Beachcombing yields surprises: Country diary 50 years ago

Originally published in the Guardian on 13 April 1967

NORTH DEVON: At the time of writing no oil from the Torrey Canyon has reached local beaches. On the other hand one has never had to look very far for oil waste in its coagulated state during recent years. It occurs in tiny pulverised fragments, indistinguishable from some of the constituents of shingle till it adheres to one's foot, and in lumps up to the size of a football. The oiled carcass of a gannet or an auk is an only too familiar sight on the high water mark.

The Atlantic drift which brings oil on to our coastline also carries less objectionable material: seeds, skeletons and bodies of sea creatures, shells, many of which have travelled a very long distance. Among these are seed cases and fruit from trees which are native to the banks of the Amazon; the flat, purple Entada scandens, the Sacoglottis amazonica, Mucuna the fruit of a climbing plant; objects which are of the size of a marble or golf ball. At the other end of the scale whales and sharks in addition to ships are sometimes cast up. What appeared to its discoverers to be the exceptionally well-preserved bones of "an extinct prehistoric reptile" turned out to be the skeleton of a whale buried by locals, as the simplest method of disposing of its bulk, earlier in the century. And when an expert hurried out to inspect an "Elizabethan canon" uncovered by the tide, he found it to be the rusted end-section of an old sewer!