Introduction

In 1967, Benoît Mandelbrot suggested a mathematical conundrum that involved answering the seemingly straightforward question, ‘How long is the coast of Britain?’1 The answer is surprisingly elusive and dependent on the scale at which one is looking. Increasing the scale unearths greater detail, time and time again, and so the answer grows the closer one looks. The problem is that any measure, at however small a scale, is forced to simplify complex ambiguities that might otherwise reveal further intricacies of their own. This was an entry-point to Mandlebrot’s writings on fractal geometry, but it also chimes with the very ecology and geomorphology of that coast itself, characteristically intricate, ambiguous, and changeable. Large-scale, ocean-facing landforms—such as capes and bays, estuaries, dunefields, and reefs—are well known to have, nestled within them, smaller and often dynamically mobile features such as longshore bars and troughs, berms and beach cusps, not to mention difficult-to-measure caves, inlets, tributaries, and salt marshes. Looking closer still are to be found the ripples, rills, and swash marks of a more minute scale; even within these are to be found the bioturbation structures of intertidal organisms: forms within forms, scales within scales, and worlds within worlds. In the way that it draws the attention down into such minute details as these, while at the same time drawing it up towards an expanse that suggests a space almost planetary in scale, the coast is a highly distinctive geographical environment. And yet it has all too often been overlooked, as if its peripheral relationship to the land has reinforced its peripheral treatment culturally....