This new book has been added to our page of books about tides
Click on image to go to the page
This is another new term to emerge out of the collaborative explorations of the Severn Estuary by Owain (blog owner) and artist-scholar Heather Green. With artist PhD student Laura Denning too on this occasion.
Sea Biscuits. Pieces of clay that are rolled into regular ovates (egg shaped) along the sea floor by the flowing of rising and ebbing tides, which are then left exposed as the tide falls. (The clay mud is sticky and firm enough to resist being dissolved by the sea water).”
((Ovates also seem to be druids of some kind!!))
We like how like how ‘biscuit’ conjures up the action of rolling dough by hand.
We might go and get some and try to bake them hard. And biscuit is also a term for unglazed fired ceramics.
Laura suggested the name sea scat!
This has been added to the page A (poetic) Tidal Glossary on this blog.
In a Facebook comment Stuart Ballard added:
“Stuart Ballard We used to find great fields of almost perfect spheres and cylinders about 4″ diameter near Arlingham when the conditions were right. I think someone tried putting one in a kiln but it just fell apart.”
We stumbled across this tidal curiosity. We guess there were many such tins depicting classic scenes and times of British life – and the ebb tide was one of them. And maybe a reference to retirement, old age – and biscuits!? The drawings are lovely – reminiscent of Delft tiles.
This is great we think – it is from a 1980s book of arial photographs of the British landscape. It seems to be a kind of pattern made in a Welsh (UK) estuary mudflat by a moored boat being repeatedly lifted and grounded on a mudbank by the tide. There seem to be a few of them.
With the artist Heather Green, we have decided to call these ‘tidal spiralgraphs’. Other examples, in Korea, can be seen here on Instagram. (Thanks to Heather for link).
This is in Angle, Dyfed, Wales.
This is the book this is from, by Bernard Stonehouse, published in 1982. Although just about the British Landscape there are a lot of coastal pics of intertidal areas, e.g. the ones below
This is the incoming tide. The same happens when the tide ebbs, i.e. the water flowing the other way.
The higher the tides the stronger the flow is.
Part of colaborative explorations of the Severn estuary with artist and scholar Heather Green
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
No 69. Walking the Tide. A large scale dynamic participatory performance event celebrating coast and community. By Jo Hodges in collaboration with Florencia Garcia Chafuen. Scotland; UK. 2013.
Thanks to Jo Hodges of artist partnership Coleman and Hodges for sending this in to us.
From the artists’ website
See it and all other tide art works on the dedicated page here
See their website here
And also a film on their Facebook page here
A few quotes
They say .. “The different tides at each Beach School session spark children’s curiosity and interest in unimaginable ways!”
“There is something just so magical about watching the tide come in wave by wave, I love observing the children’s reaction to the great water! For some of them it will be their first experience of open water.”
Tidal Cultures 