Life Beyond the Edge 1 Coast

Coast is home.

Home to explore the most endlessly fascinating shoreline in the world -

Our own.

The quest to discover surprising, secret stories

from around the British Isles continues.

This is Coast.

Standing on the brink, we dream of going beyond.

Hoping to reach the magical meeting point of sea and sky.

Heading out along natural causeways.

And man-made walkways.

Leaving the land behind lifts our spirits.

Out here, different rules apply.

If you ever wanted proof

that people who live out on the edge do things a bit differently,

this is it.

For those who dare to take the plunge, adventure awaits.

We're here to explore Life Beyond the Edge.

I'm on a mission to reach the most westerly inhabited spot in England.

I'm heading to the Isles of Scilly.

Land's End isn't actually the end of England.

28 miles beyond,

this beautiful archipelago beckons.

The ride out to the Isles of Scilly is a stunning voyage.

There are five inhabited islands to choose from.

The ferry comes into the largest, St Mary's.

This is just the beginning of my journey.

I'm heading out to the very edge of the Isles of Scilly,

as far west as you can go in England.

I want to discover the attraction of life beyond Land's End.

One immediate appeal is that the daily routine just isn't so routine.

-Have you ever dropped one in the water, Andy?

-No, I haven't, no.

Andy Smethurst is a postie with a rather unusual route.

He's a vital link to the mainland,

a role he's very happy to deliver.

It's the best place.

-This is your work run, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

-Island hopping.

-Yeah, yeah.

In a small boat.

It's a great job, I love it.

What's it like in winter?

Bleak. It... Rough, cold, wet.

But it's still usually a lot warmer than...

I go and see my parents in Devon,

and there's sometimes about eight degrees difference.

Right, I'm going to have to get on. All right. Are you holding on?

Yes, I'm holding on tight.

Andy can't afford to hang about.

Twice a day he must complete a 15-mile route around five islands.

But I'm getting dropped off with the first delivery,

to continue my quest on foot.

I'm in search of people who live life on the edge.

I'm on the island of St Martin's, this one here,

but I want to get to this island, Bryher,

the most westerly inhabited spot in the whole of England,

so I've got a bit of island-hopping to do.

But no more boats for me.

I want to walk the walk of those that enjoy life beyond the edge,

and today I'm in luck.

There's an exceptionally low tide,

so the locals take the rare opportunity

to stride through the sea from island to island.

I've done some pretty strange walks in my life,

but this is the most bizarre.

The islanders have been doing this for as long as anyone can remember.

It's scheduled for the lowest tide in September,

when the water's at its warmest.

But not that warm,

and I soon find out why they need shallow water.

This might look like a rather enjoyable Caribbean stroll,

but there's a really strong tide pulling through here,

it's hard work.

We can't hang around.

It's a race to make it between the islands.

The land I'm on is living on borrowed time.

Soon the sea will surge in to reclaim its domain.

The tide's really starting to rip in here now,

so I've got to get my skates on.

This is biblical - I'm just waiting for the waters to part!

That was absolutely wonderful.

The last bit of wading was neck deep

so we just made it, before it was too late,

before the tide came in and took out the entire channel.

This is a wonderfully weird water world. Here, in the eternal waltz

between land and sea, swirl ancient tales of a lost kingdom.

Later, when the tide ebbs again, I'll be exploring that landscape

of myth and legend revealed offshore.

Life beyond the edge of the mainland offers unique opportunities

that go-getters have embraced on the south coast.

Near Folkestone, engineers dug deep

to profit from going beyond the Channel.

At Sandbanks, they sell spectacular sea views.

But over generations, some have seen an opportunity

to harvest the sea and the soil.

The people who worked here at Branscombe

were both fishermen and farmers.

Somehow they scratched a living on the steep slopes of these cliffs.

Their lost way of life has got Ruth Goodman intrigued.

Stood here you get a real feeling for Britain coming to an abrupt end,

but for some people this was the start of the day's work.

I've got a photograph here from the 1960s, and this tough little chappie

with his donkeys is Clifford Gosling, known locally as Cliffie,

which is really appropriate,

because he was the last of the Branscombe cliff farmers.

Cliffie was born in 1889. For over 60 years he cut a solitary figure,

fishing in the morning, cultivating crops in the afternoon.

Cliffie was the last man standing

from a proud community of subsistence farmers.

Now I want to discover what it's like to toil beyond the edge.

They made do with poor soil, sloping at a precipitous angle,

the residue from landslips.

The cliff farmers' plots were known locally as "plats".

This was Cliffie's plat.

Oh, wow, what a view!

SHE SIGHS

This is really farming on the edge, isn't it?

The view may be good. The land isn't.

But canny locals found a way to make this lofty perch pay off.

Fishing had been the main industry in Branscombe,

but it was unreliable.

They needed a back-up and so looked inland.

On the cliff face they could farm a variety of crops

all within sight of the sea.

That was the life Cliffie Gosling clung on to until the end.

Cliffie is long gone,

but his son Alan knows how to eke a living from surf and turf.

He's returning to the plat with his family.

This is Granddad Cliffie, this is back in the 1920s.

And he's with two of his donkeys.

Oh, he does look a hard-working sort of a man, doesn't he?

-Cliffie and Granny.

-Oh, she's got her best on.

It's right down on the beach and they're sitting in the boat.

He used to stand every night and look out to sea

before he came home with the donkeys.

-That's just down there.

-It was quite a hard life, I think.

A couple of times they had landslips here and he lost his garden,

so that was a bit of a disaster for him!

Well, you never knew when you came to work whether your plat... the ground would still be there.

This is all slipping all the time, the cliffs here.

'Alan's in his 90s now,

'but as a lad he did jobs for Dad, like collecting seaweed.'

-What's that you got there?

-Seaweeding hook.

-Oh, for gathering?

-Yes, yes, we used to cut it off the rocks.

It's like a little tiny billhook.

Quick as we could before the tide come in.

Once the tide come in you still had to start loading then

and whip it up into the beach, we'd unload it and go back for the rest

and gradually bring it up the cliff, you know.

I can see it still fits in your hand.

LAUGHTER

You don't forget.

Part fisherman, part farmer, Cliffie used seaweed

as a way of fertilising his land.

To find out more about how sea complemented soil,

I'm meeting John Hughes, the last fisherman left in Branscombe.

-Can you remember the plats?

-Oh, yeah. Further down this way more.

Cliffie Gosling was the last one down there.

He taught me a lot about different things, about seaweed, what you can do with seaweed.

Where is the best place for seaweed round here?

Down there where it's flat, where they used to send the donkey out,

and one of 'em cut it, and then the donkey used to take it up

and the other one'd take it out of the panniers.

Time to see how Cliffie cut his seaweed fertiliser.

I've been told fresh kelp was highly prized.

To be honest, in the height of summer when it's a beautiful day, this is a really fun job.

I think it might be rather different in the middle of November in the freezing cold.

Once Cliffie had his seaweed, he needed to get it up a 500ft cliff.

He had beasts to bear the burden.

Enter Ginny and Smart, his beloved donkeys.

And I've got my own work buddy, too.

Hello, George. You going to give me a hand?

'Having harvested the bounty of the sea, Cliffie put his kelp to work improving the poor soil.'

This whole piece was dug by hand on a regular basis,

fertilised with seaweed.

These blokes were really scratching a living,

on land that couldn't really be used for anything else,

not suitable for big-scale farming, you couldn't get a plough down here.

These plots may be precarious,

but at least they're warmed by the sea in winter.

The farmers selected crops to make the most of this frost-free zone,

as Sue Dymond knows.

Potatoes were the mainstay and the variety was Epicure,

which they pronounced "apicure",

but all along this coast that was the variety that they grew.

Branscombe Teddies. They always called them teddies,

and they were marketed as such, and the cry used to go up, "Teddies, Branscombe Teddies for sale."

Really? And you'd have to know that that meant taters.

Yes, but all the local people would know that they called them teddies.

-Branscombe Teddies.

-Branscombe Teddies, yes.

They didn't eat them themselves, only the kind of reject ones.

They had to get them to market to sell them,

and the money they made saw them through the winter, alongside other jobs.

-Bought the bread, paid the rent.

-Yeah.

Plats were passed on from father to son and that was how it was,

it was very hard to work your way in if... if you didn't already have a plat,

and the end of the plats was when the sons didn't want to do it.

It was the 1960s and it was more or less all ended along this coast at that time.

By the Swinging Sixties, Cliffie had his own Flower Power revolution.

He ended his days selling blooms to the tourists.

The cunning combination of fishing and farming

that kept generations going through good and bad times

was gone with the sea breeze.

The cliff men and their donkeys managed to carve a life along here, on this edge of land.

I mean, it must have been pretty tough at times, but you can see that there would be compensations.

Caught between the fat of the land and the bounty of the sea,

it does have its attractions.

I'm on a journey,

far beyond Land's End to the very edge of the Isles of Scilly.

Bathed in clear blue water, warmed by the Gulf Stream,

these sandy shores look and feel more like the Caribbean.

The Tropical Gardens on Tresco

thrive in a frost-free environment.

No need for a greenhouse.

Exotic plants bloom in the open air,

not hiding behind glass.

The soil's wrapped in its blanket of balmy water.

Out here, boundaries are blurred

between land and sea.

The edges become fuzzy.

Hidden away in the lush greenery,

there's more evidence

of the importance of the sea to these islands.

Extraordinary. It's a sanctuary for the spirits of lost ships.

Very beautiful.

These figureheads look back to times long ago

and age-old trade routes.

Thousands of years ago, back in the ancient times,

traders didn't see the Isles of Scilly as the end of Britain,

but as the beginning.

Look at the map with Bronze Age eyes.

For ancient Greece to make bronze,

they needed tin.

Coming to collect tin from Cornwall,

merchants may well have stopped off on the Isles of Scilly.

Out there is the submerged home

of some of our Bronze Age ancestors,

a lost land that is rarely revealed.

I just need to wait for the tide to ebb.

At this exceptionally low tide,

the seabed that was once land is exposed.

People used to live out here

before the water level rose

thousands of years ago.

Now I can walk back to the Bronze Age.

My guide is historian Amanda Martin.

What would this landscape have looked like in the Bronze Age?

This area here, which is the Tresco Channel,

would have been an area of tidal swamp

fringed with the salt marshes,

a place of very primitive cultivation.

What evidence have you got that they were farming down here

on what is now sand and a tidal channel at high tide?

We've got some evidence of boundary walls, field boundaries.

They wouldn't have been the sophisticated fields

we can see from the modern era. They would have been far more rudimentary.

So compared to these very neat dry stone walls behind us,

the walls we're talking about back in the Bronze Age

-were much more crude.

-Absolutely.

From the ground, you can see tantalising lines of stones.

But from the air, you begin to notice man-made rock boundaries,

unnaturally straight lines

just visible in the chaos of debris.

These walls are what remains of ancient farmland.

Once, the separate Isles of Scilly were joined together

in one large land mass.

What's now the edge of these islands

was once their heart.

The farms were lost as the water level went up

when ice melted millennia ago.

This journey out to the edge of our isles

is a voyage back thousands of years in time.

We've gone beyond written history.

What happened to the people out here as sea levels rose

was passed on by storytellers down through the generations

and remembered as myths and legends.

The legend has it that once upon a time,

the Isles of Scilly were connected to Cornwall.

What's now the Atlantic

was supposedly the lost kingdom of Lyonesse.

A mythical world

which may have given rise to tales of the Round Table and its knights.

Some say Lyonesse is the resting place of King Arthur himself.

If that great kingdom did exist,

the most westerly tip of the Isles of Scilly

would have actually been Land's End.

And that's where I'm heading,

continuing west till I come to a full stop

and find the last house on the very edge of England.

I'm not the only time-traveller around our shores.

Fossil hunters pick away at crumbly cliffs,

hoping to prise out a prize specimen

from the age of the dinosaurs

or beyond.

Our coast remembers a time

long before the big beasts of the Jurassic period.

We can go much further back than the dinosaurs

with a stop at St David's.

Today, this tiny city draws the crowds

because of its big cathedral.

But in Victorian times, the craggy cliffs nearby

were crawling with scientists,

challenging the church's view of the world.

Hermione is puzzled by the age of the Earth.

150 years ago,

our coast was causing a commotion.

Ideas about the Earth were evolving rapidly

thanks to Victorian naturalists probing the edge for knowledge.

One of the scientists who came to this shore was J W Salter,

a palaeontologist working

for the British Geological Survey.

In 1862, Salter's boat took a wrong turning

and he landed purely by chance at this rocky inlet near St David's

called Porth y Rhaw.

Maybe it was divine intervention that steered him off course.

Whatever the reason,

he made a startling discovery.

Salter uncovered evidence here that supported the idea

that the Earth hadn't just existed for thousands of years,

it had to be hundreds of millions of years old.

A literal reading of the Bible

suggested the world was around 6,000 years old.

Salter found a fossil that said otherwise.

-Hi, Bob.

-Hi.

'Dr Robert Owens knows that priceless fossil better than most.'

-So, Bob, tell us about what Salter found here.

-Well, he found these.

-My goodness.

-Giant trilobites.

This one I'm holding in my hand comes from this very spot.

-This is enormous.

-Absolutely, yes.

Imagine splitting a rock open and that's facing you.

What would this creature have been like when it was living?

Well, it's a distant relative of the crabs, lobsters, scorpions,

spiders - the arthropods, that group of animals.

This probably lived on the seabed crawling around

and it was probably a predator scavenger,

was probably fairly high up in the food chain.

How old are these trilobites?

On our present estimates, they're about 505 million years old.

505, so that's a lot, lot older than any dinosaur, for example.

Yes, over twice as old as the oldest dinosaur.

-Right back to the beginnings of large life forms.

-That's right.

This geological period they come from,

it's called the Cambrian, after...

After Wales, where rocks of this age were first recognised.

A truly Welsh fossil, then.

If there were to be a national fossil of Wales,

I think this might well be it.

The Welsh trilobite helped prove

that the Earth was old enough for life to evolve.

But the fossil found here also tells a remarkable story

about the evolution of the planet itself.

Welsh trilobites

aren't only found in Wales.

Look at this.

This is a postage stamp from Canada

and the fossil depicted on it is a trilobite

and not only a trilobite,

it's Paradoxides davidis

and that is the very trilobite we get in Porth y Rhaw.

If you look at the rocks of Eastern Newfoundland of the Cambrian age,

you find exactly the same fossils in them, the same trilobites

including Paradoxides davidis.

How has that come about?

Well, we now know that

500 and more million years ago,

what is now Wales, what is now Newfoundland, were all located

on the margins of a vast continent called Gondwana

and this was about 60 degrees south of the equator.

So when the trilobites were alive in the sea,

Wales and that part of Canada were part of the same continent.

Exactly, yes. They all lay quite close to one another.

Hundreds of millions of years ago,

what's now Wales and Canada

were jigsaw pieces in one massive continent.

Over time they started to drift apart

and as the geological plates split open,

they formed the vast Atlantic.

This stranded identical trilobites on the coast of Wales and Canada.

And because of that, our quintessentially Welsh fossil

ends up over in Canada on one of their stamps.

Yes, we have to share it

but we got to name it first as we found it first.

It's remarkable to think

that this imprint in Welsh stone

tells an epic tale

of the birth of the Atlantic Ocean.

I've made it to Bryher,

the smallest of the five inhabited islands,

home to around 80 permanent residents,

and a couple of goats!

The name Bryher is from the old Cornish,

meaning "place of hills."

Over the crest of the final peak

lies the real Land's End of England.

WAVES CRASH

Who chooses to live out here in such isolation?

I'm on my way to the most westerly house in England.

-Hello, there!

-Oh, hello.

I'm sorry to bother you.

You probably get fed-up with questions like this,

-but do you live here?

-Yes.

Is this the most westerly house in England?

Well, I think so,

apart from next door's, we're all in a line.

Are you? And you've never figured out who's the most western?

-Well, I think we are, yes.

-You think you are.

-Where did you move from?

-We moved from Northamptonshire.

But that's right in the middle of England.

I know, I know, sort of countryside.

-Now you've come to the very edge of England.

-I know.

And that's where my husband spends most of his time.

Wow!

Look at that!

This is a coastal view.

-How do you do?

-Good afternoon.

-Sorry about the intrusion.

-That's quite all right. You're most welcome to come around.

My goodness. This must be one of the best views in England.

Well, I can't think of anything better myself, yes.

Look at that.

# Oh-oh-oh-oh

# This could be para-para paradise

# Para-para paradise

# Para-para paradise

# Oh-oh-oh-oh ohoooo. #

I'm standing on the most westerly point

of any inhabited island in England.

My journey's completed,

and although it's quite wild and windy here,

inside I feel quite still and calm,

it's rather like reaching a top of a mountain.

The journey's over, there's no further I can go, and yet,

when I lift my eyes to the horizon,

you can see there's more to come,

the promise of something far bigger,

and I think that's the appeal of life on the edge,

it's on the cusp of another world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd