It may be, as Carl Sauer (1962) has suggested, that man was originally a creature of the seashores, where abundant food, tolerable climate and a ready supply of conveniently shaped rocks enabled him to develop the beginnings of culture. This may well also have something to do with our present interest in the seashore, reflecting as Sauer says a deep instinctive need to see and experience the sea. Yet it has taken man a strangely long time to become interested in the seashore as a scene for scientific activity, and perhaps an even longer time to become interested in the wider reaches of the ocean. Long after man became interested in strange beasts of countries beyond the rim of fiery peaks and strange plants from the antipodes he began to look at the shores of his own country beneath his feet. Indeed this interest came after he had developed practices of cultivating oysters and mussels in tidal impoundments. It has often been suggested that the popularisation of the seashore, both as a place to seek health and recreation and as a source of intellectual improvement, was associated with the easy access provided by the development of railways in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, as Hern (1967) points out in an amusing account of the British habit of seashore holidays, this began well before the railways. Scarborough was the first such resort or ‘spa’, started before the middle of the eighteenth century, a hundred years before rail transportation. But these early resorts were on sandy beaches; apparently only poets and wreckers frequented rocky coasts.