Treasures On The Shore

The flotsam and jetsam washed up on France’s long coastline provide rich pickings and artistic inspiration, says enthusiast Robin Gauldie

- Robin Gauldie

I grew up on the shore of a vast tidal estuary that at high tide looks like a silvery inland sea and at its lowest ebb is a miles-wide expanse of mudflats patrolled by flocks of waders. The beach nearest my home was a post-industrial stretch of shingle. The tide brought in all manner of detritus from the city dump downriver: timbers from the shipyards, joists and floorboards from demolished tenements, even cattle skulls from the abattoir.

This was a very urban beach. But not far away there were vast sweeps of sand where the flotsam and jetsam were completely different. The flotsam included gnarled tree limbs, cuttlebones, crab shells, and sometimes the corpses of guillemots and razorbills. Among the jetsam, we found a Dundee cake, intact in its battered tin after months or years at sea. They knew how to build tins in those days. A worryingly bomb-shaped object turned out to be a drop tank from an RAF aircraft. And what was the sad history of the soggy, child-sized teddy bear that the sea delivered one day?

The sea changes human objects, wearing broken bottles down into translucent white, green and amethyst seaglass jewels, pounding metal into sheets of rusted filigree, encrusting bottles and pieces of ceramics with barnacles and riddling old timbers with wormholes.

D-Day reminders

All beaches are evocative, but the stretch of the Normandy coast between Ouistreham and the Cotentin Peninsula has a special resonance. These are the beaches where the liberation of France began on 6 June 1944. Even on a sunny summer day I still find them slightly spooky; it is hard not to conjure up old black-and-white newsreel images. The sands are scattered with reminders that these lovely strands were once a lethal battleground.