Liminal Landscapes

Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between

Hazel Andrews, Les Roberts, Hazel Andrews, Les Roberts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415668842
• eBook ISBN: 9781136337451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities. The ritual, performative and embodied geographies of borderzones, non-places, transitional spaces, or 'spaces in-between' are often discussed in terms of the liminal, yet there have been few attempts to problematize the concept, or to rethink how ideas of the liminal might find critical resonance with contemporary developments in the study of place, space and mobility.

Liminal Landscapes fills this void by bringing together variety of new and emerging methodological approaches of liminality from varying disciplines to explore new theoretical perspectives on mobility, space and socio-cultural experience. By doing so, it offers new insight into contemporary questions about technology, surveillance, power, the city, and post-industrial modernity within the context of tourism and mobility.

The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, film, media and cultural studies, art and visual culture, and tourism studies. It brings together recent research from scholars with international reputations in the fields of tourism, mobility, landscape and place, alongside the work of emergent scholars who are developing new insights and perspectives in this area.

This timely intervention is the first collection to offer an interdisciplinary account of the intersection between liminality and landscape in terms of space, place and identity. It therefore charts new directions in the study of liminal spaces and mobility practices and will be valuable reading for range of students, researchers and academics interested in this field.

Part IV Liminality and nation

Marginality, negotiation, contestation

11 Shifting borders and dangerous liminalities

The case of Rye Bay

Introduction

Coastal landscapes, their metaphors and symbolic structures

Jean Didier Urbain (2003) writes ‘the beach is a place where society puts itself on show’. Andrews (2011), Weber (2010), and Rogelja (2004) have re-worked this sharp observation for the broader fields of the anthropology of tourism and coastal studies. Whilst Andrews has described how British charter tourism reveals features of British society itself, Weber and Rogelja have shown how readings of the seascapes of Montenegro and Slovenia point towards contours of the societies, cultures, histories, and politics of the countries and regions that they border. The present chapter builds on, and develops, these lines of thought by offering a reading of some of the material sites and associated symbolic markers of a stretch of ‘liminal landscape’ in South Eastern England, namely the coast of Rye Bay between the town of Hastings in East Sussex and Dungeness in Kent.

The chapter also builds on work in the fields of the political archaeology, geography, and anthropology of landscape by such authors as Bender (1993), Crouch (1990, 2010) and Selwyn (1995, 1996, 2001).

Discourses we use to understand the landscapes around us and to mobilise opinion about their management (whether or not to erect wind turbines in certain sites and not others, for example) derive as much from the realm of symbolic features of landscapes as they do from material ones. For example, the ‘u-turn’ in 2011 by the British coalition government on whether or not to privatise forests (the government wished to do this, the public did not) owed a considerable amount to the symbolic significance of trees in the public imagination. Forests and woods appeared to many so essential to British identity and association with the land that the idea of them being privatised was, and remains, anathema.

Exploration of liminal landscapes thus requires us to focus, first, on their natural and built sites (hills, rivers, buildings, spaces, significant objects, and so on), second on the metaphorical and symbolic connotations these generate, and third on the social relations within which both the material and symbolic are embedded.

A walker in Rye Bay

The chapter proceeds by imagining a walker following a route along the coast from Hastings to Dungeness. Like most walkers, he or she spends much of the journey observing and responding to the material, symbolic, and social surroundings as these appear on the way. Once again like most travellers, our walker will be keenly aware, both consciously and unconsciously, of the relationship between landscapes and the senses of self that they generate (Selwyn, 2010). After all, members of the Ramblers Association go on mountain walks partly or mainly because by doing so they affirm or re-affirm senses of themselves as these relate to, and are shaped by, open spaces and the values, such as the rights to roam freely in the countryside, that go along with them. In this sense ramblers have something in common with the kite surfers of Camber Sands, who we will meet below, as they too link their own style of movement along the seashore to senses of freedom that help define who they are.

In short, the present chapter is concerned with how a walker in Rye Bay might relate its coastline actually and metaphorically to his or her sense of self as a citizen of Britain in the world today. Indeed, in this regard, we are also concerned to use the insights generated here to reflect on the nature of contemporary Britain.

Our walker is, in a sense, everyman (or everywoman): a traveller who might, perhaps, keep a diary, a local citizen, tourist, or both, blessed with an average amount of wit and thoughtfulness and with a wide field of material and symbolic markers to select from during the journey. To give it some preliminary shape we may suggest that this field may be divided into three interpenetrating layers. To start with there is a layer containing a benign collection of holiday beaches, amusement parks, the cobbled streets of Rye itself, and other tourist related ‘heritage’ narratives. Then there is layer of landscape of fishing boats, lifeboats and their memorabilia, churches (the two appearing here are at Rye and Rye Harbour), war memorials, tales of the links between the Cinque Ports, Ancient Towns and royalty, and so on, that all seem to evoke narratives about an English identity of pragmatic individualism, heroism in the face of stormy seas, Anglicanism, royalty, antagonistic relationships between England and France, and so on. A third layer contains sites and symbols that connote more unsettling structures and forces. There is the power station at Dungeness whose cooling system some believe to be compromised by shifting shingle deposits. Then there are the firing ranges at Lydd, owned by the Ministry of Defence. These are reported to have had, at various times, realistic mock-ups of the streets of Belfast and Baghdad as aids to the training of army personnel in responding to snipers. Additionally, there are other manifestations and reminders elsewhere about deaths caused by some of the past millennium’s wars, including the most recent ones in the Middle East. Underlying all of these our walker cannot but be aware at every turn of the ubiquitous sea defences that speak materially, metaphorically and accurately enough of anxieties about rising sea levels and the propensity for parts of the land behind the coast to be flooded.

We may make the point simply. In travelling along the coast our walker will be faced with the task of working out how Camber Sands in summer, Rye Harbour lifeboat, Dungeness nuclear power station, and the fallen of the Iraq war, are related to each other, and to him or herself.

Shifting borders

Visitors to Lime Kiln Cottage, the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve Information Centre, will be aware of a rumbling sound towards the sea some half a mile to the south. This is the sound of lorries and their mechanical shovelling equipment collecting shingle from the shore at Terminal Groyne, the area adjoining the river Rother’s western bank as the river runs into the sea, and setting off with their loads along the sea road to the west in order to empty the pebbles out at Cliff End, Winchelsea Beach near Pett, some miles along the coast. This sound is to be heard almost every day of every year for the Sisyphean task of transporting shingle from one end of the beach to the other is one of the consequences of the permanent eastward drift of sand and shingle along the coast. If left to drift without the daily intervention of fleets of lorries, the mouth of the river would silt up rapidly. Further east along the coast, shingle also piles up on the western side of the point at Dungeness where it tends to curve round, extending the point in the process. Some believe that accumulating shingle interferes with the cooling water outlets of the nuclear power station. The shingle, duly removed from around the power station, is used in the refurbishment of shingle beaches elsewhere on the coast including Cliff End. ¹

The drifting and accumulation of shingle that, if left unchecked, could lead to the silting of the mouth of the Rother which, in turn, would result in a shift of the river’s course, brings to mind the history of the shifting borders and courses of sea and rivers in and around the Rye Bay area. Rye itself, for example, together with Winchelsea, used to be on the sea until the storm of 1287 diverted the waters, leaving both towns high and dry and Rye itself looking over the marsh with only the course of the Rother winding towards the harbour some two miles away to link it to the sea.

It is these shifting borders of river and sea that are expressed in the title of the chapter, the remainder of which will consist of a more considered description of some of the features encountered on our walker’s course along the bay’s coastline. This, in turn, will be followed by a suggestion about how we might make preliminary sense of the coast’s ‘dangerous liminality’ of which the title also speaks and what this might have to do with aspects of the state of contemporary Britain in the world.

Walking the coast from Hastings to Dungeness

We will imagine our walker starting out from the shopping mall in Hastings town centre. Surrounded by such names as Mothercare, BHS, Next, and Water-stones there is a sculpture here of a cricketer and a plaque that records that the shops stand on ground that was formerly one of the best cricket grounds in England. The municipality explains in its web site that the Queen unveiled the sculpture the Spirit Of Cricket in 1997 ‘to celebrate the opening of Priory Meadow Shopping Centre’ and to mark the fact that ‘the mall is on the site of the former Central Cricket & Recreation Ground on which the game was enjoyed for over 130 years’.

The sculpture and the longevity of the cricket ground it commemorates inevitably provoke thoughts about the history of Hastings itself and its character as a site for summer visitors. Photographs of the time when the cricket ground was at its most serenely popular (late nineteenth/early twentieth century) show the beach itself as crowded with masses of straw boatered holidaymakers, bathing machines, deck chairs, sailing and rowing boats drawn up on the shingle, Punch and Judy shows, lines of people shown on the promenade above the beach. Such photographs are powerful reminders to us today of a time when rhythms of holidays were closely linked to the rhythms of manufacturing: times when whole factories closed for limited summer periods during which workers came, en famille and en masse, to the beach.

Walking eastwards along Hastings promenade and beach, our walker passes a fun fair, with notices proclaiming ‘family amusements’: big (or medium) dipper, roundabouts, and an installation called ‘Showtime’ which promises an encounter with stars and legends of the cinema as it was in the starry days of the 1950s.

Beyond the fair there are several fishing boats drawn up on the shingle beach, often surrounded by nets and lobster pots. The Rye Bay fishing fleet is composed of squat, distinctive, and tough looking clinker built boats that seem to announce in no uncertain terms capacities to withstand the routinely rough seas of the English Channel. The fleet is one of the very few – perhaps the only one – in England that routinely makes use of boats that are dragged up on, and launched from, the beach. We will return to them later but it is worth recording at this stage the symbolic potency, as well as the Masefieldian connotations, throughout a long period of English historical imagination and memory, of fleets of small boats in this part of the English coast.

Though possible to scramble along the sea shore from Hastings to Winchelsea, probably best or only at low tides, most walkers will take a slightly interior route and miss parts of the dramatic overhanging eroding cliffs – and the nudist beach – to the west of Fairlight.

Back on the seashore at Pett Level, on the edge of Winchelsea Beach, our walker will be struck, at low tides, by half buried evidence of the wreck of the English warship Anne. She suffered substantial damage in June 1690 when she came under fire from French ships during the engagement between the French and an Anglo-Dutch fleet. She was run ashore and grounded between Fairlight and Winchelsea Castle. Having experienced the attentions of treasure hunters in 1974 she is now protected under the ownership of the Nautical Museum’s Trust.

The footpath from Winchelsea Beach to Rye Harbour, mostly within the boundaries of the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, passes the Old Lifeboat House where an interpretation board recounts the loss, whilst attending to a ship in trouble during a fierce storm, of the lifeboat, the Mary Stanford, in 1928, as well as gravel pits, bird watching spotsf, and the groyne on the bank of the Rother referred to earlier. ² As to the Mary Stanford herself, she and members of her crew are remembered at a grave in Rye Harbour churchyard by individual head-stones inscribed with the names of the crew. The grave also has a collective memorial stone carved with a dramatic portrayal of a lifeboat captain in oilskins and souwester. The grave and this striking carving seem clearly to speak of the heroism of the lifeboat crew in the face of stormy seas.

Another feature of Rye Harbour village is the caravan camp. This camp is one of several on the coast of Rye Bay that (together) house around 5000 caravans. Caravan owners and their families constitute one of the most significant groups of consumers on the coast. However, most of the camps are partially hidden from view and not all are in good condition. For example, looked at from Limekiln Cottage, Rye Harbour camp appears positioned behind a bank of sea defences. Elsewhere (at Camber, for example) one caravan park is positioned in fields behind, and at a lower level than, the coastal road running along the top of the sea defence mound, whilst another is (astonishingly) found underneath electricity pylons further along this road towards Lydd. The caravan camp at Pet...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction Re-mapping liminality—Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts
• PART I Navigating liminality Theory, method, strategy
• PART II Gleaning and liminality Edgelands, wetlands, estuaries
• PART III Urban liminalities Ritual, poesis, experience
• PART IV Liminality and nation Marginality, negotiation, contestation
• Index