned - that exists between the low-water mark and
the high-water mark, and who takes pairs of images from precisely the same position
(the positions of the tripod's feet marked with pebbles and sticks) at high and low
tide.” (Macfarlane, 2007)
Where significant tides occur they have obvious impact on natural
systems such as erosion and deposition but also on many aspects of
social, cultural, and economic everyday life
Agriculture
Tourism
Sea related industries
Land transport
Sea transport
Power generation
Various forms of recreation
Environmental management
Place identity
Material forms (sea walls, boats, bridges, urban and rural water fronts)
The NCC (1991) identifies 155 estuaries (which by definition are tidal)
around the British coastline and calculates that ‘the 9,320 km. of estuarine
shoreline makes up 48% of the longest estimate of the entire coast’, and that
‘18,186,000 people live in large towns and cites adjacent to estuaries’.
(second highest
tidal range
in the world –up to 15 m)
Severn Estuary
Partnership
“Britain’s longest river brings vast quantities of water into the Severn Estuary.
Europe’s biggest tide takes masses of water back up into the mainland. The
mighty Severn influences the ways we live in many ways – and deserves all
the attention we can give it!” (SEP, 2005, p .2)
Roughly 20 % of the estuary is intertidal space (100 km sq). 80% of coastline
is modified / engineered (sea walls)
All manner of sites around the estuary have polyphonic rhythms of day night and
high low tides (and seasonal changes)
Beaches
Farms
Ports
Cities (rivers, docks and swing bridges)
Power stations
Nature reserves
The rhythm of the tides become part of everyday practice and dwelt life for many
people (to varying degrees)
Local governance has to deal with highly dynamic system which cross
boundaries and intersects with all manner of social/economic/ecological
functions.
Very little studied in a landscapey cultural geog. type ways (as far as I can ascertain)
Tide, Time and Narrative
The turn of the tide is often used to locate ‘us’ and our
stories in time - to mark a point where things can start, and
things can end.
This reflects a need (perhaps) not only for human stories to
embed themselves in (patterns of) space and place, but
also in patterns (rhythms) of time.
Joseph Conrad
Beginnings and Ends
I am collecting a number of examples where the tide, and particular state of
the tide, is used as a motif at the opening (and often) the close of novels,
and other writings.
Most famously perhaps Conrad set the narration of Heart of Darkness
between the turn of two tides.
(Opening) The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of
the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and
being bound down to the river, the only thing to do was to come to and wait
for the turn of the tide.
(Close). Marlow ceased, and sat apart [ ] in the pose of a meditating Buddha.
Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb”, said the
Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank
of cloud, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an
immense darkness.
(Conrad published two sets of stories entitled Twixt Land and Sea and
Within the Tides – the margins of land and sea being a key element in
his form of psychological realism).
Novels
Mill on the Floss - George Elliot
Frenchman’s Creek - Daphne Du Maurier
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea - John Burnside
Travel/place writing
The Kingdom by the Sea - Paul Theroux
Coasting – Jonathan Raban
Modern Nature – Derek Jarman
Tides and life and death
A number of folklore sources tell how key moments in the life cycle (conception,
birth and death) were believed to be affected by tidal rhythms.
'People can't die, along the coast,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'except
when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's
pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood. He's a going out
with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an
hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the
flood, and go out with the next tide.'
He tells of experiments with oysters which, when moved from the shore
to a distant inland location, adjust their daily opening and closing to what
would be their new tidal rhythm. They can somehow feel the moon’s pull.
Climax
“Another Place” by Anthony Gormley. 100 cast iron figures on Crosby beach. UK.
(http://weblog.girasol.co.uk/_photos/2%20men%20in%20raging%20sand.jpg)
Penzhinskaya Guba
The Bay of Fundy