Shoring the Fragments : Writing at the Tide Line

Spooner, Catherine (2025) Shoring the Fragments : Writing at the Tide Line. In: Coasts and the Gothic : Literature, Littoral Cultures, and Haunted Shores. University of Wales Press, Cardiff. (In Press)

Abstract

This ‘personal essay’ departs from a conventional academic format to take a creative and reflective approach to the subject of coastal Gothic. Taking inspiration from the double meaning of shore, as a coastal boundary and a verb meaning to buttress or reinforce, it explores the way that the coast may be a site of erosion and loss but also of restoration. It intertwines the stories of two shores: the beach near the author’s grandparents’ house in Cornwall which she grew up visiting; and Sunderland Point in Lancashire, a remote hamlet cut off by the tide twice a day, once the fourth largest slave port in Britain, close to where the author currently lives. These two coastal spaces enable connections to be drawn between the author’s personal reflections on loss and the collective memorialisation of ‘Sambo’, a young Black servant who died and was buried on the Point in 1736. Through an alternating structure of high and low tides, the chapter considers things that are submerged and things that wash up, and the uncanny transformations they undergo in the process. The shifting, transitional landscape of the foreshore, between high and low water marks, becomes a space in which memory and grief can be articulated and worked through. The chapter thus considers the shore as not only a haunted but also a creative space, in which meanings ebb and flow, cyclic replaces linear narrative, and that which returns may also renew.