Book review: Seascape by Matthew Yeomans

Julie Brominicks

The language in Seascape is brilliantly and – for such a crucial book – necessarily straightforward, but cleverly it is also like two books in one.

You could, because guides are navigational aids, say Seascape is a guide to the Welsh Coast. Guides help you see what has passed, where you are now and where you are going. Here are interesting things about Cymru’s coastal history and heritage, here is how the coast has changed, and crucially, here is how it is likely to change again. Very soon.

Sections of low-lying Welsh coastline could be under the high tide mark within the next thirty years. Both sea-level rise and inland flooding will have colossal impact and eventually homes will be lost.

Climate change

Matthew Yeomans takes us with him to investigate how we arrived at this state of coastal crisis, a quest he undertakes by walking sections of the Wales Coast Path. Each chapter includes an aspect of coastal climate change, encompassing the full gamut of devastation and possibility.

He guides us through the process for deciding what can be protected (and how). Considers where we might relocate people from places we can’t save, and demonstrates how we can plan better for the future; by working with rather than against nature.

Stranded assets

Many homes may soon be stranded assets; in other words, uninsurable. Much of Cardiff (Caerdydd) is built in a flood-risk zone. Cliffs are eroding in Glamorgan (Morgannwg). Parts of Tywyn will be gone in thirty years, on Ynys Môn the sea could reach Llangefni.

Climate refugees from uninhabitable countries overseas and from within Cymru too, will need housing. Yeomans talks us through the Welsh Government’s Flood and Erosion programme, explaining the factors which determine which bits of coast can be saved – and which cannot.

Thankfully we have some solutions. Hard engineering like the sea defences at Llandudno and the more costly soft engineering of sand dunes at Rhos-on-Sea (Llandrillo-yn-Rhos). Remobilisation of dunes to improve not just their ecology, but also their buffering potential. Restoration of depleted seagrass meadows which aid storm erosion and act as carbon sinks, marine renewable energy, and then there are enterprising initiatives like the oyster and seaweed business Câr-y-Môr. Neatly segued into these explorations are examples of what is happening elsewhere. Tokyo does this, Boston does that.

Understanding the past is a useful device for understanding our current situation, which our author uses to great effect. Here for example, he reveals how the social geography of Swansea (Abertawe) changed rapidly as industrialisation and pollution increased.

‘Social status soon became determined by how far away you could live from the copper works. While at the end of the eighteenth century the well-off had chosen to live at the water’s edge, now they chose to live on the hills overlooking the town while the copper workers and their families lived in rows hastily built near the plants on the banks of the Tawe.’

Swamped settlements

He reminds us of the Great Flood of 1607 when a tidal surge up the Bristol Channel killed 2000 people, many on reclaimed land; the Levels. Of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century storms that swamped settlements like Kenfig (Cynffig) with sand and of the Great Storm of 1859. As we enter an era of increasingly frequent and potent extreme-weather events, are we ready? Are we bothered?

Yet thirty years is not a long time. If you are old enough, Yeomans suggests rather than trying to imagine thirty years into the future, to think back three decades. He was a young journalist then, trying to get a grip on a new communication method. ‘It was called a website.’ In such a time frame a great deal can happen.

Yeomans reveals that it is not unusual to resist change and be sceptical of science. Despite advances in geological understanding, Rev William Buckland – due to his religious conviction that the world had been created 2,000 years previously – couldn’t accept that the skeleton he himself discovered in a sea cave on Gower (Gŵyr) in 1822 had been interred 30,000 years earlier.

Lampooning

And how about Robert Fitzroy, esteemed former Captain of HMS Beagle and founder of the Meteorological Office, who was driven to suicide by the unrelenting lampooning of his peers? No one took his work collecting meteorological data (which evolved into the Shipping Forecast) seriously. It sent the Houses of Parliament into convulsions of derisive laughter. The very idea that the weather could be predicted a day in advance!

Public reaction to climate science today is often similar. Yet Matthew Yeoman’s tone throughout is admirably non-judgemental.

There are many ways to write about climate change and they are all imperative. We’ve seen Tom Bullough’s heart-break in Sarn Helen, David Elias’ gentle encouragement in Shaping the Wild, the bright ‘let’s-all-stop-bickering-and-get-on-with-it’ tone Carwyn Graves adopts in Tir. In The Edge of Cymru I smuggled slithers into what I hoped was jaunty prose (and stop press – now we have Jon Gower’s cheerful resistance in Birdland). We writers are neither scientists nor engineers, but we do our research. Our job, our responsibility, is to communicate.

Addressing the climate crises can leave us angst-wracked. What if the approach we have chosen does more harm than good? What if we accidentally alienate an entire section of society still in denial?

Essential reading

Matthew Yeomans’ method is wonderfully pragmatic. Seascape is honest but positive. In his words ‘sobering but also very practical.’ His manner is calm. It is essential reading.

Like I said, it is also two books in one. Bolstered by a radiant cover design by artist Neil Gower, Seascape also works very well as a merry travelogue and – here lies its brilliance – can be sold as such. Here be pirates and castles and saints. Artist Alfred Sisley brought to life. William Robert Grove who invented the hydrogen battery in 1842. The Japanese seaweed industry, saved by Welsh laver.

The format is reassuringly familiar. Our author is a thoroughly likeable man who appreciates a pub and likes to hike with his mates. He’s like someone you know and trust; a friend, and the tone is unthreatening. Bingo.

Matthew Yeomans will be discussing his new book Seascape with Julie Brominicks at Waterstones in Aberystwyth on Thursday May 8th.

Seascape is published by Calon and is available from all good bookshops.