Sea Journal brings together a year’s wanderings in Cornwall
Written by Pelynt author Lisa Woollett, the book features several locations in Cornwall – including Spit Beach, St Ives, Par, Tallan and Looe itself
This beautiful and unusual book brings together a year’s wanderings along Britain’s shores with stories of their natural history, geology and evolution — from ancient myth to current science — and the author’s striking contemporary photography.
Lisa Woollett is from a long line of scavengers — her grandfather came from a South London family in the ‘scavenging professions’, and Lisa spent her childhood, growing up on cliffs on the Isle of Sheppey, collecting and fossicking along the shore. She would look for sharks’ teeth, mermaid’s purses, fossils, old bottles... One of her more memorable finds was a dead, washed-up squid that squirted black ink when squeezed. These childhood memories, woven through her new book, Sea Journal, are vividly brought to life by Lisa’s evocative descriptions, luminous photographs and intricate drawings.
Paddling through the shallows or crouching on a cliff in a hailstorm, we are taken on a journey of compelling diversions. Against a backdrop of the shifting seasons, weather and tides, we follow Lisa’s trails of washedup cuttlebones and by-the-wind sailors, and meet wind-sellers, Selkies and 19th century fossil hunters. Amongst portraits of seaweed and jellyfish, of gulls wheeling through spume, are stories of the evolution of whales and Lego dragons lost at sea. Drawings of plankton and shells fill the margins, as we see how a handful of sand or whorl of a fossil nautilus can hold hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history.
Throughout, there is an awareness of the stark nature of the threats our oceans face, and of our part in this. As the threads draw together there is the sense that any walk on the beach stretches both back into the deep past and ahead into the uncertain future of our oceans. The book is full of hope, however, that the best way to inspire us to take greater care of these wild, magnificent places is through wonder and a love of the natural world.
Sea Journal will inspire readers to go out and explore for themselves, reminded of the pleasures of discovery, and of looking and listening more closely. Copies are available on request, and Lisa is available to talk to about the book, how a few outside excursions in Cornwall led to a year's worth of journeys, carefully documented, and about the making of the book itself.
Kind regards,
Sarah Taylor
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