The Coast With The Most

There may be more dramatic coastlines elsewhere but few encompass such diversity of geological forms as our own: precipitous cliffs of red sandstone and pure white chalk; bold promontories and deep bays; great stretches of sand and shingle and mighty tidal estuaries.

- James Le Fanu

Down through the centuries, that gloriously variegated coastline has shaped our history and culture in diverse ways. It has also, if less obviously, broadened our intellectual horizons in three major directions.

By the early 19th century, the discovery – in successive rock strata – of numerous, fossilised bones and teeth of long-since extinct creatures convinced most that the earth must be vastly older than could be supposed. The Catastrophist explanation for that layered arrangement of fossils supposed that, over aeons, the earth must have experienced a series of catastrophes – ‘global earthquakes’ – annihilating all the plants and animals then living, following which God started again with a new Creation.

The Victorian geologist Charles Lyell, reflecting on the contrasting coastlines of Norfolk and Sussex, came to the contrary Uniformitarian view: throughout its history, the earth had been shaped not catastrophically but through the agency of the same gradual processes that might be observed contemporaneously.