Where Chapter 1 showed us that coastal erosion scours the shoreline and gives rise to tales of nocturnal predators who come from the sea and threaten us or our loved ones, further along the coastline that eroded material is re-deposited in bays, estuaries and inlets, or forms marine features such as spits, sandbanks and saltmarshes. This chapter is sub-divided into three sections, each of which takes as its focus a different aspect of subterranean instability, leading to death or untimely burial. In the first section, wetland topography caused by marine deposition takes the form of coastal saltmarsh, especially in landscapes in which that marshland is also combined with fluvial (rainwater) flooding. The result is a swampy and endlessly shifting mix of freshwater and saltwater channels, complicated by tidal ebb and flow. Writers setting their haunted tales in such terrain exploit the fact that, underlying this deadly marsh lie human secrets long buried, but rising to the surface as the narrative unfolds, aided by recurrent and flooding rain. Here, the distinction between local walker and incoming traveller becomes especially acute, because only those who are native to the saltmarsh know how precariously footfall can imprint itself safely across its surface. Always, it is the incoming traveller who gives rise to the Gothic impetus for these narratives.

In the second part of the chapter we move on to upland burial sites, which might (as in the Languedoc region of South-West France explored by Kate Mosse), have once been seabed, but now form mountainous topography full of caves and other natural and unnatural hiding places. In these landscapes sedimentation, or a multiple layering and over-layering across decades, centuries and eras proves the persistent geological process, one which finds a metaphorical companion in storytelling across the centuries, as one tale overwrites and gives rise to another over time, shape-shifting in the retelling while continuing to connect generations. In several of these narratives, reading equates to the armchair traveller reaching down through the strata to access a journey through time: thus are bodies uncovered, secrets unearthed and historic trauma resolved. For the protagonists themselves, these upland narratives emphasise the challenge the journeys themselves comprise, either due to the mountainous terrain, or the significance of the quest which impels the protagonists forward. Here, the impetus frames itself as a challenge from beyond the grave.