Shorelines and watery edges: rivers, lakes, oceans, seas. These are sites of an infrastructure of change, from ports to research to pleasure. Neither land nor water, but both at different times, seasons, climates. Shorelines are worth looking at for themselves, not just the edge of more important things. They themselves are important.
ON SITE r e v i e w
fall 2026 49 shorelines and watery edges
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 1955. New York: Mariner Books Classics, an imprint of Harper Collins, 1998. www.harpercollins. com/products/the- edge-of-the-sea- rachel/
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? Penguin Books, 2025 www.penguin.couk/ books/455147/is-a-river- alive-by-macfarlane- robert/9780241998212
Asher Ghaffar, editor. History, Imperialism, Critique. New Essays in World Literature . Routledge: 2020 https://www.routledge.com/ History-Imperialism-Cri- tique-New-Essays-in-World- Literature/Ghaffar/p/ book/9780367587321
Steve Mentz, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2023 https://www.routledge. com/An-Introduction- to-the-Blue- Humanities/Mentz/p/ book/9780367763664
books
Holling Clancy Holling. Paddle- to-the-Sea. Houghton Mifflin, 1941 www.biblioguides.com/ pub/book/paddle-to- the-sea
Steven J Zaloga, The Atlantic Wall :1 France; 2 Belgium Netherlands, Denmark, Norway; 3 The Südwall . London: Osprey Publishing, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009-2015. https://www.ospreypublishing.com/ca/atlantic- wall-3-9781472811479/
Tanya Traboulsi, A Sea Apart . A photographic memoir of Beirut, accompanying text by Sabyl Ghoussoub, 2024 https://www.outofplacebooks.com/a-sea-apart Winter 2009 I stand on the waterfront promenade, camera in hand, to capture what was my last visual memory of Beirut for many years. It was the vivid memories that drew me back—the familiar echoes of car horns, the fragrant scent of zaatar mingling with orange blossom, the faint saltiness in the air along the corniche, even the checkpoints on the way to school and the sugary smell of burning garbage. At the edge of its shore, only a few hundred metres of sea separate me from the city I now live in, the home I have returned to.
Pat Barker, The Women of Troy Series: The Women of Troy, Silence of the Girls, The Voyage Home . Penguin UK: 2024 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/0TY/the- women-of-troy-series/
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ON SITE r e v i e w
from our original call for articles for this issue: One of the aspects of the ancient infrastructure of the shoreline is as a site of war and trade. Does the human relationship to oceans, rivers, lakes and seas still embody that interstitial condition, commanded by weather, by hinterlands, by tides and maritime vessels. The dock, the pier, the container port, the sandy beach: these are all constructions that mediate between water and land, war and trade. Migratory routes transcend borders, only registering at frontiers: a border crossing is a metaphorical landing site. It can be open or policed, marked by reefs, by walls, by surveillance as humans cross from one state to another, from land to sea; sea to land. These borders are marked by mangrove swamps, seaweed and kelps, reefs of coral and shipwrecks, by crumbling cliffs, by beach encampments. Spaces that do not always cohere; under many kinds of threat, they are as fragmentary and elusive as the camps of Achilles. For On Site review 49 , we wanted to look at the architectures of those watery frontiers This is clearly a wide, global condition with extremely local built infrastructure. Can, for example, one write about a container port in terms of its landscape, its form, its ultimate relationship to the size of its hinterland both on land and ocean? A deciding factor in the WWII turning of the tide were the Allied landings on D-Day across a number of beaches in Normandy: not ports, but seaside towns. Corniches, promenades — these are the fronts of cities: the seawalls that defend from tides and armies. And when flotillas of warships and aircraft amass in strategic seas and gulfs, their close shoreline is the edge of the flight deck. The shoreline, that watery edge, a thin but potent edge condition we must never overlook.
fall 2026 49
Blue humanities: the human relationship with oceans, rivers, lakes and seas. now recognised as one of the important foundations of civilisation. shorelines and watery edges
contributors
contents
p
4
Asher Ghaffar
shorelines , a poem about the Kotogama Maru, Vancouver 1914
6
Nezar Alkujok
After the last sky , a proposal for the archiving of a civilisation, Gaza
12
Barbara Prezelj
Time on holiday , walking the King Charles III Coastal Path, Norfolk
20
Tim Sharp
Watery edges , cutting through Andalucia
26
Ian Chodikoff
Edge conditions , the scent of Prince Edward County
30
James Moses
Submerged pastures , the agriculture of the oyster, Wellfleet, Cape Cod
35
Lebbeus Woods, from the archives
el Malecón , revisiting an idea, Havana
38
Andrey Chernykh and Léonard Flot
Operative ground , dredging as a shoreline strategy, Toronto
43
Marly Ibrahim
Simulations of the sea , a research laboratory, Port Hardy, BC
48
Suzanne Steele
The river, she is on our side , the North Saskatchewan from start to finish
58
Stephanie White
Shorelines , crossing the line
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who we are
On Site review 50 call for articles
front: John Constable, Rainstorm over the sea , ca 1824-8. Royal Academy of Arts 03/1390. Mike Red beach, 6 June 1944 . Juno Beach Centre Association back: Shetland . Title sequence, Silverprint Pictures 2018. North Shore Beach, Landudno. ca 1890 , Conway Archives, CP251/41
covers
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shorelines Asher Ghaffar
ii. His name is
1
Barkatullah
bespectacled, towering, a book under his arm
fired from his teaching post in Tokyo for a newspaper banned before it reached India 5 that same year that he boards the ship
and likely never steps on the shore
adrift his whole life,
but immaculate like an axe blade pitched into sand.
i. lift your eyes
from the shoreline to the blue so your vision becomes tremulous
He stands at the rail already knowing this is a failed mission,
I know him through a coincidence of relations — two bodies separated by the diurnal pattern of foghorns
ghadr
say it slow
three blasts from the ship three blasts answered by a hand-pumped horn at Point Atkinson
so as not to make it sound like
treachery
a signal built from a lighthouse built that year in concrete,
HINDU INVADERS NOW IN THE CITY HARBOUR 2
a word that travels, port to port without landing in Urdu — in Hindi ghadar revolt — mutiny tracing back to 1857
and another approaching boat, the Sea Lion the passengers answering with coal
with fire bricks with scrap iron
documented as souls in a parish register, Hindoos in the official record from Hindustan?
compressed there into meaning, in bodies, into lore that still lives in Old Delhi.
no column for her
Carman writes in Connecticut, 1914 —
Before shorelines become swallowed
“This is May coming now, With the blushing apple bough; And her swallows skim and circle Where the heavy oxen plow.” 3
by the uncertainty of gunfire,
and the certainty of being.
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iii
23rd May, 1914 — Vancouver Harbour
Manifested this day the following Asiatic passengers ex Hong Kong:
4
Sikhs
340 souls
Mahomedans
24 souls 12 souls
Hindoos
Sum Total
376 souls
and among the souls, two women five children
folded into the number
provisions account:
four days out of Hong Kong stores sufficient
Vancouver Roads provisions denied by order.
iv
early June
no water still none
1 HMCS Rainbow and the Komagata Maru in Vancouver Harbour. City of Vancouver Archives, Major Matthews Collection, AM54-S4-: LGN 1031.1, [July 1914]. public domain. 2 ‘Hindu invaders now in the city harbor on Komagata Maru’ (1914, May 23). The Vancouver Sun , p 1. Historica Canada, Critical Digital Literacy Education Guide . https://fb.historicacanada.ca/ education/english/critical-digital- literacy/17/ 3 Carman, B. ‘July’. In B. Carman & M. P. King, Earth deities, and other rhythmic masques . New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. p56 4 ‘Indian immigrants on board the Komagata Maru in English Bay, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1914’ Library and Archives Canada. PA-034015. 5 Barkatullah edited the journal Islamic Fraternity and, later, the newspaper El Islam , both critical of British rule and banned in British India; his appointment at the University of Tokyo was terminated in 1914 as a result of these activities.
(to drink or perform wudu).
No record
is precise
on who it is
refusing.
So grow a new sensorial world,
folded in the lyric’s hoary beginning.
Allow the lyric to die
inside the museum of your skull.
In discarded bone,
Photographs selected by Armaan Ghaffar.
write the lyric back and forth in the grooves of bone.
‘shorelines’ is drawn from The Somnambulist’s Library , a book-length sequence written in counterpoint to the Canadian literary tradition as it stood in 1914 — the year the Komagata Maru sat in Vancouver’s harbour, its 376 passengers, including 24 Muslims, refused entry, while poets such as Bliss Carman wrote pastoral lyrics from Connecticut, untouched by the crisis unfolding in their homeland. ‘shorelines’ asks what does the lyric owe to witness, memory and the systematically silenced?
Begin when words lock into place.
You will become a rib cage of music when the book envelops you like a moat.
Drown the lyric to unearth its dark intention, draw it up into night’s geometry
into the absence of things slipping
into the darkness we love.
ASHER GHAFFAR is a poet, writer and critical historian who lives outside Toronto.
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where should the birds fly after the last sky Nezar Alkujok
— Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The earth Is closing in on us’, Fewer Roses . Beirut, 1986
What survives of a people when the buildings that held their memory are targeted, the museums that catalogued them are rubble, and the roads that connected them are sealed at every checkpoint? Where Should the Birds Fly After the Last Sky , a Master of Architecture thesis, answers with a moving archive. It proposes a vessel that carries the fragments of a targeted Palestinian heritage across the diaspora–both the pieces of destroyed architecture and the inherited possessions of the displaced–and it holds them in motion because motion, for Palestinians, has become the one condition under which anything survives. The premise is that the archive must travel for two reasons held together. It must move to collate, gathering what seventy years of displacement has scattered across the diaspora into a single travelling body. It must also move to protect, since a repository without a fixed coordinate is far harder to target or erase. As the land is closed to such movement, the archive takes the routes that remain open, and the vessel is therefore both maritime and airborne, an infrastructure that floats on water and rises into air. That the vessel is a dhow is not incidental. Gaza is among the oldest port cities on the Mediterranean, joined to the sea for over three millennia through its ancient harbours at Anthedon and Maiuma, the terminus at which caravans from Arabia and the Persian Gulf met the water, and the final stop on the incense route that reached as far as China. The city lent its name to more than one vessel of exchange. The fine cotton it wove became gauze in European tongues, and the amphorae in which it shipped its wine are known to archaeologists as the Gaza jar. A maritime archive returns Gaza to the trade in goods and knowledge it conducted for centuries before the blockade closed its shore. Akin to a celebration vehicle, the vessel follows an itinerary of its own, one traced along the geography of Palestinian exile. The first circuit reaches the communities most directly formed by displacement. It calls at Tyre and the refugee camps of southern Lebanon, at Amman and Yarmouk, and at Cairo and Alexandria, before crossing to Santiago, whose Palestinian community is the largest beyond the Arab world. The inland cities are reached by air, the coastal ones by sea. The route also bends toward older ground, the ancient ports through which Gaza’s trade once passed, so that the itinerary retraces a network far older than the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 that occasioned it. Upon arrival, the vessel anchors in deep water and dispatches its cargo to land aboard smaller dhow boats crewed by the archivists, who are themselves drawn from the diaspora the vessel serves. The distance is deliberate. A port can be denied, a harbour blockaded, a dock refused. By holding offshore and entrusting the final reach to boats that need no berth, the archive keeps clear of the infrastructure through which arrival is controlled. What cannot be granted entry lowers itself to the shore by hand.
The cargo travels in crates modelled on the Sandouq, an inlaid chest once filled in preparation for a marriage and passed down through a household, its surfaces worked in the geometric grammar of Tatreez. The chest is an object built to carry a family’s most valued inheritance across a threshold and into a new life, and the crate performs the same office for a people, bearing what has been salvaged toward a return. At each shore the crates unfold. The larger become raised platforms, the smaller open into the furnishings a gathering requires, and set within them are drawers left empty, waiting to receive what the diaspora will give. Each landing convenes a Sufra, the communal meal that anchors Palestinian social life. Heritage is not sealed behind glass but enacted through ritual, and through Muzakira, the practice of collective recollection by which refugee communities have sustained the memory of depopulated villages. The diaspora arrives bearing food and their own inherited possessions, a house key or a family photograph, and consigns them to the drawers to travel beside the fragments recovered from rubble. The archive departs each shore heavier than it arrived, rehearsing at each landing the Awdah, the return that the vessel defers until it can deliver its contents to a free Palestine.
Nezar Alkujok
Gaza damage map: the coordinates of every built fragment aboard, plotted against the territory from which they were taken. Dark points mark the original sites. Shaded ground shows what has been damaged or destroyed across Gaza since October 2023. Each entry in the archive begins here, as a location on this map to be published along with the vessel’s manifest.
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Nezar Alkujok
Club Palestino, the vessel in section above: the vessel in cutaway, some one hundred and twenty metres from bow to stern. Six retractable fins line each flank, drawing water for ballast and lifting clear when the hull takes to the air. Its skin is woven keffiyeh, the black-and-white weave produced at the Hirbawi mill in Hebron, and beneath the canopy runs a lining of gauze. The hold is stacked in tiers, the largest architectural fragments cabled to the structural frame at several points, the smaller crates racked on sliding runners along the length of the deck. Cranes rise fore and aft to lower cargo over the side, while four freight elevators and a central escalator carry the crew of archivists between floors. Around the whole perimeter a lattice of drones keeps station, recording the passage and turning the instrument that watches Gaza’s sky into one that testifies on its behalf.
left: cross section. The cranes, freight elevators, escalator, ballast and fin mechanisms all draw their power from sun and wind, collected across the vessel’s own surfaces and stored below, so that it operates without fuel and without a berth at which to refuel. It is worked otherwise by its crew, read and adjusted by hand.
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Nezar Alkujok
top: prow of the vessel above: hull of the vessel from below
On water the vessel is driven by the wind, the keffiyeh tensioned across the fin arms to form its sails, while the fins themselves angle below the surface as keel and rudder to hold its course. To leave the water it floods and vents a series of ballast chambers along the hull, trimming its weight until the envelope lifts it free, at which point the fins re-angle into the air as stabilising planes.
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Index : the manifest in full. Every fragment the vessel carries is entered here as a numbered item, ordered into a single register that the crew works from and that the diaspora may detail further.
Nezar Alkujok
above, from left: Qasr al-Basha, a thirteenth-century Mamluk palace in the old city of Gaza, entered as its salvaged west entrance after the assault that began in October 2023. The minaret of the Omari Mosque, the oldest in Gaza and raised on ground held sacred for two thousand years, salvaged from a structure struck in December 2023.
left: The keys of return, carried out of villages during the Nakba of 1948 and kept across generations.
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1
2
3
Nezar Alkujok
4
row 3: Landing The crate comes ashore and is drawn up the sand, still roped to the dhow that carried it, waiting to be opened when the community gathers. Sufra at the Beach The crate opens, the gathering assembles. Carpets are laid on the sand, food is carried down from the community’s kitchens. row 4: Stage A larger crate unfolds into a raised platform, its panels form the structure beneath and gauze is hung above. The community shares a meal and, in return, leaves its own inheritances in the drawers set within the stage, to travel on with the archive. Repacking Together the community closes the crate, its panels swing back into place around what they have given, and the boats are drawn back out to the vessel.
from the top (left to right) : row 1: Approach At first light, dhows set out from shore to collect the crates and carry them back to land. Archivists Within the vessel, archivists tend the crates and maintain the conditions that keep the collection safe; a crew drawn entirely from the diaspora who load and unload each item as it comes and goes. row 2: Loading The crane swings a crate over the side and lowers it into a waiting dhow, which pulls away toward shore while the next boat waits on its tether for its turn. Ferrying The laden boats draw away from the vessel in a line, each carrying a crate toward shore, strung together by the ropes that keep the small craft in convoy.
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Nezar Alkujok
above: Off the Chilean Coast Among local boats, the vessel is anchored at the far end of its circuit, half a world from the shore its cargo came from. It holds the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world.
The Global Itinerary The circuit follows the geography of exile, calling at the Palestinian communities formed by displacement, from the Levant and the Gulf across the Atlantic to Chile, bending toward the ancient ports where Gaza’s histories were once carried and found.
Awdah (The Return) From the deck, the vessel makes its final approach to Gaza’s rebuilt port in a free Palestine, its hold full with everything salvaged and everything the Sufras of its tour gave it, each fragment now returned to the coordinate from which it was taken.
NEZAR ALKUJOK is a Bahraini- Canadian artist and architectural designer working with temporary, mobile and adaptive architectures as frameworks for cultural exchange. His University of Toronto M. Arch thesis received the Kuwabara-Jackman Thesis Gold Medal.
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time on holiday walking the King Charles III Coastal Path
Barbara Prezelj
What follows are some of the thoughts I gathered while walking the coastal edge from Great Yarmouth to Cromer, pier to pier, updrift. They are accompanied by three mappings, or choreographic/musical scores, which unfold the spatiotemporality of three sections of my walk.
In Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein writes that ‘philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.’ 1 What he is describing is the quality of language that sets in when words are detached from their familiar context and set loose. Liberated from what ordinarily gives them their meaning, they lose their original place in the order of things and stop making practical sense. This creates problems and enables words to begin to relate in unforeseen, strange, philosophically interesting ways. Something similar is at the moment happening to time. To live through the climate crisis is to experience time that has gone on holiday. How we experience time is grounded in place and its rhythms and today much of the ‘old time’ is gone. In some ways, the way ‘new time’ feels isn’t that different from how we experience time on actual holiday - free from deadlines, schedules, routines, patterns of intelligible reality. On holiday, time is at its most freeing, although it is possible, however rare, that after a week or two of unstructured bliss, we slowly start feeling a little homesick, a little tired of temporal looseness. As much as we seek the release that holidays offer, familiar temporalities offer us a sense of measure and satisfy that deeply human need for structure and grounding. Much has been written about the social construction of such temporal grounding and about the damage and violence that our Western, modern frameworks have done to otherwise non- linear and fluid worlds of multiple temporalities and rhythms. We now know that our desire for stability got us into deep trouble. We only have to look at how unprepared we are in the face of a rapidly changing climate to understand the fallacy of trying to deny the inherent dynamism and complexity of the living world. As familiar temporalities begin to destabilise, they can no longer be trusted, or relied upon, causing widespread anxiety and confusion. Spring is now but two-weeks long, record-breaking heatwaves begin as early as in May, first frost is delayed until the last weeks of autumn. This past June, I decided to set off on a three-day 34-mile East Anglian coastal walk to explore these altered times, as it happened in the week when the UK Health Security Agency issued rare red weather warnings for six English regions. Unlike W. G. Sebald, who in The Rings of Saturn wrote about the experiences of walking the coasts of Suffolk, my journey focused on the Norfolk coast, on the stretch that is today rapidly eroding due to accelerated climate change. What I set out to do, beyond taking stock of the many coastal rhythms, was to think about the possibility of duration in a place of constant flux. If coastal communities are to accept that a coastal sense of place is fluid, what, if not solid ground, might serve as an anchor?
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations . Oxford, Wiley- Blackwell, 1953 [2009], p. 23e.
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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I’ve barely done any serious walking and yet, by day two, I can start to feel my bad knee. My feet suddenly become visible, as does the way they meet the ground - walking on a concrete seawall becomes preferable to sandy beaches and I am surprised by how quickly I am prepared to trade the discoveries of the seashore for the stability and walking speed afforded by concrete. Seventy years ago, the seawall I am walking on would have been sand too. Concrete was not how we faced the sea until the late 1950s, when large-scale coastal defence works were built in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea storm surge, also known as The Big Flood. Hard engineering methods (seawalls, groynes, revetments etc.) began to shape how we relate to the coast, what we expect of it and how we envisage its future. Tasked with stabilising the shoreline, they each brought to the coast their own temporal logics - distinct rhythms, tempos and speeds of change. Walking the coast today, it is clear that coastline stability was but a short-lived promise. Along this stretch, the landscape has been reconfigured time and time again for thousands of years, and while sea defences still cover vast stretches of the coastline, and are in places newly constructed, the beach now shows evidence of erosion and decay, from cracking concrete to cliff falls and deteriorating timber. As Rachel Carson beautifully showed in The Edge of The Sea , the seashore is an unsteady middle, impermanent and dynamic by its very nature. As the speed of coastal weathering accelerates with climate change, walking along the East Anglian Coast is accompanied both by an awareness of loss and an understanding that landscape along this edge is not held together, neither spatially nor temporally. The section of the coast from Great Yarmouth to Cromer consists of fourteen Shoreline Management Plans, each their own version of either ‘Hold the Line’ or ‘Managed Realignment’ coastal government policy. The policy was put in place in 2005 and proposes to gradually phase out ‘Hold the Line’ management approach in five out of nine currently defended sections. By 2055, most coastal defences will be allowed to fail, letting erosion to occur naturally and restoring longshore sediment movements. As the coastline returns to its natural dynamics, more than 3,500 properties across England are at risk of being lost by 2055, 5,200 if we take into account higher erosion rates and rising sea levels; a figure more than triples by 2105. Like a number of other fast eroding coastlines across England, Norfolk faces rapid land loss primarily due to its soft cliff geology and easily erodible glacial deposits. The North Sea’s wave action combined with powerful storms today pose multiple challenges to coastal communities who have made homes on what they thought was protected ground, at the time located far enough from the edge not to worry. This was before time went on holiday, dispensing with the idea that erosion patterns can be accurately predicted and creating a gap between the speed of human adaptation and the pace of landscape change. Recently, the gap has widened - in May 2026, Reform UK, a right-wing populist party, gained control of the Norfolk County Council, announcing on its first day in office that it would review all current council environmental spending. Where, if not along this fast-crumbling edge, will it become clear that climate change is a social issue, and dwindling socio-economic prosperity an environmental one?
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About a mile or two into my walk, I come across footprints on the stepped part of the seawall. Viewed as a lasting reminder of our attempts to keep coastline movements at bay, these strike me as appropriate. Feet set in fresh concrete stand in sharp contrast to the footprints that were in 2013 discovered on the seashore of Happisburgh, the next village on my walk. Happisburgh has long been subject to significant coastal erosion. Since 2005, with the coastal policy shift to ‘Managed Realignment’, land has been washing away at an unprecedented rate, up to 6m per year on average, with sections of over-winter cliff loss reaching up to 15m. National Coastal Erosion Risk Map predicts that the sea will make further advances of up to 150m by 2105, taking with it a number of properties, a local pub and
the church. By 2026, Happisburgh’s erosion is well on track to meet, and surpass, these estimates. And yet while climate projections certainly paint a grim picture of the village, there are also other stories that can be told. Aside from erosion, the East Anglian coastline is globally known for its geological and archaeological record, with rapid coastal change both erasing and revealing what lies beneath our feet. Processes that would otherwise take thousands of years inland are here responsible for a number of discoveries which shine light on patterns of past human inhabitation and markedly different ways of life. On a rainy day in May 2013, Happisburgh’s eroded foreshore revealed one such discovery - 900,000 years old fossilised footprints, the earliest evidence of humans outside Africa.
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Footprints were created by a small family group of both children and adults, together exploring the muddy estuary of what was then an early course of the River Thames. Other archaeological finds in the Cromer Forest Bed Formation reveal that the local Palaeolithic landscape was a floodplain teeming with life. Much like Doggerland, that much later, now submerged, Mesolithic land of plenty which once connected Britain to mainland Europe, the estuary was similarly a resource-rich landscape in which early humans flourished. The wetland environment was home to diverse plant and animal species, surrounded by ancient conifer woodlands which provided critical forest resources and supported large herbivores such as mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, wolves, hyenas and giant deer.
Beyond the fascination with deep time and creative leaps of imagination brought on by archaeology, what I find most intriguing about Happisburgh’s footprints is their setting - the earliest evidence of when people first set foot on what is now Britain was discovered in an ancient estuarine landscape of mud. Unlike concrete footprints, Happisburgh’s footprints tell a story of fleeting traces and provisional landscapes, of just how rich and life-giving transitory environments can be. After they were meticulously documented, the footprints washed away as quickly as they came into view, in dialogue with the non-human forces of the shore. A 900,000-year-old trace was, due to erosion, permanently lost to time in a fortnight. To walk from Great Yarmouth to Cromer is to cross these times.
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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I wish to return to the question that initially motivated my walk – what makes life liveable when time loses its grip and the ground crumbles? To walk from Great Yarmouth to Cromer is also to recognise a familiar refrain. What repeats across the different Shoreline Management Plans, varied coastline conditions and locally distinct vulnerabilities are vacant plots of land. Dotted along the edge, these landscapes emerge in areas where the shoreline is rapidly retreating and act as a buffer against fast receding cliffs. Along the ‘Managed Realignment’ sections of the coast, they
form a continuous ribbon of land that has been left behind. While it is important to recognise that these places develop alongside irreversible loss and displacement, they harbour diversity of plants, animals and spatial experiences otherwise non-existent along protected stretches of the coast. As I explore new cliff falls, wildflower mixes and sand martin nests, and realise I haven’t walked very far in the past hour, it occurs to me there is something else, apart from defences, that slows down time – wonder.
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Perhaps there is an opportunity here. Perhaps we could think of this strip of land which exists outside of market interests and state funding not as insignificant but rather as vital for unfolding a new language of value. In The Human Shore , John R. Gillis writes about the urgent need to collectively (re)learn how to live with our coasts, and not only on them. To begin to learn how to value, and feel at home on, land that is destined to vanish will require nothing short of a kind of temporal sorcery, of finding stability in a field of chaos. Ecologies and landscapes of the abandoned edge can be instructive in this regard - they endure in
time not through stasis but through the ebb and flow of coastal transformation. Perhaps we could engage with them as rhythmic spacetimes, provisional orderings, environments that in their transformations anchor us to changing land. Here I am reminded of Tim Robinson, artist, writer and cartographer, who spent decades mapping and walking the coastlines of Aran, and who aptly identified the task at hand as finding the ‘good step’, both grounded and in movement, ‘as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to the wave.’ 2 *
2 Robinson, Tim. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage . London, Penguin Books, 1986 [1990], p 12
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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Note on the scores: With a nod to dancer Anna Halprin’s scoring work, especially her score for ‘Landscape Event’, the mappings use notation to organise the varied temporalities I encountered on my walk. In order to communicate the rhythmic quality of the seashore, the natural curve of the shoreline has been flattened and laid out horizontally on a five- line staff. Grey slits represent areas of cutting into, pulling apart and distorting the landscape. The coastal edge, or the boundary between land and sea as perceived while walking, stretches uninterrupted across the third line of the staff.
BARBARA PREZELJ is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and a PhD candidate at ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art. Most recently, she has been thinking about eroding coastlines, the land left behind and coastal retreat as a form of detachment.
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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Watery Edges tracking a river across Andalucia
Tim Sharp
That’s an interesting notion, I thought, in the call for articles. The other terms – shorelines, seafront promenades, landing sites, docks and ports – faded into the background, so defined, so real. ‘Watery edges’ had just the right amount of mental space for me to imagine a line meandering along a coast line, Andalusia, say, and having encountered a river, following it inland to its source before crossing to the other bank and heading back to the estuary to intersect with the coast again. More or less what we were doing. Of course, you say, your line would have to include all the tributaries too. It would, and it would be almost endless as it wound its way round the globe, all-encompassing, you could say. So let us begin at an arbitrary point and try to link up with these thoughts. A hilly landscape, dry, scrubby, not very fertile but in parts it supports stone pines. A drop of water falls from the sky. Then a million. The waiting plants suck them up, the thirsty earth absorbs them, then lets the surplus sink. It soaks into the depths, leaving the kingdoms of now, of decades and centuries for the realms of aeons . The rest is run-off and it hurries to join water that has found its way back to the sunlight as a stream bearing the mineral memory of its journey. If that flow is joined by others it becomes a river heading ever downwards, back to the sea. If such a river passes over granite, its waters will be soft; if over limestone, hard. Let me be more specific about where we are: the Iberian Pyrite Belt, in the south-west of the peninsula, running from Setubal near the Rio Sado estuary on the Atlantic, in a south- east direction across Portugal, and then east across western Andalusia to a point north of Seville. The belt is about 250 kilometres long and twenty to forty kilometres wide. Many rivers run here. If, over time, our rivers seep and cut their way through geological layers, they may encounter the results of very ancient hydrothermal activity on an even more ancient seabed, picking up iron, sulphur and other heavy metals. If one of them turned a very distinct red and become highly acidic it might well be called Rio Tinto, the red river of Andalusia, a region bounded in the south by the Gulf of Cadiz into which it empties. But the Rio Tinto is not the only river here. Just eighteen kilometres further north a sister stream emerges in the Sierra de Aracena to become Rio Odiel with which it shares its geological parentage. Along with their various tributaries, they flow through the pyrite belt — one of the largest sulphide deposits in the world. There are many more: Rio Guadiana which acts as the border between Spain and Portugal; Rio Agrio, a tributary of Rio Guadiamar which is itself a tributary of the Guadalquivir with its estuary in the Gulf of Cadiz. The Iberian pyrite belt contains sulphur, copper, gold, silver and tin, and has been been exploited since humans learned to make fire by striking iron pyrite against flint. Anything other than surface mining only began about 4,000 years ago: it
A stone pine landscape, Huelva province, Andalusia
Roman bridge over Rio Tinto at Niebla.
all images Tim Sharp
was the Romans who first mined the area systematically, with deep tunnels and using tiered waterwheels to drain the shafts and galleries. In the four centuries of their Iberian presence, they operated over forty mines in the pyrites belt, in one case turning a hill into a deep open pit. The abandoned Tharsis pit.
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In 1858 James Mason, managing director and chief mining engineer of Mason & Barry Ltd, bought the land around the monastery of São Domingos in Portugal while still technical director of mines at Tharsis in Spain; Mason & Barry acquired the mining rights from the French holder, La Sabina. By 1864 São Domingos was the most productive copper mine in Europe partly thanks to the railway Mason had constructed to the new port on Rio Guadiana at Pomerão, founded by the company. From there it was shipped to the estuary near Vila Real de Santo António where export dues were paid and the ore loaded onto freighters. In 1866 Tharsis Sulphur & Copper Company, founded by Sir Charles Tennant, put together a consortium of Scottish investors to acquire the mining rights at the eponymous location in the province of Huelga. One of the company’s first activities was to build a railway line to, and a quay upon, the coast 50 kilometres away. The company became the leading pyrite seller in Spain with over 40 percent of the market, shipping the overwhelming majority of its ore to Britain from what was at the time the small port and fishing town of Huelva. In 1873 the Spanish government auctioned the mining rights to another area. A syndicate led by Hugh Matheson, which included German banking (Rothschild, Goldschmidt) money, tendered the winning bid. Matheson, related to the Mathesons of Jardine & Matheson Company, had refused a post in that organisation because of their central involvement in the extremely lucrative opium ‘trade’ with China and their role in instigating the Opium Wars. Nevertheless, he accepted capital backing from them for his new enterprise, the Rio Tinto Company, control of which was to pass to the Rothschild family fifteen years later. So another railway line was built to the port of Huelva, this time shadowing the Rio Tinto. Originally designed to carry ore, it also developed into a passenger service with a number of stations connecting two hundred and forty kilometres of branch lines to other mines, coming together at Niebla, an ancient town halfway to the sea. As the line approaches Huelva it turns away from the Rio Tinto towards the Rio Odiel estuary, being deeper and more navigable. It was here, a few kilometres south of the Tharsis quay, that the Rio Tinto Company built its kilometre-long curved quay out into deeper water. The companies were typical nineteenth century enterprises, British-founded and managed undertakings primarily concerned with shipping as much unrefined ore from the Iberian peninsula in the most efficient manner possible. This meant getting it to the sea and onto freighters bound for northern Europe where burgeoning chemical works waited for the magic of pyrite to produce sulphur – and thus sulphuric acid – with its many uses in industrial processes including explosives and fertiliser, along with iron, copper, gold and cadmium.
The industrial scale of Rio Tinto ’s Cerra Colorado mine, still in operation
The greatest changes, however, came in the second half of the nineteenth century when British capital, accumulated from the early industrial revolution and imperial trade (sugar, slaves, tobacco, cotton, tea, spice), saw further opportunities for substantial profits by meeting the demands of a burgeoning chemical industry. In need of income, the Spanish and Portuguese governments issued licences to foreign mining enterprises. The result was mining on an industrial scale.
Abandoned marshalling yard station building, Niebla. below: Tharsis Quay.
all images Tim Sharp
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Before the Rio Tinto company entered the picture, the London-registered Mason & Barry Ltd (São Domingos mine) and the Tharsis Sulphur & Copper company dominated the European pyrites market. Rio Tinto disrupted that market. In a period that has been called the Long Depression (1873- 1879) it was decided that cooperation was a better strategy than competition (contrary to liberal dogma) by dividing the market up, creating an effective monopoly: Rio Tinto got all of continental Europe, including Germany plus 40% of the British market, Tharsis got 33.33% of the British market, and Mason & Barry got the remaining 26.66%. This agreement was formalised in 1878. Although it lapsed in 1885, it offered a precedent which continued in a modified form until the Second World War. Reading the widely available sources of the company histories does not give a reality-near picture of the situation. In an age in which we have been induced to accept that one extreme form of capitalism is natural, desirable and even inevitable, that competition is king, a look back to the activities of the real antecedents of the present day can be seen in the interaction of the companies exploiting the Iberian Pyrites Belt with the relevant governments and among themselves. The Rio Tinto company, for example, not only ‘negotiated’ a mining concession: in addition to the mineral rights it also took over ownership of the land and the airspace above, which can be considered as Spain relinquishing sovereignty — little or no control of activity on company land. Rio Tinto maintained its own police force (that coordinated with the Guardia Civil when needed), ran grocery shops for the miners, and controlled the health facilities provided but deducted contributions from miners’ pay. Company health facilities were a two-edged sword: on one hand it provided immediate medical attention in the event of accidents and dealt with common miners’ ailments caused by contact and inhalation of sulphur and heavy metal dust. On the other it controlled the flow of information about the prevalence and causes of the diseases created by mining the pyrites and the frequency of accidents. Rio Tinto exercised political influence at national level, it appointed local mayor and counsellors in the immediate vicinity and had its chosen men in the provincial government – power seen in its repressive treatment of the miners striking for healthier conditions and better pay. As Miguel Ángel Collado Aguilar suggests, the company was run on ‘a fully- fledged colonial model’. 1 An 1888 miner’s strike resulted in at least forty-five dead and many injured when the army opened fire on strikers. Just how far the company was involved has never been definitively clarified, however I use the Rio Tinto
Pyrite, the name derived from pyr (fire), now the term for all sulphide minerals and ore, generally FeS 2
The abandoned Tharsis Mine and its railway ore wagons.
company as an example, as there is little difference between it and the other companies mentioned above who dealt with organised miner demands in similar, if not quite as drastic, ways. Although we may seem to have drifted off topic, the review of the mining companies indicates a way of thinking that is economically determined, single-minded and only minimally concerned with consequences. The bottom line: in 1872 Tharsis paid a dividend of 40 per cent. This degree of profit- seeking is diametrically opposed to the implications of the watery edges that are sensitive to tides, floods, ebbs, salinity, acidity, colour and all the other characteristics water can have. Bearing that in mind, let’s look at the water.
all images Tim Sharp
The Tharsis pits affect Rio Odiel, Rio Tinto’s Cerro Colorado mine (above) and the Rio Tinto itself, as well as the tributaries.
1 https://conversacionsobrehistoria. info/2020/03/23/ecohistoria-ii-el-ano-de-los- tiros-rio-tinto-1888/
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The Rio Tinto has always been red, they say, so I begin to wonder about the origins. Research brings a strange result: none of the Roman (Pliny, Avenius) or Greek (Diodorus Siculus, Strabo) sources, even those who wrote extensively about the area and named the river, the mines and their products, mention its colour. After the Romans withdrew, there seems to have been a significant drop in mining activity until the sixteenth century. It is not until a report to King Philip II by Diego Delgado in 1556 relating to potential mining opportunities that something solid emerges. He writes: We also visited another cave which was full of water and from under which sprang a river said to be the Rio Tinto. The reason why it is known as the red river is because it springs from vitriol, which in another part is known as copperas , used for ink. The geology is complicated. As I understand it, the main ore is iron pyrite, which explains the colour. Within the ore however, there is also copper, lead, tin and gold. The pyrites are sulphides created at the bottom of an ancient sea that had no oxygen. The exposure to oxygen in the presence of water, with the help of bacteria, produces sulphuric acid and the metals ... you can see the chemical history: the yellow sulphur, the red iron deposits on the banks of the Rio Tinto. The Odiel has a different acidity level due to more alkali tributaries which result in a different reaction. At the higher pH the precipitate mineralogy is dominated by schwertmannite (a pale yellow-orange iron ohyhdroxysulfate) rather than the deeper red geothite hematite that colours Rio
Tinto. Odiel’s metal load ids proportionally richer in copper, zinc, aluminum and magnesium relative to Rio Tinto’s iron. Perhaps Delgado was not that familiar with chemistry as we know it, however he did mention that nothing can live in the river, which he tested by throwing a frog into it. It died. Most of the writers who mention it are concerned with the wealth the mines generated, rather than the physical properties of the stream itself. Modern, more economic methods of open pit mining, rather than the long history of shafts and galleries, use water in processing, affecting its colour. Crushing ore allows water to come in contact with a much larger surface area of pyrite (iron sulphide), initiating a process of oxidisation driven largely by acidophilic bacteria such as Acidithiobacillus . The slurry is held in huge tailing ponds behind dams, affecting surrounding ground water which percolates into the river more directly, deepening its colour and accentuating its acidic properties and heavy metal content (it is, in fact, dilute sulphuric acid coloured by iron). All of these rivers, the Tinto, the Odiel and the Guadiana exhibit these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree, part of the legacy of both defunct and continuing mining. How much is natural and how much is caused by mining is a contentious issue— it should not be though that I’m only describing the past and the physical legacy of that past. The Minas Los Frailes catastrophe in 1998 is a case in point. The retaining dam of a tailings pond ruptured sending six million cubic metres of toxic sludge (containing cadmium, nickel, zinc, arsenic, mercury and lead) into the Agrio River, a tributary of the Guadiamar River
Tim Sharp
The Rio Tinto: Iron-tinted acidic water, near the Tharsis mine.
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which joins the Guadalquivir. The estuary of this system and its wetlands are part of a national park. The immediate threat to the life, health and livelihood of the people of Aznacóllar and the downstream wetlands was apparent. The clean- up was extensive, the material collected dumped in the Aznacóllar pit while the Los Frailes pit was flooded with acidic mine drainage. The court case demanding damages from the company responsible, Boliden, is still undecided, as is the future of the mine. There are some less destructive developments. One actually makes use of degraded rivers and the processes involved. I said above that nothing could live in the Rio Tinto, but that is not quite true. Lithotrophic bacteria, one of the oldest life forms on earth, can and do live in this acidic environment. They eat rocks such as iron sulphide and leave behind metal in the leachate. In the very long term they produce soil, so they can be employed in remediation programmes and for bio- mining the tailings. Because of its geological configuration, the area has also provided insight into dealing with problems related to Mars exploration and sample drilling. The Rio Tinto Quay was originally constructed on wooden platforms with screw piles driven into the soft mud of the river bed, providing the foundation for a two-tier pier that used gravity to move railway wagons to and from waiting freighters. Its restoration is now a tourist attraction and recreational asset for local people. It is only two kilometres east of the walled Protestant settlement of Reina Victoria that Rio Tinto built for British staff employed at the railhead, port facilities and the company’s administrative offices. It is a Garden City middle class inflected architecture, still evident in Huelva – a home away from home. Tharsis Pier, on the other side of the river has not yet been restored but is undergoing an engineering and social assessment.
Rio Tinto, near the Tharsis mine where it feeds into the Odiel.
Rio Tinto barrio, Reina Victoria in 2026.
all images Tim Sharp
Rio Tinto Quay in Huelva, originally for loading wagons of ore, now restored.
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