Tidal Cultures is a wonderful collection of stories, links, essays, media programmes and more collected in a blog published Owain Jones (Bath Spa University).
He says:
I have always had, as far as I remember, an awareness of tides, and also a fascination from them, a love and longing for them, now a concern for them. This is a thread of my life which started in early childhood, developed in odd twists and turns through school, (changing) home life, my student days at art college, and then on into postgraduate and professional academic geography, and landscape and environment studies. This is a complex story which will only briefly appear through the text that follows. but it also is the foundation and motivation of what follows. My love of tides and intertidal areas and the margins.
I grew up (in part) on a farm on the Wentlooge levels in what was then the county of Monmouthshire, Wales. The main block of the farmland did not reach right to the coast, but to the coast road. Beyond that, a few fields away, was the sea wall that protected the levels for the high tides, and the dazzling (sometimes literally) space of the Severn Estuary, which opened up to view if we made the short walk and climbed up the grassy bank of the seawalls. The industrial docks of Newport (east) and Cardiff (west) booked ended the levels. The levels themselves were gridded with reens (drainage ditches) to make rich farmland. Once they had been tidal saltmarsh wetlands, but had long been reclaimed by keeping the creeping tide at bay.
Read the rest of Owain’s introduction