The sea, as it hits the land, works on our every sense, and our senses feed imagination. This density of variation is contrasted with another drowned bell at Selsey, literally swept away along with St Wilfrid's monastery but which is still heard by fishermen venturing near the treacherous sandbanks. A 20th-century informant ("a local harbourmaster") preferred to blame a woman, who cried out at the wrong moment – reflecting "the common sailors' belief that women brought bad luck at sea" (as do cormorants, white pebbles and, bizarrely, the word "salt"). The great tenor bell of Bosham in West Sussex smashed the boat of the Vikings who had stolen it when it boomed out in reply to its companions in the tower: in a delightful development, the locals tried to haul it from the sea with a team of pure white oxen, but "the rope snapped and it sank once more, because one of the cattle had a single black hair in its tail". Take drowned bells, for instance: they generally toll underwater, usually as warning. This maritime compendium of British and Irish material, tracking tales and yarns right round the notched, wave-seethed coasts of our island group, proffers endless variations and versions of not only the same theme (wrecks, sea-serpents, pirates, sailors' superstitions, ghost ships, things found in fish …), but sometimes the same tale.īeachcombing by geographical area, the late Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill helpfully reference similar finds described elsewhere in the book.
And it's unmappable, unofficial, like one of the magical islands that keep on appearing (and disappearing) in The Fabled Coast. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, "no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found." Thankfully, there is no government agency or private corporation controlling the folk imagination, which has left a silt deposit of legends, stories, beliefs and traditions that goes on being added to and adapted as long as the criss-cross currents of language permit.
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