This is a new term devised by artist-scholar Heather Green and Owain (blog owner), and is the first outcome of their collaborative explortions of the Severn Estuary. Treeces were seen when Heather and Owain got on to the Severn river bed at Arlingham (near Gloucester, UK) at low tide. The moon was rising over the nearby village of Framilode.

Treece – a mark left on intertidal ground by bits of wood and other objects, as they are dragged, and then left stranded, by the last ebbings of a falling tide. (Treece is also an old Anglo-Saxon name associated with trees).

They might be quite rare – depending on particular combinations of conditions of flow, surface and object.

The ones we saw were quite varied, depending on what made them (e.g. a discarded christmas tree,  and one was a kinding interweaving pair of lines made by a log that must have been spinning as it can to rest on the sand. (See pics below).

See new post and definition card  by Heather Green  here

Comment from artist  Margarethe Kölmel sent by email on 16.01.2020. Thanks.

“Lovely, a new word! “Treece” – Besides its obvious relation to trace it is what I would call a sound word (surely there is an english term for it that I don’t know) – a word that describes the thing or the activity by the sound it makes when we say it – here the dragging of a thing through\over sand.

You might want to submit it to  the bureauoflinguisticalreality.com?” (We have done so)

This has been added to the page A (poetic) Tidal Glossary on this blog.

Photographs by Heather Green and Owain Jones