Marcus is sculpting a series of ‘tidal bells’ that will ring out at high tide around the country. There is no mention of springs or neaps in the article, so I’m presuming the bells are being placed low enough to ring at a neap tide (the narrowest range between high and low).

In the book I touch on the fact that humans have become very adept at approximating tidal behaviour, but it is still impossible to predict tidal times or heights with absolute precision. The tides are influenced by the orbits of the Moon about the Earth of course, but also very significantly by the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which fewer people realise. These are the factors that are relatively easy to predict. The effects of wind, air pressure, temperature and the motion of the previous tide’s water are harder to predict and this chain continues almost all the way down down to the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Australia.

Technical challenges of predicting tides aside – these bells are not being designed to replace Caesium clocks in laboratories – it is a beautiful concept and I can’t wait to hear a bell ring out. Regular blog readers will know that I get an intense pleasure whenever creative works embrace the natural world and this is accentuated when there is a navigational connection. My thanks to Angela Williams for bringing my attention to the story and best of luck to Marcus in his work.

In case it is not legible in the picture, the words read as follows:

When full or new

You see the Moon,

The tides far out in the afternoon.

But when the Moon’s

At either quarter,

At tea the beach

Is underwater.

Six hours the water

ebbs away,

An hour later

Every day.

Get down to the beach

As soon as you can

Time and Tide

Wait for no man.

——

How divine is that?

This year I was lucky enough to spend some time on a place called Les Écréhous. It is a place you spend time on, not in. Five miles northeast of Jersey, these three tiny islands stand precariously above the water at high tide, surrounded by rocks that have claimed countless lives in the past. When the tide recedes the dots in the sea join up, forming the most rugged landscape of sharp dark shapes, broken only by a few curves of sand. At low tide it is possible to walk for half an hour over land that spends most of its time deep underwater.
It is the ultimate coastal experience, filled with rich evidence of life – we found baby cuttlefish squirting ink in the rock pools – as well as reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality. Each winter the elements tear down some of the small number of huts that cling to the rocks.

This is a photo taken looking out to the Fort from Longis Beach on the southeastern part of the island. Alderney is famous for its powerful tides and you can see how churned up the water is getting on the left halft of the picture, as it races across the causeway.

So many natural phenomena take their orders from these bodies and tide is one of the best known of these. I took this photo of the tide running past a cardinal off Jersey this weekend. The cardinal is an easterly one, signalling that the safer water lay to the east of it. But could it tell us anything else? With two pieces of information, time and tide table, we can discern others such as the speed of the water and its direction. If we had no other references: no sight of land, no chart, no compass, no GPS… that small patch of water could reveal not only where the safe water was but also which way we were heading, all by looking into the workings of the big clock.

A navigator who knew the local waters well could probably gauge most of this just by looking at a rock sticking out of the water and checking the sun and moon.