With another storm, Dennis, due to hit Dorset this weekend, I'm seeing the coast not just at it's sunny best when the honeycomb cliffs and glowing beaches even in February make you reach for an ice cream, but at its most dramatic. With high winds whipping up the surf, cliff falls and high banks of shingle. Sometimes foam blows off the sea so thickly that its like wading through a children's fun party.
It was this sort of weather that inspired me to write the Wreckers, a children's book set in Abbotsbury in the 1700's. Shipwrecks were common along Chesil Beach, and if you go to Portland or Lyme Museums you will see the sad remnants of the lives of men, women and children setting out to emigrate to Australia or America. Or of sailors caught out in storms or by rocks. But sometimes by wreckers who would lure ships onto the rocks and plunder their goods, if they could avoid the militia or Revenue Officers. Stories tell of entire communities supplementing their meager farm wages with the earnings from illegal contraband trade from smuggling or wrecking.
Contraband was even hidden in churches, as in Falkners spooky account in Moonfleet, also based around Chesil beach, near the Fleet.
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