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Strands, A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

Strands documents a year in the life of the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands on England’s north west coast. Sprackland’s research included a range of historic and contemporary writers on landscape and natural history, such as Gilbert White, Rachel Carson, WG Sebald and Roger Deakin. Just as Deakin creates a rich psychogeographical experience by swimming his way through a succession of muddy ditches and polluted rivers, Sprackland draws a varied body of stories from the unsung and underrated Lancashire coast. In order to write authoritatively, she returned to the same area repeatedly, exploring it in all seasons, weathers and hours. The book required extensive research (part-funded by a Society of Authors award), and she was assisted by local experts. These included archaeologist Gordon Roberts, who taught her to interpret and contextualise the Neolithic footprints found at Formby, Ric Williams, Professor of Oceanography at the University of Liverpool, on the actions of tides and currents; and historian Martyn Griffiths on local shipwrecks including the Victorian cargo vessel ‘The Star of Hope’. The Maritime Archive in Liverpool was an important source of information on the growth and decline of the transatlantic passenger steamships in the early 20th century. The book interrogates the ideas of scientists and philosophers, including Fritjof Capra’s account of ecology in The Turning Point, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s maverick theories on natural selection in On Growth and Form, and Thomas Nagel’s classic essay on the mind/body problem What is it like to be a Bat? Recent scientific discovery was equally important: the writing was informed by Dr Alex Ford’s work at the University of Portsmouth on the effects on marine animals of fluoxetine in seawater; and Jonathan Eisen’s radical experiments in evolutionary biology. Strands was widely reviewed, and featured as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.