The man who turned the tide

The first and last member of Enterprise Neptune on mapping the British coast

- Jack Watkins

JOHN WHITTOW is the last survivor of the founder committee that met in 1964 at the National Trust’s Westminster headquarters to plan Enterprise Neptune. He has now published his memoirs, The Edge of The Land, to explain how that groundbreaking effort to save the British shoreline from development and neglect came about.

The book is also the story of a man who has dedicated his life to the study of landforms, with a special focus on what he calls ‘the edge of the land, the zone where the three elements of earth, air and ocean truly conflate’. As he’s now 91, that amounts to a considerable span of time, underlined by his memory of seeing George V and Queen Mary on holiday near Sandringham in 1935. ‘I remember them waving to us as they swept past in a limousine and I also remember being told how important that was, because the King died the next year,’ he says.

To paraphrase Noël Coward, however, Norfolk is very flat, and it was the rockier undulations of the north Wales coast that prompted an interest in geology and coastal matters. ‘My father was born in Pembrokeshire and, as we lived in Staffordshire, he would take us to the north coast. Llandudno, a planned Victorian town with the huge limestone headland of the Great Orme rising up behind it made a great impression. Those places where the mountains meet the sea have always appealed most to me.’