A few years back there was a short-lived flurry of media interest in a normally unremarkable farmhouse near the village of Coton in Derbyshire. Based upon calculations by the trusty Ordnance Survey, Church Flatts Farm was officially declared the place in Great Britain farthest from the sea, a mere 70 miles away. To be precise, the location is in a field a short walk to the south of the farm.
Needless to say the announcement provoked some controversy. The location was disputed. The 'centre' of Britain, it was argued, is not necessarily the same thing as the remotest point from the coast. After all, Britain is not circular. The distance was disputed too. The river Trent is tidal and on a high tide brackish water may encroach upstream to within 45 miles of Church Flatts. Never mind the statistics, it was all a bit of fun. The BBC turned up and some chap built a sand castle topped with a Union flag to mark the spot. Well done Brits!
There are two points to my writing about this. The first is that 70 miles really isn't all that far. None of us lives truly landlocked in Britain. The second is that, camera crew aside, hardly a soul ever visits the place. Save for a toy flag on a heap of sand it is unmarked, unnoticed, unromantic. It occupies no place in our imagination. Compare that with the cardinal points of our coastline. We teem in hundreds to Land's End and John O'Groats and are charged for the privilege of standing at the ends of our little piece of earth. Sadly these days the names have more romance than the locations themselves but we are not deterred. Some of us venture farther still: the Scilly Isles, Ardnamurchan, Muckle Flugga, St Kilda; the names ring with an exotic maritime poetry.
Perhaps it is a small island mentality but the siren song of the coast seems irresistible. We are drawn to the fringes of our land as we are to the seaward railings on the deck of a ship. We look outwards to the horizon. There are immediately obvious attractions in a coastline. It is exciting and varied, we have a great deal of it for such a small nation (just how much is the subject of a celebrated mathematical paradox, of which more another time) and there is always plenty going on. Large tracts of the British coast are accessible and it is full of recreational possibilities. We run and hike, fly kites and skim stones; we build castles, walk dogs, watch birds and poke around in its pools; we paint the coast, write about it, collect little pieces of it to fetch home. And like everything else we have tried to impose our human will over it. We have created safe moorings for our boats and built defences against flood and erosion. Where the land isn't quite enough we have defied the sea by extending it, building jetties and piers and filling them with all our human trappings.
We go to the coast when we are happy, in love, when we have things to talk through or are in need of inspiration, when we are pensive, reflective, desolate even. Whatever our mood or our motives, the coast and the sea seem to offer us something beyond the merely diverting or aesthetic. The lure of the sea has been much written and sung about. It tugs at something elemental and primeval within us. For all the riches and beauty of the interior of our country it is not enough, the horizons beckon. The lore of our islands abounds with tales of drowned villages, ghost mariners, half-human sea people. We cock our heads to the waves and we hear voices in the tricks of the wind and the mewing gulls. Perhaps they are the voices of our ancestors, summoning us home.
I am fortunate to see the coast almost every day. I travel along a stretch of it on my journey to work and I sit at a desk not 70 yards from the sea, never mind 70 miles. Some days the sea is angry and grey, on others glassy calm. The opposite shore may glint back in the sun or be softened by mist. Some days it vanishes altogether. It is never the same view twice. I hope the owners of Church Flatts Farm are happy where they live. Derbyshire is a beautiful part of the country. I wonder whether they have the same sense of living on a small island with a long edge. I wonder whether the sea calls them in the way it does me and whether they answer.
Inland the dry wood of buckthorn bushes rattles and creaks. It looks dead but the stems are heavy with orange berries that glow unnaturally bright in the failing light. As I pass I send up flocks of feeding winter thrushes, clacking fieldfares that the wind quickly scatters. Higher still and there are geese; hundreds of birds in undisciplined squadrons that have risen as one from nearby fields. There are no syllables in human speech that accurately express their calling. Perhaps they sing of the Sagas of the far north.
