Windswept Coastlines

The wind seems not only to shape the geography of coastlines, but it also shapes the plants and lives of the animals that inhabit them. Certain coastal regions seem to live permanently in a wind tunnel, while others experience nothing more than warm and pleasant breezes. Chalk it up to weather patterns, but nonetheless, the windier coastlines are starkly beautiful and usually human settlement there is sparse and tenuous.

On the British Isles the coastline is blasted by the Northerlies, so the windiest coastline is the northwestern one—lashed by the gales over the North Sea. But the coastlines throughout the isles are windy, from the Isle of Lewis to Portland Bill in southern England. Near Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, the Callanish Stones have stood for perhaps 5000 years atop the windblown knolls of the island. One can imagine the ancient ceremonies held there in the gusts that sweep through the grass beneath the stones.

Further south, in Wales, the Great Orme acts as a windbreak for the city of Llandudno—with its windy side facing the sea. Few people inhabit the windy seafront of the Orme where over time the blasts of wind have arched the trunks and branches of the trees planted in the graveyard that surround the Medieval St. Tudno’s parish church.  

We hiked across the Orme on a warm summer afternoon, but it was not hard to imagine the snow whirling across the barren hillside in winter. Circling back toward the city we were surprised by a small herd of Kashmir goats high up on the Orme, but it was obvious that they seemed perfectly happy on their windy perch over the water. We learned later that this goat population has thrived on the hillside for over a hundred years.

Portland Bill has a similar windswept graveyard, with the trees bent by the constant wind. And just a little west of Portland Bill, Lyme Regis’ stone breakwater is another spot constantly lashed by the winds and choppy sea.    

 

Across the Atlantic, the entire Newfoundland coastline seems to brace itself against the constant gales. Life there is rough and bitter cold in the winter. Even in the summer, although the land is very beautiful, the wind is brisk. In fact, the weather we experienced traveling there in midsummer reminded me of weather in New Zealand’s winter. Since before the Vikings first ventured to the coast, Newfoundland’s population has eked out a living mostly from the sea, and has had to come to terms with the extremes of its climate and weather. A Paleo-Eskimo population seems to have been the first human habitation of the island followed by a Dorset Indian population. However, both populations died out or had abandoned Newfoundland by the time the Vikings first arrived in 1006. The furthermost outpost in northern Newfoundland is the only site where Viking artifacts have been found thus far in North America (which may partially explain why the Vikings aren’t usually given credit in the U.S. history books for discovering America). What is now called Straumfjord at L'Anse aux Meadows is the site where the Vikings created a seasonal summer settlement to use as a stopover on their explorations of further down the coast of what they called Vinland—the account of which is documented in the ‘Vinland Sagas.’ The landscape at L'Anse aux Meadows has the windswept austerity of the tundra, with small trees and low lying vegetation that cling close to the soil in their effort to survive.

  

It may actually be that the harshness of Newfoundland’s coastline is what has isolated and protected the treasure trove of sea life that is now harvested there. Newfoundland grew out of the cod fishing industry, and only later developed other resources. Life is not easy for the fishermen and their families, but they band together against the elements in little coastal communities. Sadly, in St. Anthony—near the Viking site—we stayed with a woman whose husband had just recently been killed while working on his boat just off the coast. It is a hard living and it still claims lives. St. Anthony is far enough north that in addition to the precarious weather there is a constant flow of icebergs down the coast far into the summer which create additional hazards for the fishermen. The temperature and wind in the winter must be formidable.

There are few frills in Newfoundland, just an abundance of boats and lighthouses, clusters of wooden cottages, wide open landscapes and crashing seas.

 

 

Similarly, on the other side of the globe the Southerlies blast the Australian and New Zealand coastlines. Though Australia verges on too hot for most of the year, its south coast feels the winter chill of the winds that sweep across the ocean from the South Pole. On Rottnest Island, near Perth, you can see how the land has been shaped, and is still being shaped, by the unrelenting gales from the south.

The Great Ocean Road has vistas of rugged beauty that are continually whipped by the wind, making the beaches a destination for avid surfers and the rocky formations like the Twelve Apostles a spectacle for visitors.

And still further south the Southerlies blast the islands of New Zealand throughout the winter months, creating a breathtakingly beautiful coastline, but keeping the western side of both islands more sparsely populated.

 

I don’t think I have the fortitude to live my life braced against the tempests of the coast. Life there year round is harsh, not just picturesque. I am constantly amazed that there are hearty folk who do put their roots down into these forbidding windswept coastlines and stay. But then, when you think about it, islands all over the globe are now inhabited by the progeny of those ancient Gaelic tribes that danced among the stone circles of the British Isles and were at home with the wind and sea.