"This being a remote and more or less private beach, its flotsam had escaped being tidied. It is part of Lord Montagu's estate, a nature reserve, and most of its visitors are birdwatchers. Every now and again we encountered their improvised encampments of driftwood benches, places to munch sandwiches, unscrew thermos flasks and exchange intelligence of the latest arrivals. Driftwood and the rich bird life along this shore are closely connected. Flotsam gives shelter to sandflies and other food for the small flocks of wading birds that kept wheeling in like a single organism, landing or taking off on the instant in perfect unison: sandlings, ringed plover, gadwall and dunlin. All were feeding along the shore, keeping a wary eye on a peregrine at rest on a post in the river mouth.
"The lonely spit of shingle runs out a mile or so between the saltmarsh and the sea to the mouth of the Beaulieu River. We made our way along it, Barry shouldering a telescope and tripod, which he set down now and again for us to observe the birds. Across the sparkling Solent, the undulating landscape of the Isle of Wight with its wooded hills, fields and hedgerows looked far too homely and inviting ever to have been the prison it was to my great-uncle Joe.
"The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners."
