TURNING TIDE: A Biography of the Irish Sea

The book is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance, combining social and cultural history, nature writing, travelogue and politics. 'He unloaded the lobster from the pot and put it in a tub, and they took out the spider crabs, their conkery shells crusted with acorn barnacles...' - Syman Jones, 'Everything I Found on the Beach.' From charting and cross current maps, Pirate Isle and Enlli, here are sherawees and sea-swallows, the craft of the sea, the Norman Invasion, the dockers of Dublin, urban geese, a frenzy of shipbuilding, wild geese winters, tempests and wrecks, nets and lines and the last invasion of Britain. Welshman Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints, invasion forces, royals and rebels, writers, musicians and fishermen. The divided but interconnected waters of the Irish Sea from the narrow North Channel through St. George's Channel to where the Celtic Sea opens out into the wide Atlantic have a turbulent history to match the violence of its storms. Gower is a sympathetic and interested pilot taking the reader to the great shipyards of Belfast and through the mass exodus of the starving during the Irish Famine in coffin boats bound for America. He follows the migrations of working men and women looking for work in England, and tells tales of more casual travellers, sometimes seasick, often homesick too. It is also a place where the rarest seabird in Europe visits its coast in summer while the rarest goose wings in during winter. Filled with seals and salt-tanged stories, lyrically written and fizzing with curiosity and vitality as the sea is itself. 308pp, colour photos and images. Map.