NIGHT HAD PINCHED the light from the sky. Behind us, the glowing dots of harbour bulbs swung like lanterns in a gale. Things were not going too well. A few hours earlier, as we prepared for the shoot, the director had collided with the corner of the wheelhouse and been carted off to hospital with blood pulsing from a head wound. In his place, the film was being directed by the assistant producer, and he was already hooked over the rail losing his lunch. That just left three of us; ‘If you go down, too,’ grinned the sound recordist at the cameraman, ‘we’ll just have to make a radio doc instead!’ Through the wheelhouse door, I could see the skipper, Stefan, glowing against his instrument lights. Beside him, the body language of the two crewmen suggested that they were relaxing at a pub bar. Off the starboard rail, I could just make out the granite edge of Cornwall. Somewhere over there, where cliffs, sea and night became one, lay Land’s End.

Beyond the shelter of Mount’s Bay, the deck began to pitch and yaw. Wind hurried out of the darkness. The boat was so damn small. All fishing boats are small. The boats I knew as a boy were cross-Channel ferries and they were enormous. But fishing boats are cockleshells. Clutching my stanchion, I struggled to imagine what it must mean to work, night after night, on the open ocean.

The first oil painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy showed two open fishing vessels being tossed helplessly on a rampant, moonlit sea against a silhouette of carnivorous rocks. Nature has always been at its most merciless on coasts. In the ten years between 1999 and 2008, 121 fishermen lost their lives on UK registered vessels. Another 669 were injured and 273 fishing boats were lost. Over the same period, there were 88 ‘person overboard’ incidents. Misfortunes liable to befall a fishing vessel include capsize and listing, collision, fire and explosions, flooding, foundering, grounding, machinery failure and ‘heavy weather damage’. In the decade to 2008, there were 3,173 of these incidents – an average of six for every week. Fishermen are the last of the hunters. And hunting is still a dangerous game.

We changed course. Stefan’s eyes watched the shifting electronic topographies of his screens. The boat was new. He’d designed it himself. ‘We went out and spent £100,000 … It was a risk.’

Stefan spoke with a warm, West Country drawl. He’d built the boat to catch pilchards – or ‘Cornish sardines’. ‘We didn’t know whether the fishing would work. Whether we could catch the fish or not. But we saw the stock was there when we were catching other fish. I thought we’d have a go …’

Highlander was equipped with instruments that could track a shoal deep under water. ‘It’s like a lion stalking,’ continued the skipper. ‘Which way is it going to go? Can you move faster than the shoal? Then it’s bang! Hit it!’

Stefan warned us that we were heading for rougher water. I was certain we’d roll back into Newlyn in the small hours with nothing to show for the night but a deck swilling with BBC sick.

We were still wedged in our respective discomfort zones when Stefan shouted: ‘We’ve got a shoal on the sonar!’ The wheel span and we veered to port. The crewmen took their stations at the rail. The deck lights were doused. A quarter of the sonar screen was filled with pixellated magenta interference. Stefan said quietly, ‘That’s 60 or 70 tons of fish.’ The tension was so palpable that we could film it. Stefan’s eyes were everywhere at once: checking the screens, the sea, his crew.

‘Right guys … Shoot!’

The drogue dropped over the side and the net snaked out. The boat swung in a circle, surrounding the shoal. Gulls shrieked, white on black. The winch hauled its unseen load. We lurched crazily in the swell (why is it that waves are ten times taller at night?). Below the rail, the water began to flash with silvery darts and then the net lifted clear of the sea, bulbous with a thrashing, mercurial mass.

The fish were scooped, 100 kilos at a time, from the net into the boat. ‘We’ll be going another four or five times to make a cargo,’ smiled the skipper. A groan (or something like it) left my throat. We shot the nets again. And again. And the next night we went out again.

The morning after the second night we filmed Stefan’s fish being auctioned at Newlyn fish market, a draughty, cavernous shed on the quay. Only a couple of boats had been out, and the building had an awkward, vacant capacity. Markets are meant for throngs, not grim huddles. The auctioneer, Robin Turner, told me that Stefan was catching half the sardines going through Newlyn each year. Afterwards, as a succulent cloud drifted across Stefan’s sunlit lawn and we filmed a tiny portion of the catch being grilled on his barbecue, I promised I’d never again take a sardine for granted.

Seven thousand years earlier, a similar barbecue scene (less some of the props) was being enacted on the island of Oronsay at the southern end of the Inner Hebrides. Fish were being cooked to the gentle swash of waves on a beach. The fish were saithe and they’d been caught from boats that the men had launched from the beach. Saithe are good to eat; white-fleshed and firm.

Oronsay was a reliable source of food. It was a tiny scrap of island, with a couple of low hills at its northern end, and sheltered beaches along its eastern shore. The island is larger now that Scotland has risen a little from the water, but in those days, it covered an area of less than 2 square miles. On the eastern shore your eyes would have been drawn to four strange, shining mounds. A fifth mound could be found a short walk to the west, where the shore was protected by an islet. The mounds were gigantic rubbish heaps of shells and bones: middens. When an archaeologist called Paul Mellars came to excavate the middens in the 1970s, he found that Oronsay’s inhabitants had been living off an entirely marine diet of fish, seals, crabs, seabirds and shellfish. Analysis of the ear bones of the saithe skeletons revealed that the fish had been caught in all seasons, so the islanders had been based on Oronsay throughout the year; there must have been an abundance of seafood. The discovery of bone sewing awls suggests that they were also making items of clothing. On the larger Hebridean islands today, you’ll find community shops selling Celtic jewellery, a tradition familiar to Oronsay’s campers, who found time to assemble necklaces from periwinkle shells.

The pioneers who came after the ice knew the value of coasts and, thanks to archaeology, we know why. With southern Britain and Ireland sinking relative to sea level since the weight of ice was lifted from Scotland, many of the low-lying prehistoric coastal sites in the south have been lost to rising waters. But the area of Scotland where the ice was thickest – on top of the Grampians – has been rising, and with it parts of Scotland’s west and east coast. And that is where archaeologists have scraped down to the very beginnings of our affinity with the coast.

The earliest site of human occupation discovered so far in Scotland was selected with prescience by a small group of hunter-gatherer-fishers who erected shelters on a bluff overlooking the Firth of Forth in what is now the desirable Edinburgh suburb of Cramond. The village has its inn, its kirk and its pretty white cottages, and more than enough history for a sunny Sunday afternoon: the foundations of a Roman fort, a 15th-century tower, and a concrete submarine defence which forms part of a causeway running out to Cramond Island. There are routes for cyclists and walkers and, on the west side of the village, the River Almond pours into the Forth and provides swinging moorings for a flotilla of yachts. It is a delightful place. Cramond’s earliest campers came here 10,500 years ago because a bivouac on a bluff where a river meets the sea is a five-star site. Right beside their hearth at Cramond, they had freshwater, seafood and firewood. Customers in the Cramond Inn, tucking into pie and chips with a pint of Samuel Smith, are sharing a pleasure which dates back to the days when Britain was joined to the continent.

It was the geographer Carl Sauer who championed the coast as an optimal habitat for human beings. As the great man pointed out in his paper of 1962, we are odd among primates for failing to fit into an obvious habitat. We’re not specialized predators, we’re rubbish at flight and concealment, we’re not very strong and we’re not fast. We have no night vision and we’re not adapted to forests; we haven’t grown a pelt to protect us against thorns or the cold, and we sweat so much that we need constant replenishments of fresh water. On the plus side, we’ve evolved to eat anything that isn’t poisonous. The essentials of our natural habitat are freshwater and a diversity of plant and animal life. ‘It may be,’ wrote the Californian professor, ‘that our kind had its origins and earliest home in an interior land. However, the discovery of the sea, whenever it happened, afforded a living beyond that at any inland location.’ Think about it. All rivers (in temperate lands, anyway) end at the sea, so you don’t have to walk far along a coast before finding freshwater. And there is food wherever you look. You can fish at sea; you can collect shellfish from the intertidal zone; and just inland you can hunt and gather. ‘No other setting,’ insisted Sauer, ‘is as attractive for the beginnings of humanity. The sea, in particular the tidal shore, presented the best opportunity to eat, settle, increase, and learn. It afforded diversity and abundance of provisions, continuous and inexhaustible.’

Several hundred years after Cramond’s campers gazed across salt water from their bluff at the confluence of the Almond and Forth, another group picked an identical type of location. The remains of the hut on a Northumbrian sea cliff beside Howick Burn is one of the best-preserved Mesolithic structures in the British Isles. It’s 6 metres in diameter, and back then – before the cliffs got eroded – it stood like a thatched tepee 300 metres inland from the sea. Right beside it bubbled the freshwater of Howick Burn, and behind it, more than enough forest for cooking and warmth. Radiocarbon dating of hazelnuts retrieved from the central hearth has shown that the hut was erected in about 7800 BC and used for about 150 years. The rubbish midden probably disappeared with the receding cliff, but bones recovered from the hearth have revealed a mixed, marine/terrestrial diet of grey seal, molluscs, wild pig and birds, although it is thought that seafood formed the staple. The fox or wolf, whose remains also survived, was probably killed for its pelt.

To Britain’s Mesolithic colonists, the coast was both a highway and a safe habitat. If they headed inland, they might have to cope with a catalogue of alarming landscapes varying from vast, trackless forests and mountain ranges, to sucking bogs and impassable torrents. On the other hand, they could travel for hundreds of miles along a coastline and yet remain within a continuous habitat, at a constant altitude (sea level), with little chance of getting lost or running out of food. Life at sea level was relatively predictable. But these Mesolithic pioneers were not land-bound. They built boats.

A couple of years back, while filming a BBC series about William Camden’s 16th-century masterwork, Britannia, I found myself on Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, rowing a skin boat, a currach. Actually, it wasn’t clad in skin, but in modern, tarred canvas, stretched over a lightweight lattice of hazel. The currach had been built by my fellow oarsman, Holger Lönze, and was similar to the skin boats that were used around the coasts of our archipelago thousands of years ago. These are the craft that Pliny the Elder heard the Britons were using at sea: ‘coracles constructed of osier covered with sewn hides.’ Although it was less than 17-feet long, our currach could, reckoned Holger, carry half a ton of weight. And yet it was so light that the two of us had lifted it from a car trailer and carried it to the water’s edge. Out on the lough, as we pulled hard on two oars each, it skimmed over the waves. The currach was fast, manoeuvrable and versatile, and Holger had discovered that it was possible to build such a boat ‘easily in a week’. He’d heard of a 21-foot currach from Kerry carrying 4,000 mackerel. For all their apparent frailty, they were sound seacraft. In 2007, Holger and two friends had rowed and sailed a 26-foot currach for 210 miles along the coast of Ireland, weathering a Force Six blow and 15-foot Atlantic swells.

Back in the 1970s, the explorer Tim Severin undertook a far grander experiment by successfully sailing a skin currach from Ireland to Newfoundland. Currachs are ideal for coastal waters, being easy to launch and beach, and of such shallow draught that they can float in a few inches of water. In kind weather, a skin boat paddled or sailed by skilled boatmen will traverse a given section of coastline far faster, and with far greater freight capacity, than is possible on foot along the shoreline. There are parts of Scotland’s west coast where a 20-minute boat passage is equivalent to a two-day hike. When archaeologists working on the Antrim coast ran a foot v. boat trial, they found that canoeists making use of tide and currents could cover up to 5 kilometres in only 30 minutes, four or five times the speed possible on land.

At about the same time that Howick’s hut-builders moved on or died out, another group were hanging out in a coastal rock-shelter on the Applecross Peninsula in Wester Ross – a 3,000-foot high chunk of Torridonian sandstone thrust like a clenched fist at the Isle of Skye. A few years ago, when the Sunday Times asked me to select the best bike ride in the UK, this is where I came. From Loch Kishorn, you pedal up the switchbacks of the highest road in Scotland to the 2,053-foot summit of Bealach na Ba, the Pass of the Cattle, where the rumpled peaks of Skye and Rum drift like Scottish castaways on the far side of the blue gulf (I should add that I’ve also been up here on meteorologically downbeat days, when it’s been impossible to focus on your feet for howling cloud). The 2,000-foot freewheel to the seashore at Applecross village brings you to the start of a 25-mile tarmac belvedere which follows the shore northwards past the islands of Raasay and Rona then jinks into Loch Torridon and reaches the picturesque waterside village of Shieldaig. (Just writing these words is making me want to rush to the rail station with my bike.) This wonderful bastion of ancient, Torridonian stone was picked out 9,500 years ago by a group who spent a winter at a rock shelter by Sand – the little beach you’ll pass 5 miles after leaving Applecross village. In 2000, a team from Edinburgh University uncovered a fascinating archaeological trove. Here, too, early coasters were reaping the best of both worlds, living from the land and the sea. Along with the bones of red deer and birds was a harpoon made from antler, and tools for opening shellfish. Some of the tools probably came from the islands of Rum and Skye, a reminder that the first known visitors to Applecross probably floated across the water rather than struggled over Bealach na Ba.

The Scottish coast was also the Mesolithic departure lounge for Ireland, where the earliest-known man-made structures have been found a short walk from the sea, on a 30-metre bluff above the River Bann just outside the northern town of Coleraine. The archaeological site at Mount Sandel has a lot in common with Glasgow, Edinburgh and London; great cities which grew near the mouths of great rivers. The Bann is the longest river in Northern Ireland and it links the vast inland sea of Lough Neagh with the Atlantic. It’s a lovely river. In Camden’s day, it was famous for ‘breeding Salmons in aboundance above any other river in all Europe because, as some thinke it passeth all the rest for cleerenesse’. The remains of ten structures – probably fashioned from bent saplings – were excavated at the Mount Sandel site. In the surrounding pits were the bones of wild pig, a range of game birds from mallard and grouse to wood pigeon, snipe and thrush, and food from river and sea such as trout, salmon, eel and sea bass. Evidence of what might have been a fish-drying rack was also discovered.

Life was good on a temperate archipelago. To go hungry, wet or cold at Mount Sandel, Sand or Cramond, you had to be a seriously incompetent fisher-forager. Indeed, the incredibly rich coastal pickings we enjoyed from the Mesolithic onward laid the foundations for the wealth, power and cultural diversity which came with later generations. The further you travel from the coast, the more precarious life becomes. A couple of times, I’ve burrowed deep into the heart of continents, walking or cycling as far from the coast as it’s possible to get. My cousin, Dr Richard Crane, and I rode bicycles to the place in the world most distant from the open sea: a grid reference in the heart of Asia. To get there from the Bay of Bengal, we pedalled over the Himalayas, across the widest part of the Tibetan Plateau, then across the Gobi Desert. In low-lying, coastal Bangladesh, the food available at roadside chai huts was plentiful and varied; up on the Tibetan Plateau, we subsisted on the nomads’ staple of salt tea and tsampa (roasted flour). In the Gobi Desert, the only food available was trucked into widely spaced oases. On a later trip, I walked across Europe, following the mountain watershed from west to east. Where I started, in the Spanish coastal province of Galicia, the mix of seafood and mountain fare was mouth-watering. But by the time I got to the Carpathians, a year later, I was living mostly on cheese, milk and bread bought from or donated by shepherds. Tramping out of Turkey’s dusty foothills to the first marine beach I’d seen for 17 months, I was craving seafood.

Britain’s coast was a vast, open-access larder. We should view early coasters as amphibians who had developed the skills that allowed them to harvest the land, the seashore and the sea in such a way that every season kept them fed. Oronsay’s Mesolithic campers were living off an entirely marine diet because the island was too small to offer much else. On larger islands, and on the mainlands of Ireland and Britain, coastal communities treated ocean and island as complementary resources. William Camden’s ‘singular praise’ for the multitasking men of Kent stands for all who were reaping land and sea:

‘For they are passing industrious, and as if they were amphibii, that is, both land-creatures and sea-creatures, get their living both by sea and land, as one would say, with both these elements: they be Fisher-men and Plough men, as well Husband-men as Mariners, and they that hold the plough-taile in earing [tilling] the ground, the same hold the helme in steering the ship. According to the season of the yeare, they knit nets, they fish for Cods, Herrings, Mackarels, &., they saile, and carry foorth Merchandise. The same againe dung and mannure their grounds, Plough, Sow, harrow, reape their Corne, and they inne [store] it, men most ready and well apointed both for sea and land, and thus goe they round and keepe a circle in these labours.’

Around the coasts of the archipelago, farm labourers would sail as deckhands on fishing boats once the crops were gathered; in the fleets of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, these brawny men of the land – the ‘bumpkins’, or ‘joskins’ – were admired for their strength at the winch.

Back in the Mesolithic, coasters were enjoying a similar – if simpler – balance of terrestrial and marine food. But evidence suggests that our habit of living beyond Nature’s means goes back a very long way. Over on the east coast of Scotland there is a midden that begins to tell a disquieting story. Today, the self-styled Kingdom of Fife (for 500 years it was home to Scottish kings) is a gentle, green spade of farmland and baronial piles separating the firths of Forth and Tay. It’s on the same latitude as the grand-standing Trossachs and Loch Lomond, but it’s a world away from peaks and wild glens. Cycle trails and coast paths unravel along sheltered shores punctuated by headlands, old ports, Scotland’s first university and the world’s most famous golf course. Six thousand years ago, when sea levels in Scotland were higher, there was a low-lying island off the north-east tip of Fife. It must have been a productive site for marine foraging. The island has become Tentsmuir Forest, and close to the edge of the trees, archaeologists uncovered a Mesolithic midden containing a staggering ten million shells. It’s inconceivable that harvesting on this scale did not affect the sustainability of the local ecosystem.

I’d always seen Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fishers as a benign race of explorers who lived within the bounds of Nature’s sensitive ecosystems. But it seems likely that Britain’s post-glacial pioneers were no more restrained in their exploitation of nature than the ravagers of the Industrial Revolution. In America, marine scientist Jeremy Jackson – together with a team of zoologists, ecologists, anthropologists and others – bored back through 125,000 years of palaeoecological, archaeological, historical and ecological records to discover that ‘humans [had] been disturbing marine ecosystems since they first learned how to fish’.

From the earliest days of colonization, there are ominous signs that coastal Britons were far from green. When archaeologist Steven Mithen investigated a Mesolithic site on the Hebridean island of Colonsay, he found evidence of hazelnut harvesting ‘on an almost industrial scale’. Surrounded by a series of pits that had been used for roasting the nuts, was a rubbish dump containing more than 100,000 nutshells. Pollen analysis from a nearby loch revealed that the island’s woodland cover had collapsed just after the intensive harvesting. Sustainability, it seems, was less important than immediate needs. Mesolithic overexploitation also appears to have occurred on a headland at the other end of Britain, where the ‘Isle’ of Portland dangles untidily into the English Channel. Towards the southern end of the peninsula is a Mesolithic site that must have been a sensational billet. It’s on a sunny, south-facing slope, with wide views over the sea and a freshwater spring which still tumbles over the cliff. These days, the 4-mile peninsula of Portland has a population of around 13,000, but when Mesolithic families watched the sunrise from these cliffs 7,500 years ago, there were somewhere between 2,750 and 5,000 humans living in the whole of Britain. The Portland midden suggests that the 15 to 30 people who occupied the site for 10 to 20 years had left their mark on the local wildlife. Discarded shells of Monodonta lineata – an edible mollusc that has disappeared from the shores of Dorset – changed in size and abundance within the midden, implying that Portland’s earliest-known settlers had been foraging so thoroughly that M. lineata had been unable to reproduce. The fate of marine life generally can be read in the pretty spiral of Portland’s mollusc.

Whaligoe, meaning whale inlet, is the most peculiar fishing port I’ve ever seen. It can be found a couple of hundred metres from the A99 in the Caithness village of Ulbster. From the verge, there is no hint of the port’s existence and yet on the landward side of the road the gentle slopes are speckled with chambered cairns, standing stones, the remains of circular stone brochs and forts. It’s been a popular coast for some time. On the east side of the main road, a flight of steps tips over the cliff. As you go down the worn slabs that zigzag into the depths, you’re entering a large ‘geo’ – one of the sheer-sided, sea-filled slots so typical of Orkney and Caithness. The deeper the staircase descends, the more claustrophobic the chasm becomes. At the bottom, you find yourself trapped beneath sheer walls, with a panel of daylight forming the ceiling, and a doorway of light opening to the sea. It’s as if a giant has taken a claymore to the cliff.

At the foot of the steps, a lawn of wild grass sprouts from the upper surface of a stone platform. There is a rusting winch, and drystone buttresses that look from below like an Inca stairway; they’re inset with lintelled recesses for lanterns. Cries of seabirds echo from the tilted bands of Old Red Sandstone. When Thomas Telford investigated Whaligoe during his tour of 1786 for the British Fishing Society, he pronounced it a ‘terrible spot’. A few years later, the local minister, Reverend William Sutherland, provided a graphic image of a working day in Whaligoe:

‘The fishermen, on this part of the coast, to get to their boats descend a huge precipice by winding steps in the face of the rock, by which some lives have been lost; and yet, from frequent practice, it is often done without assistance, by a blind fisherman in Ulbster. To secure their boats from being dashed against the rocks, particularly by storms and stream tides, the fishermen hang up their yawls by ropes, on hooks fixed in the face of the rock, above the level of the water, where they are safely suspended, till the weather is fit for going to sea.’

In 1808, Whaligoe’s unlikely harbour was sheltering seven herring boats, or ‘cobles’, and by 1826 the number had risen to 24. The boats were unloaded by columns of local women, who carried the baskets of fish up that interminable flight of steps. There are said to have been 365 steps, one for every day of the year.

Why would fishermen – and women – go to such extreme lengths? Reverend Sutherland spoke for every haven on the North Sea coast:

‘The coast is of great extent, and abounds with a vast variety of fish, which, besides what is annually exported, furnishes the inhabitants with a liberal supply during every season of the year. Salmon, trout, herring, cod, ling, haddock, whiting, mackarel, halibut, which the fishers here call turbot, skate, flounder, dog-fish, (from whose livers a great quantity of oil is extracted), a red speckled prickly fish called cumars, cuddies, that grow up to the size of a cod, and are then called seaths, sillocks, a small fish caught with the rod from the rocks in such quantities, as to be sold for a penny an hundred, are all met with in plenty; sand eels, crabs, partans, and lobsters are also caught here, though the latter not to such extent as might be for the London market, to which it is now in agitation to send them.’

Compared to the Highlanders of the interior, Sutherland’s coastal parishioners had rich pickings: in their manoeuvrable cobles, the villagers of Caithness launched seasonal forays into remote, sandy coves inaccessible from land. There, they would beach the boats as silently as possible, and creep towards families of seals, which they would kill, explained Sutherland, ‘with bludgeons for their oil’. On the cliffs they shot seabirds that were salted to supplement their winter food. On the coast, too, they had access to so much salt that the salt pans at Sarclet and Nybster produced a surplus that was sold at 8d–10d per peck. On beaches like the 3-mile strand on Sinclair’s Bay, winter and spring storms threw up vast amounts of seaweed that the villagers would pile in great heaps and allow to rot. Mixed with dung, cods’ heads, ‘herring garbage’ and brine, it made, Sutherland noted, ‘a very strong manure’. In the parish of Wick alone, 40 or 50 tons of kelp would be cut with scythes from the rocks each year.

From Caithness to Kent, thousands of coastal communities were reaping the North Sea shoreline. The North Sea was Britain’s abundant pond. At 222,000 square miles, it’s substantially larger than, say, the Black Sea or Baltic, and just under a quarter the size of the Mediterranean. It is shallow, and used to be teeming with marine life – especially herring. If fish could accept awards for services to industry, the ‘silver darlings’ would be the most deserving. It was their misfortune to have evolved into a ‘pelagic’ species, one living near the surface of the sea, and, during the spawning season, given to gathering in enormous shoals. There were three main areas where the North Sea herring spawned each autumn: ‘Buchan’ off north-east Scotland, ‘Banks’ off the east coast of southern Scotland and northern England, and ‘Downs’ at the eastern end of the English Channel.

From the earliest records we have, there are signs that herring were being netted in huge numbers. The annals of the monastery of Barking in Essex, which was founded in 670, recorded that a tax known as ‘herring silver’ was being levied on herring, and documents from Evesham monastery (founded in 709) include several references to the herring fishery. By the time the Normans landed in 1066, there were clearly a great many herring boats operating on the east coast. A hint at the numbers of fish being caught can be detected in the pages of Domesday Book. On the south coast, one of the most active fishing communities was a place called Bristelmestune, rebranded later as the Sussex resort of Brighton. Sandwich in Kent was supplying the monks of Canterbury cathedral with 40,000 herring a year; and Yarmouth in Norfolk could boast 24 permanent fishermen. But the big catches were coming into Suffolk: under Edward the Confessor, Blythburgh was paying tax of 3,000 herring a year, Southwold 25,000, Beccles 60,000 and Dunwich a whopping 68,000.

The population of England more than doubled in the two centuries following the collation of Domesday Book. Fish, a necessary staple of the medieval diet, became a major trading commodity and the North Sea assumed a Galilean role in helping to provide the country’s Catholic people with a dependable, meat-free source of protein on Fridays, Saturdays, Wednesdays, on feast days and during Lent. Consumers just liked the taste of fish, too. It was the delicious fantasy of sea fish that drove a schoolboy to write, one day in the 15th century, that he wished he was ‘one of the dwellers by the sea-side, as their sea fish are in plentiful supply and I love them better than freshwater fish’.

By medieval standards, the scale of the fishery business on England’s east coast was extensive and complex: a web that included facilities for salting and smoking, supported by fishmongers, brokers and ‘rippers’ – retailer-transporters who conveyed fish in baskets slung over packhorses from the coast to provincial centres, including London. By 1300, herring were also being shipped abroad. The creation of a fishing ‘industry’ brought a change to coasts, as former subsistence communities adapted to new roles as hyperactive bottlenecks between the vast offshore shoals and the equally vast inland markets. The places that prospered were those suitable for beaching boats and reaching shoals. On the coast of Yorkshire, an outlier of Jurassic limestone provided an ideal location for commercial fishing.

Picture a great plateau of rock, jutting into the ocean, buttressed by 300-foot cliffs and connected to the ‘mainland’ by a low isthmus of good building land overlooking a sheltered anchorage framed by a long beach of firm sand. For hundreds of years, this castle-like promontory had been a key point on the east coast. Fort-builders in the Iron Age had capped the rock with defensive earthworks, and the Romans had built a signal station on it. In the tenth century, a Scandinavian settler called Thorgils Skarthi (the Hare-lip) gave the place its modern name when he founded a stronghold, or burh, here. Then ‘Skarthi’s burh’ was spotted by Norman settlers who topped the rock with a stupendous castle, ringed the town with walls and built a quay for shipping. By the time ‘Scarbough’ appeared on the Gough Map of the late 14th century (the oldest surviving ‘road map’ of Britain) the town was a fishing port of international importance, with an autumn herring fair that lasted 98 days. In an age before maritime charts and GPS, the best ports lay close to an identifiable geographical feature. As John Leland, the ‘father of English topography’, observed in the 1540s, Scarborough’s ‘slaty cliff’ offered ‘a very fine prospect from out at sea’. It was a superb landmark for seafarers.

A fishing community comes of age with the construction of its own harbour. I’m not alone in being sentimental about these places: whenever I walk a worn stone jetty beside a tidal pool of placid water, the memories and images flicker through the scene like sunlit fish. Boats nod at orange buoys, or recline on wet sand. Occasionally, there are soft tumuli of nets, or lobster pots tasselled with weed. At harbours like Aberdovey and Padstow, gaggles of children torment crabs with bits of bacon on string. I find myself taking photographs (why?) of those old mooring rings that rest like rusted quoits on the stone, or of bollards that are scarred by the hawsers of boats that rotted to oblivion decades ago. There ought to be a word for the pleasurably aimless recreation of contemplating fishing harbours. ‘Mouseholeing’ perhaps.

Scarborough’s harbour came early, built by Normans and upgraded in the 13th century by a stone quay financed by a users’ levy: 6d for merchant ships, 4d for fishing ships and 2d for fishing boats. Each herring season, hundreds of ships unloaded their catches at Scarborough, where they were salted and barrelled for English markets. In 1304, a peak year for the port, no fewer than 5,237 foreign vessels unloaded 3.5 million fish. Officials claimed in 1363 that their income ‘for the most part arises from fish and herrings taken at sea and brought to the town for sale.’

Scarborough’s take was repeated up and down the North Sea coast, although in those early years of the herring boom, only Yarmouth could compete in terms of volume. Yarmouth was unique in the archipelago for being the only fishing town of its size to have been born on a sandbank. Some time after the Romans departed, an 8-mile long bank of sand formed across the mouth of the ‘Great Estuary’ that used to carry the waters of the Yare and Bure towards the sea, and it seems that fishermen set up seasonal camps on the sand so that they could take advantage of the herring shoals gathering at Smith’s Knoll fishing ground, 30 or so miles to the north-east. By the 14th century, Yarmouth too had its annual herring fair and was catching an average of well over ten million fish a year.

Elsewhere on the east coast, many other ports were feeding on the shoals. Hartlepool, Whitby, Boston, Grimsby, Saltfleet and, on the south side of the Wash, Wells, Holkham, Blakeney, Cromer, Dunwich and Walberswick all had their own fleets while large foreign fleets too were chasing North Sea herring. With the invention of the factory ship by the Dutch in around 1415, catches multiplied. Each Dutch ‘buss’ could carry 30 to 40 ‘lasts’ of fish – or about 300,000 to 400,000 herring, and they processed the fish at sea. By 1630 there were between 500 and 600 busses in the Dutch fleet.

The herring turned ports into bustling ‘fish factories’, nowhere more dramatically than in Caithness, where the ‘silver darlings’ transformed a back-of-beyond anchorage into the largest herring port in Europe.

The cliffs, reefs and caves carved from that looming, broken wall of Old Red Sandstone are less than welcoming if you’re in a small, timber boat. But 15 miles south of the daggers of Duncansby’s stacks, there is a break in the wall. It’s called Wick Bay, and it’s nearer to Bergen than it is to Manchester. For the Vikings, Wick was one of the closest havens on the British mainland; its Norse name is derived from ‘(place by) the bay’. Nearly a mile wide at its mouth, the bay tapers inland to meet the outflow of the Wick River, which drains hundreds of square miles of moor and arable farmland. On William Roy’s military survey map of 1747–55, the landscape is stippled with field strips and clusters of crofts. Despite its strategic location, Wick Bay boasted just a single street of dwellings when Roy came by with his surveyors.

In the 1790s, one of Wick’s most ardent lobbyists was its minister, Reverend Sutherland, the chronicler of Whaligoe. With shelter for a fishing fleet, argued the minister, Wick could feed a multitude: ‘The new harbour,’ he wrote, ‘is not only an object of the highest importance to the town itself and its immediate neighbourhood, but to the kingdom at large.’ Sutherland described the dangers of the coast and pointed out that there was no place of shelter for vessels all the way from the Orkneys to the Cromarty Firth – a distance of nearly 200 miles. For ‘want of a harbour’, explained Sutherland, ‘many vessels have been driven ashore, and many lives lost. A harbour commodious for a number of vessels, and safe in all weather, might be made at Wick. This would be particularly beneficial during the herring fishery, which has been much retarded from the want of such a shelter.’ He described an alarming day in 1791, when 34 fishing vessels had been trapped in the bay ‘in constant danger of running foul of one another’.

Sutherland was a man of his time. A few years later, in 1808, the harbour was built, and by 1818 there were 822 herring boats operating from Wick. In William Daniell’s aquatint of the early 19th century, you can see new buildings on the headland, a harbour jetty and a fleet of fishing vessels riding the sheltered waters of Wick Bay. Daniell caught Wick just as it was taking off. Women flocked there for work, gutting and packing the fish as soon as they were lifted from the boats. In Wick’s boom years between 1860 and 1890, a thousand or so boats operated out of a harbour that was employing around 6,000 fishermen and another 6,000 shore-workers, including the 300 coopers whose job it was to construct the barrels for the salted herring. Another thousand seamen manned the ships which exported the fish and imported salt and barrel-timber to Wick. To replenish this huge population of manual labourers, the port had 45 pubs, a distillery and a brewery.

Each century brought greater demands and more efficient means of removing fish from the sea. With each new innovation, catches increased and stocks decreased. One of the leading centres of innovation was the port that had grown up a few miles from the Mesolithic camp at Cramond on the Firth of Forth. Leith was an outlet for Scottish inventiveness. In 1820, a Scotsman called James Paterson opened a factory in Leith which could manufacture lightweight, flexible nets of cotton on a loom. That loom was then improved by another Scotsman, Walter Ritchie. Traditional handmade hemp nets were heavy and inflexible, and took up so much space on a boat that the largest yawls operating off the Yorkshire coast would typically carry 60 or so of them, but that more than doubled to 130 when skippers switched to the new, lightweight nets, which were shot in a train that could be 2 miles long. It’s been estimated that the capacity of the English and Welsh herring fisheries increased fourfold in the 20 years from 1858. Faster, bigger, more stable fishing boats were also appearing. In the 1850s, the twin-masted ‘Fifie’ was developed on the east coast of Scotland. Taking its name from the kingdom of Fife, it was designed mainly as a herring drifter, wide beamed, with a long, straight keel, and a vertical stem and stern. Some were over 60 feet long. Fifies were overtaken in 1879 by the even bigger, faster ‘Zulus’, named after the then-raging Zulu Wars and designed by William Campbell of Lossiemouth.

In common with most species crashes triggered by Man, the end of the herring was hastened by a brilliant, human invention. As long as drifters depended upon the wind and tide, their catches would be limited. But in 1877, a shipbuilding company based at Leith launched a fishing boat powered by steam. Pioneer LH854 was the brainchild of David Allan, whose yard on the Forth went on to build steam trawlers and drifters for customers in Spain, Italy, France and Belgium. It’s not known whether the five Scottish steam drifters that showed up at the East Anglian port of Yarmouth in 1887 were from Allan’s yard, but they caused a sensation. By 1894, Yarmouth owners were operating two Scottish-built steam drifters, the Puffin and Salamander, and by 1898, there were 20 steamers fishing from the port. Over the next 15 years, most of the Yarmouth owners abandoned sail so wholeheartedly that by 1913, 213 drifters out of a total of 227 registered vessels were powered by steam.

Steam changed everything. Not long ago, I was a passenger on board a small fishing boat on the North Sea, and when we finished filming, the skipper turned the boat for Yarmouth. Not only was the entrance to the harbour invisible to my un-nautical eye, but to reach it, we had to sidle past various sandbanks lurking just beneath the surface. I found myself wondering how on earth skippers of sail-powered fishing boats managed to return safely to such a tricky port. Steam power made it safe to leave and re-enter harbour in most winds and weathers, while the speed and predictable range of steam drifters made it possible to exploit more distant fishing grounds on a regular basis. The new steam harvesters produced incredible catches. On one day alone, 22 October 1907, 60 million herring were landed at Great Yarmouth, and when space ran out, 30 million of them had to be sent on to Grimsby. Steam caused an integrated revolution; herring caught by steam drifters could be transferred at the quay to steam trains for rapid distribution to distant cities.

Fishing was utterly unlike farming in that both the crop and the workforce were highly mobile. The Fifies and Zulus would fish herring off the Hebrides and Shetlands in May and June, sail down the east coast to fish the shoals off Northumberland and Yorkshire through the summer, then fish from Yarmouth and Lowestoft through the autumn. Some of the boats would carry on through the winter, catching spawning herring in the Forth, the Minch, Irish Sea and the Atlantic off Northern Ireland. Fishing boats from various countries roamed the seas, following the shoals and selling their catches in the closest suitable port. With boats mingling in each others’ harbours, innovations spread quickly. One of the most damaging developments – from the fishes’ point of view – was the spread of trawling from the south of England. Where drift nets were suspended near the surface to catch pelagic fish like herring, a trawl net was towed across the seabed to catch demersal fish, like cod, which lived in the lower levels of the sea. Trawling was less selective than drift netting, since the trawl net tended to bag anything that strayed into its path. In the Middle Ages, fishermen had learned to attach a heavy beam across the mouth of the net. As the beam scraped across the seabed, everything in its path was crushed or scooped. Once the net was on deck, the fishermen would pick out the saleable and bait fish, and chuck everything else over the side. For those who knew the seabed as a living garden of nutrition, ‘beam-trawling’ was a heartbreaking development. As early as 1376, a proto-environmentalist forcefully made the point that ‘the great and long iron of the wondyrechaun [beam trawl] runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below the water there, and also the spat of oysters, mussels and other fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished’.

Beam-trawling under sail was a highly specialized style of fishing. In Brixham recently I went out on a restored sailing trawler called Keewaydin. She’s owned by Paul Welch, who had built his own 19th-century beam trawl using a baulk of oak and two welded steel frames. The idea was to test Paul’s trawl. However, there are very few surviving fishermen who know how to trawl under sail. One of them, retired Brixham trawlerman Bill Wakeham, was on board. Off the South Devon coast, with Keewaydin’s tan sails aloft, the beam was lifted by winch over the side. The rope was paid out, and by placing a hand on it we could feel that it was bumping along the seabed. All seemed to be going well until Keewaydin suddenly stopped moving forward. A long, physical struggle eventually brought to the surface a smashed beam trawl and a ripped net. In the remains of the net were a large rusty anchor and a metal casing which could have been part of a torpedo. Or, as the sound recordist pointed out, a Morris Minor wing.

The original beam trawlers could only work in relatively shallow waters, where the seabed was fairly smooth. In the early days, they could be found off the south-west and south-east coasts of England, operating out of Brixham and Plymouth, and Barking on the estuary of the Thames. But in the 18th century, the beamers grew larger, and spread north. With a gaff-rigged mainsail, a bowsprit and a jib, they were known as ‘smacks’, and could be sailed by fewer men than the larger deepwater craft. By the early 19th century, West Country smacks were sailing up the Channel to trawl the North Sea, landing their catches at east coast ports. One of those ports was Hull, on the Humber.

With the Thames and the Wash, the Humber is one of the big three estuaries on the east coast of England. The Humber’s value to local fishermen had long been its rich, estuarine habitat, and its convenience as a haven. Hull had grown up 20 miles inland from the sea, and by the early 19th century, it had become a booming, wealthy, trading port with a population of over 22,000. But the Humber was a tricky waterway, fed by several powerful rivers and swept by funnelling tides. During the great storm of 1703, virtually all the ships that had been sheltering at the mouth of the estuary were, according to Daniel Defoe, ‘driven from their anchors’. Many were lost. When Defoe’s contemporary, the intrepid traveller Celia Fiennes, went out on the muddy Humber in 1698, she described how it always ‘rowles and tosses just like the Sea’, and rated it ‘a hazardous water … more turbulent than the Thames at Gravesend’. It wasn’t until Hull began to build new docks in the early 19th century, that the fishermen began arriving in numbers. In 1840, there had been seven fishing boats registered at Hull, but by 1878 there were over 400 and the port’s fish trade was estimated to be providing employment for over 20,000 people.

At the exposed mouth of the Humber there was another, much smaller settlement. Grimsby had been founded by Danes in the ninth century, and despite its marshy, exposed site it had prospered through trading until its channel began to silt up in the 15th century. In 1801, its population was just 1,524. All Grimsby needed to turn itself around was engineering. The channel was deepened, and docks were built. In 1857, the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway opened No. 1 Fish Dock, and to lure fishing vessels from adjacent ports the company offered a package of inducements that included reduced dock charges and railway rates, and free rail travel for fish merchants planning to develop inland markets. By 1863, six years after the dock opened for business, at least 70 fishing smacks were based at the new facility. By the 1950s, Grimsby was the world’s largest, busiest fishing port.

The trajectory of the fishing industry had been set with the spread of the beamers. A rail distribution network, purpose-built fish docks, steam trawlers and drifters increased the takes of British and Irish fleets, but the effect was multiplied because there were many other countries also fishing the common pond – all serving an insatiable market for fish. There could be only one outcome. Fish stocks crashed.

The first to go were the silver darlings – Europe’s largest fishery. In 1966, the North Sea yielded 1.2 million tons of herring, but the tipping point had already been passed. The herring shoals that had fed Yarmouth and Lowestoft for a thousand years had collapsed in 1955, and others followed until, by 1975, the total North Sea herring catch had plummeted to 200,000 tons. Species being trawled from ‘bottom fisheries’ suffered a similar fate. The one million tons of fish landed by North Sea trawlers in 1900 had risen to 3.5 million tons by 1970, and then it dropped. Horribly. The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy made matters worse: in an attempt to keep national fishing industries alive it had awarded them unsustainable quotas.

History has provided many examples of mankind’s inability to limit the exploitation of resources, even when it is apparent that the eventual outcome will be ruin. Natural resources with free access to all are particularly susceptible to destruction. In 1968, the Californian biologist Garrett Hardin neatly encapsulated the human capacity for self-destruction in the theory that he called ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Because each exploiter sees the negative consequences of acting selfishly as being shared between all the exploiters, there is an immediate net benefit in maximizing his own take. Looting is popular for the same reason. The real cost to the ‘commons’ is greatest when the commons in question are large and unregulated – like the atmosphere and the ocean.

The fishing commons in this case are all one. The ocean, the sea, the various straits, channels, minches, firths, bays and estuaries that wash against our shores are all part of a single body of water which covers 71 per cent of the earth’s surface. That huge, many-tentacled blueness contains 97 per cent of the planet’s water. It also contains 300,000 recorded species, although the actual total may be as high as ten million. The billions of livings things that contribute to those species are interconnected in fantastically complex food-webs which span the globe. The herring larvae that hatch in the gravel beds off Yorkshire drift as clouds of plankton for four to six months across the North Sea to their nursery beds off the coast of Denmark. Today, we’re demolishing those food webs so efficiently that many species of fish have reached the limits of sustainability. Even now, despite ample data about the state of fish stocks, we still take from the world’s oceans 80 million tonnes of fish every year. Around 70 per cent of the world’s fish stocks are now fully fished, and another 20 per cent overfished. Global wild fish catches have been falling since 1988.

The tragedy for these common seas is that the momentum of demand-driven exploitation and the difficulties inherent in counting and tracking fish have proved beyond the scope of effective regulation. Fishery protection initiatives leave port armed with quotas, bans, buy-outs, scrappage schemes and surveys, only to berth with the news that fish stocks are in an even worse state. Looting the seas began as an oversight, but was always a violation of natural law. And now that it’s a global, institutionalized violation, powered by market economics, it is not easy for politicians to address.

The effect on the coastal communities of the archipelago has been profound. UK herring catches peaked in 1913, at 600,000 tons for that year – an amount which represented about half the wet fish unloaded in Britain. Since then, it’s been a sorry tale of diminishing returns. The tonnage of sea fish and shellfish being landed by UK vessels into UK and foreign ports dropped from just over 800,000 tons in 1999, to 588,000 tons in 2008. Landings of cod dived by 72 per cent between 1994 and 2008 and, over the same period, haddock landings dropped by 65 per cent. Mackerel was down 46 per cent between 1994 and 2008 and herring down by 35 per cent. Seas that once teemed with so many fish you could scoop them out with a bucket have become semi-deserts. With the exception of a few areas in UK waters, stocks of cod, haddock, plaice, sole, herring and mackerel are variously described by the UK’s Marine and Fisheries Agency as being ‘heavily over-exploited’, ‘suffering reduced reproductive capacity’ and ‘seriously depleted’. In government reports, it is not considered appropriate to use phrases like ‘utterly stuffed’, or ‘maxed out’, but that’s the situation. In his investigation of overfishing, author Charles Clover tried to extract from marine scientists an estimate of the ‘virgin stock’ of cod in the North Sea before the sailing trawlers went on the rampage in the 18th century. Nobody knew, but Clover concluded that only around 10 per cent of the original spawning biomass was still in the North Sea. When stocks fell that low in Canada, cod fishing was banned entirely. In the North Sea, it continues. Cod can live to the age of 20 years and more; these days, they seldom see a sixth birthday.

In fishing the seas to death, the industry lost its future. Between 1999 and 2008, the number of fishermen fell by almost a quarter, to 12,761. The graphs all head downward. In the ten years to 2008, the number of vessels operating in the UK fishing industry shrank by 18 per cent, to 6,573, while capacity shrank by 22 per cent. Meanwhile, the UK has slipped into ‘fish deficit’; we import more fish than we export, by 364,000 tonnes in 2008 – a 30 per cent rise on the 2007 deficit and the highest for 15 years. Iceland is the UK’s main supplier, then Germany and then China.

The collapse of the fishing industry is a tragedy far beyond the demise of British coal-mining or car-making, because the resource being exploited was not an inert raw material but a living ecosystem that has sustained us since fishermen used spears to catch supper on the coast of Doggerland. And it’s not the fault of the fishermen. In a global market economy, exploitation is driven by demand; by the choice we make as we linger over the fish counter or restaurant menu.

From a mooring bollard at Newlyn or Peterhead, the sea looks as it did 10,000 years ago. Unlike the birds and beasts of the woods, the fish of the deep move unseen through their own, private sanctuary, and so their removal has made little superficial difference to our view from the coast. The surface of the sea still looks watery. But our seas could no longer support Oronsay’s fisherfolk. Abundant seafood once gave the archipelago its food security. We are now dependants.

The lost shoals of the Atlantic and North Sea have left a coast lined with hundreds of ghost ports.

Last summer I was in Great Yarmouth with an evening to spare, and for want of anything better to do, I walked the full length of the old port, from the mouth of the River Yare to the Haven Bridge. It’s a measure of how busy this place used to be, that it’s a stroll of over 2 miles. Back in 1913, at the peak of the UK herring industry, 1,006 fishing vessels were based here. I passed a few, small fishing boats, but the fish wharf, where herring drifters used to moor so closely that you could jump from deck to deck, was deserted. Eventually, I came to one vessel. She had a single funnel, two stumpy masts and a wheelhouse like a pine-clad phone box. Lydia Eva was built in 1930, 20 years after the shoals shrank, and she hauled her last catch on the eve of war, in December 1938. Lydia Eva is the world’s last surviving herring drifter. In summer, she’s open to the public. Ten minutes away, I came to the Time and Tide museum. It was packed. Occupying a large corner site in what used to be the Tower Fish Curing Works, the museum takes you on a herring tour, from drifter to wharf to smokehouse, where 24,000 fish could be hung at a time for curing. The works used to have seven smokehouses. There’s even a reconstruction of one of Yarmouth’s famous ‘rows’, the paved alleys no wider than a fish-barrow which ran – until the Luftwaffe removed them – like teeth on a comb between the quay and the marketplace.

It’s a pity that we can’t run our industries as well as the museums we remember them by. Britain and Ireland are well supplied with fishing museums and museum ships. Not so long ago, I was browsing the arches on Brighton’s seafront and came across a fascinating museum full of models, paintings and prints. At the Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther in Fife, the 66,000 objects that have been collected from Scotland’s coasts include a 78-foot long Zulu fishing boat, and Reaper, a ‘Fifie’ herring drifter that starred in one of the BBC’s Coast programmes. On the water at Hull, there is a restored ‘side-winder’ trawler called Arctic Corsair that you can step aboard. Almost any port that once depended upon fishing has created its own heritage centre. You’ll find them at Broughty Ferry, Buckie and Cromer, Duncannon and Grimsby, Peterhead, Plymouth…

The fishing ports are a generous legacy. When the North Sea oil industry needed east-coast ports, the old fish quays of Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Grimsby and Aberdeen were vacant and waiting. Several fish quays are used by the vessels that build and service offshore wind farms. And fishing ports have been adopted by the tourist industry as proxy resorts that offer a deeper history than Victorian esplanades and funfairs. Padstow, on the north coast of Cornwall, has been reinvented with the help of chef Rick Stein. At Craster on the coast of Northumberland you can visit the works of L. Robson & Sons, who still smoke fish over fires of oak sawdust. The photogenic quays at old herring ports like Whitby and Blakeney are thronged each summer with families who come for golden views that were built with the profits from silver darlings.

At the biggest fishing ports, those built to handle fish as if they were being mined inexhaustibly from the ocean, there’s a sense of desolation or opportunism, depending on whether or not the sun is shining when you visit. Filming in Grimsby’s fish docks for Coast, I found myself gazing – a tad melancholically – across 60 acres of empty water and a mile of silent wharves. It looked like a film set before the props arrive. A year or so later, the derelict ice house became the scene of a firefight during the filming of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. Wick harbour is as silent as Daniell’s aquatint. It’s as if the herring boats sailed out to sea, never to return. The old herring mart with its wrought-iron canopy still stands, and so does the elegant pilot house up on the bluff. Valiant efforts have been made to bring the boats back to Wick, with some success. There are 1,366 metres of open quays and berths for vessels up to 89 metres in length. A yacht marina was opened in 2009 by the Princess Royal, Princess Anne, and summer visitors can take sea-angling trips, or go hunting (with cameras) for killer whales and basking sharks. And there are still boat trips to the sea stacks and caves. There’s even a restored Fifie, the Isabella Fortuna. Last time I was in Wick, an old timber herring boat caught my eye. Her paint was peeling, her metalwork salt-eaten and her wheelhouse looked as if it had been ravaged by several Perfect Storms. On the signboard advertising her sale, some wag had daubed: ‘NEEDS SOME ATTENTION.’

The collapse of such a huge industry doesn’t just leave physical voids around the coast. When the fleets were scrapped, a culture went with them. Fishing communities had their own traditions, their own songs, stories and language. In many parts of the country, echoes are retained in place names. Hythe on the south coast of Kent, and Hythe on Southampton Water, take their name from the Old English word hyth, for ‘landing place or harbour’. Staithes, too, on the coast of Yorkshire, is another Old English word with the same meaning. The port of Fishguard in Wales is derived from the Norse words fiskr and garthr, a yard for receiving fish. Porthcawl in Wales comes from porth, for harbour and cawl, for sea kale; the harbour where sea kale grows. Pwllheli means brine-pool. In Scotland, the language of fishing is fading with each generation, but centuries of use have left the coast dotted with labels that date back to the heyday of fishing and foraging. In Wester Ross, where Mesolithic gatherers once searched the foreshore for mussels, there’s a place called Creag na’ Feusgan, meaning ‘the rock of the mussels’. Port na’ Sgadan, on the shores of Loch Diabaig, means ‘the port of the herring’. Also near Diabaig is Allt a’ Roin, ‘the burn of the seal’. Further south, a burn flowing into the Garry River is called Allt nam Banag, ‘the burn of the finnocks’ – finnocks being the young sea trout that used to swim up the river to spawn. There are many others. The fruits of the sea were also adopted in sayings. ‘The herring were so good that you could eat your fingers after them’ is the kind of post-prandial, lip-smacking epithet that must have been heard in many a coastal croft. Where the inlander might refer to something being as tough as old boots, the Gaelic coaster would say ‘as tough as the spotted dogfish’. The best of all worlds would be ‘a herring’s middle and a salmon’s tail’. The old Gaelic saying that serves as an epitaph for the ocean is Giomach is runnach is ron, tri seoid a’ chuain; ‘lobster and mackerel and seal: the three heroes of the ocean.’ Amen to that.

Pessimism is the enemy of invention, so I’ll close this story with an encounter I had recently, on the Isles of Scilly. We were filming a new series of Coast, and I was out on a fishing boat off the eastern end of the island of St Martin’s. At the helm was Scillonian Adam Morton. He fishes single-handed, so there was nothing I could do to help. With the practice of years, Adam both steered the boat and lifted a series of pots with the deck winch. Nearly everything in the pots went back in the water, except one lobster whose shell exceeded the metal measuring gauge. But when Adam began line-fishing, the catch abruptly improved. Within a minute, he had a good-sized pollack. Then another. And another. Ten minutes later, the bucket was full, and we were bouncing back through the swell to St Martin’s. A couple of hundred metres from the jetty, I helped Adam’s brother dig potatoes that he’d been fertilizing with seaweed and then we humped a tub of shiny Maris Pipers along a path to a new timber building set back from the dunes. The place was packed with customers. It’s called Adam’s Fish and Chips, but it’s really a restaurant. The fisherman I’d been with an hour earlier had swapped his sea clothes for chef’s whites and was in the kitchen mixing batter, dunking pollack fillets, crisping chips from the potatoes I’d just dug from the hill. Fiona, Adam’s wife, glided to and fro taking orders, bearing wine, ferrying loaded plates.

It wasn’t just that Adam and Fiona’s fish and chips were the best I’d ever tasted, by far, and that I’d seen the pollack and the potatoes emerge from the sea and the soil that very afternoon, and that their journey from source to table was not measured in food miles, but food metres. No, the real point is that it’s a sustainable operation, hand-lining fish that are locally available and growing spuds with nutrients from seaweed. There was something qualitatively Mesolithic about the whole experience, as if I’d been invited back 5,000 years to discover what fresh food could taste like. The sooner we treat fish as a delicacy, the sooner oceans will recover.