As I looked at this book, with its gentle but evocative cover, I found mysef eager to get to grips with it. Tom Fort, author of the charming A303: Highway to the Sun in 2013, had primed me for another of his eccentric travels.
I quickly discovered that this book has adopted another approach; it is frequently about eccentricity itself, as though the coastline and fantasy are inseparable. Fort takes seriously the English reputation for eccentricity and on his bicycle ride from the White Cliffs to Land’s End he runs into a large number of eccentrics. He has a keen eye – as always – for the countryside and for small towns and for good pubs and for doomed enterprises and for the absurdities of local government and its readiness to swallow hook, line and sinker the nonsense of consultants and developers who have gone a long way to destroy many towns. Fort is also amused by the degrees of snobbishness on his route, from the strangeness of Dungeness which is “not like anywhere else”, to the English Riviera, which is really just Torquay with pretensions.
Fort says that he is nervous of going on the sea, but loves being beside it. He gives an account of the foundering of the frigate the Northfleet in 1873 when it was struck by a Spanish cargo vessel, causing it to list dangerously; the crew called to the Spanish ship but it performed a maritime hit-and-run manoeuvre, disappearing into the night without helping the doomed passengers. Nearly 300 people drowned. Their destination was Hobart, Tasmania.
For those who live by the sea shipwrecks have traditionally had a strong pull, and deliberate shipwrecks have long been a mainstay of Cornish literature; Fort sees not the romance of the wreckers, but the greed and callousness of those who rushed to salvage what they could from any wreck, often ignoring the nearly drowned, even cutting off their fingers for their diamond rings. The most recent looting was of the Napoli in 2007 when the ship went aground near Branscombe; 40 containers were broken open and 50 BMW motorbikes, and Bibles in Xhosa, were stolen.
Fort has a keen interest in the people who live along the coast, whether they live in a recycled railway wagon or a huge 19th-century mansion. He spent a lot of his early life in Brighton where his mother was headmistress of Roedean, a venerable private school for girls. Fort remembers hours of scanning rockpools looking for shrimps, and he is delighted to know from the present headmistress that the private tunnel through the chalk down to the sea wall where he had spent endless happy hours is still used.
Fort cycles on; he finds the National Trust uncooperative about bicycles, but he also acknowledges that it has been the saviour of the coastline, and it continues to conserve and to raise objections to crass development. On the way he visits unused churches and abandoned schemes for more housing estates, and remarks on the decline of many seaside towns and the culpability of local councils in destroying fine architecture. In the 19th century success often depended on the patronage of the royal family, hence the suffix, as in Lyme Regis and Bognor Regis, the latter given to the genuflecting locals by orders of George V. George, we hear, probably never said “Bugger Bognor”. His last words were “God damn you”, to a nurse.
Being in the company of Tom Fort is delightful and interesting because he is so inquisitive; he loves the eccentric and the unusual, the unsung, and he understands the economics of fishing; he has a wealth of stories and anecdotes about the coastal towns from Dungeness to Penzance and Porthcurno, stopping in Newhaven where Lord Lucan left his car.
Channel Shore is breezy and nostalgic, but it is at the same time shrewd and wonderfully informative – in Fort’s unique way, a masterpiece.
Channel Shore is published by Simon & Schuster (£14.99). Click here to order it for £11.99
