Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

Featured on Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2012. This is the ultimate beachcomber’s book from a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller. Think Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin.

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 perfect cup 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, Strands 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.