Dune

Formby Point

A group of colleagues walk up the steep, mobile sand dune away from the seashore. We had been on a coastal training course, and at Formby had looked at coastal processes in action. The sand dunes are being eroded at their seaward side, and what remains are rolling inland. Where we are walking was low-lying fixed dune grassland ten years ago. The rolling dunes are giving the National Trust challenges - a caravan site is about to be engulfed, as is a car park.

The Trust will allow natural process to take its course, helping it along by removing the foundations of the car park and caravan site. They have to find new locations further inland, and persuade local communities and visitors of the wisdom of this.

Meanwhile the eroding sand is being carried up the coast and redeposited in front of Southport where a salt marsh is forming. This is not entirely welcome to the local people, as they see the sea recede away from the pier and the former sea front. The hotel in which we stayed was once on the sea front, now it is several hundred metres inland.

Such dynamic processes are hard to accommodate in an over-crowded island, and people are not keen on change. But adapt to the change we must, the forces at work are greater than we can control, and the prospect of a rising sea level as climate warms will intensify the changes.

The changes bring new and exciting developments for an ecologist. the green beach in front of Southport has a fascinating flora of plants that have simply arrived of the their own accord quickly colonising the new habitat. Some plants that are extremely rare, and some that haven't been seen in the locality for a generation or two.

A fascinating couple of days.

A year ago - the first 100 blips.