The rocky-pool horror show

An extreme and changeable environment, the seashore is home to horribly fascinating creatures with gruesome habits, so why is it our idea of a blissful holiday spot, asks John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

WHY do we holiday en masse at the seaside? Why not holiday by the multitude in rural parts, given that England is now overwhelmingly urban and the countryside is as good a change of scene as the sea? I wonder sometimes if the seaside fixation is the recapturing of childhood—not only of you and me in the here and now, but of the original inhabitants of these isles.

On the sandy shore, the framing cliffs, the adventuresome rock pools, are we playing out our innocent childhood, when we were Mesolithic? When we scavenged—foraged, more politely—along the seashore, like gulls. Or is the call of the sea a call more ancient still? After all, in the beginning was the sea. We came from the sea. Like the gull, the mackerel, the barnacle, we all came through a common sea-thing ancestor.

The diet of Mesolithic Britons was ‘moderate to strong’ in fish and shellfish, whereas the menu of the later Neolithics, inland farmers, was dominated by meat and carbohydrate-rich cereals. The change of diet, from Mesolithic to Neolithic, from marine to terrestrial, was about more than stomach. A people moved inland and the heart of England became relocated in the countryside. Yet that yearning for the coast still exists, so here am I, on a late spring day at Portreath, Cornwall, literally on the rocks. These are twixt the granite harbour wall and the gold sand of the beach and the entirety of the little bay bracketed by plunging, seabirdy cliffs. (Cliffs in Cornwall are by default plunging and seabirdy.) The gulls are cast across the sky by the salt-abrasive wind, spewing crude complaints behind them. The sea is spitting angry.