Shifting Sands

Many will know of Blakeney Point as one of Norfolk’s premier rarity-harbouring hot-spots. Unfortunately, they will also appreciate that those migrant riches are often only accessible after a wearisome pebble-grinding march from Cley. My guess is that during his own many point-bound treks, Andy Stoddart got to pondering on the deep cultural history that lies beneath the mobile substrate. In Shifting Sands, subtitled Blakeney Point and the Environmental Imagination, he has now turned those reflections into text.

The author charts the various crucial developments in our responses to nature, to which Blakeney Point has provided a physical backcloth. In the beginning it was a place for so-called ‘gentleman gunners’ like E C Arnold (of ‘Arnold’s Marsh’ fame), who were the late 19th-century equivalent of today’s rarity-chasers, except that they carried 12-bores rather than mobile phones and telescopes.

The next stage in history saw the development of ecological science, a nascent discipline that was partly created by other point-loving naturalists such as Professors Francis Oliver and Arthur Tansley. Simultaneously, Blakeney was one Britain’s first-ever nature reserves and a major location in the story of environmentalism. Stoddart reminds us that the site has received almost every category of protection that a European environment can enjoy.

Throughout, what the author tries to demonstrate is that landscapes like Blakeney serve different human needs at different times, and are interpreted through these evolving psychological filters. Just as the point literally shifts its physical character, so our perceptions of it are modified as our ideas change. This is a short book and occasionally Stoddart’s account of modern landscape history feels a little truncated. One also senses that sometimes he is writing primarily to get the thoughts straight in his own head.

Nevertheless, this is an engaging book, and a valuable primer on both the last 150 years of environmental history and a glorious bird-rich fragment of the English coast.