Come hell or high water

Often hidden beneath slippery fronds of seaweed, rock pools offer a glimmering window into the cut-throat existence of the creatures that live in these havens on our shores, says Adam Nicolson

-  Adam Nicolson

THE best part of life in a rock pool —for us anyway—is that it can’t run away. There, in front of you, perhaps hidden by fronds of seaweed or under the shadow of the surrounding rocks, yet nevertheless miraculously to hand, is a fragment of another world. A tiny window into another life that needs no specialist equipment or refined stalking skills, but displays itself, almost as if for our pleasure, as a haven of riches.

When, in the 1850s, the English middle classes started to discover the delights of the shore, taken there by train, accommodated in the new boarding houses, fed with the deliciousness of real, local unadulterated food—the cream tea entered national consciousness at the same time as the new delight in the coastline— it was the rock pool and its offshoot, the drawing-room aquarium, that swam into the centre of the craze.

Rock pools became the heart of a kind of Nature worship, which saw in its riches and calm a reassuring vision of creation. Life in what Philip Henry Gosse, the great apostle of the pools, called ‘these unruffled wells’ was a gathering of goodness and even happiness. It was as if the pools came from a time before the Fall, when life was innocent and unthreatened. Gosse, surely half remembering the children’s rhyme, imagined at the edge of each pool ‘Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray’. At the moment when Darwin was challenging the God-ordained vision of Nature and setting the whole of life adrift on chance driven change, the rock pools looked to those Victorians like gardens of prelapsarian bliss, glimmering enclosures in which Nature seemed to have enshrined perfection and permanence.