A northern St Francis

Once, reading a psalter by the sea, [Cuthbert] dropped his book into the water - I imagine its glittering illuminated and unchained pages fluttering as they tumbled into the murky depths, an expensive loss in an age when books were more precious than almost anything. At that moment, a seal dived down and returned with the book in its mouth. It...received a blessing for its efforts, although I suspect a little fresh fish would have been as welcome.

-- Philip Hoare.

Image (via British Library): Cuthbert (lower left) praying in the sea, and, after he has finished (lower right), otters coming to warm and dry his feet with their breath and fur, while (above), another monk watches.

See also Otter tracks.

Sea tales

The giant sea-serpent glides into view time and again, with a particular frequency in the Victorian period, although the beached and rotting "Animal of Stronsa" in the Orkneys was, according to the scientists, a basking shark. Detailed accounts are often from respectable folk such as the Reverend Donald Maclean, minister of Eigg, "quite a man to be believed" according to the Glenelg minister – who saw one himself in the Sound of Sleat.

Hitch-hiking decades ago in the Hebrides, I was picked up by a fishing-boat skipper who at one point confided his own sighting of a long serpent with a bristling, hideous face yards from his stern off the Angus coast. "We've most of us seen them," he said, quietly, "but we don't like to talk about it for fear of being laughed at."

-- from Adam Thorpe's review of The Fabled Coast by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood

'the infinite succession of soft and radiant forms'

If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.

-- so wrote Edmund Gosse, recalling his boyhood seashore explorations on the Devon coast with his father in the 1850s.

News from Scotland, including (supposedly) the first sighting in British waters of the ancient amphioxus, or lancelet, indicates that at least a few inshore locations in the north of this island have survived the ravages of more than a century of intense fishing and other depredations. Could this be a token of more to come, and of a measure of recovery?