Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

An insightful and lyrical account of a year on one beach—part natural history, part meditation, part travelogue

Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales, and a printed mug from a Cunard liner. This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool. It is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation—about sea-change.