At the Very End of the Road

Abstract

Imagine that you are standing on a coastal lowland, but set back from the shoreline so that your view encompasses the meadows, salt marshes, reed beds, and mudflats between you and the open ocean. It is a misty morning; the light is low and diffuse, as if you are viewing the scene through diaphanous curtains. As you gaze toward the sea, the dense, swirling fog parts momentarily affording—just for a few seconds—a crystal clear vision of some object in the landscape: a wind-blasted tree, a cow grazing, a sandpiper probing for worms at the wrack line. Your mind registers the image in exquisite detail, and then the fog closes in and the object disappears from sight again, leaving only a mental image that gradually fades as another object emerges from the shifting clouds to grab your attention. Such is the experience, both literally and figuratively, of reading Phillip Edwards’s At the Very End of the Road, a book that is at once masterful and maddening. The observations recounted here occur on a foggy British seacoast with flashes of brilliant wildlife sightings, but the sightings are presented in such an endless flurry they befog the reader’s consciousness. Frustrated by the depauperate natural landscape near densely populated Cambridge, Edwards sought and found a new home at the very end of a paved road on England’s western coast. For 19 years, Edwards wandered the fields, hedgerows, salt marshes, and strands surrounding his new place, documenting his sightings in extraordinary detail. In his book, he presents observations characteristic of each month to immerse his readers in the nature of the place over the course of a year. Edwards provides few explicit details about the location of his home, mostly to prevent casual visitors from overwhelming the area. His observations take place on a spit of land bordered on one side by the mouth of a river, and on the other side by the open ocean. Off the tip of the peninsula lies an island. However, Edwards’s description of the location is so spare that his references to low hills and moors visible on the far horizon at odd compass coordinates were difficult to reconcile with the vague image of the spit I had envisioned from his introduction. In an attempt to resolve these seeming inconsistencies and form a firmer mental orientation to the locale, I consulted a British road atlas and identified the likely spit and associated island. A further bit of internet sleuthing confirmed that the marshes and mudflats surrounding the estuary are important shorebird habitat protected in a National Nature Reserve. In fact, in his epilogue, Edwards concedes, ‘‘Some of [my readers] may come to see this place; it will not be hard to identify, and confirmation will be easy.’’ The physiography of the spit is low and flat, and the region is generally well-watered. As a result, the productive land has been divided into 12 agricultural fields that are grazed by cattle or sheep, or are mowed for hay. Seawalls in various states of repair line the river and ocean edges and protect the land from all but the worst storms. The fields are crisscrossed by drainage ditches. The sea defenses, ditches and ponds, and hedgerows produce some topographic diversity that provides habitat for birds and a few other animals in a largely featureless terrestrial landscape. However, most of Edwards’s attention is focused on the mudflats, salt marshes, and shingle beaches at the waters’ edges—and the vast majority of the observations involve birds. He mentions some mammals: foxes, rabbits, hares, sheep, cattle, and occasional badgers, rodents, roe deer, weasels, and a bat. He