The Adventure of Writing Sea Marked – guest post by Linda Cracknell

Posted on September 1, 2025

Walking and motion have always been essential to my writing, but I can still enjoy a good walk without writing. Between 2015 and 2023 I met up with my friend Kate to walk the South West Coast Path for one week each year, sweating up four ‘Everests’ over 630 miles. Although I now live in Perthshire, Scotland, some of the places we passed were familiar from my life in Devon between 1978 and 1990 and from coastal jaunts from my grandmother’s Exeter home through my childhood. It was also pleasing that we would pass my mother’s home – our long-standing family stomping ground – in the far west of Cornwall.

I was determined, however, that this new walking venture was a holiday – it was not going to become a writing project.

That resolve held until the route led me to North Devon shores. My mother had recently acquired a book about the boom and bust of coastal trading ships in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the village of Braunton. My grandmother had been born and grew up there, within the Taw-Torridge estuary, yet my mother and I didn’t know the locality. We were surprised to read that our Drake and Chichester forebears had been significant ship-owners and traders.

Intrigued, and acting for us both, I began making visits to the coastal edges of this great estuary and the villages embedded on its shores, the quay from where all the Braunton ships had departed. I became entranced by the rush in and out of the tide which transformed an expanse of shiny mud, rotting hulks and trickling creeks to an inland ocean each twelve and a half hours. I visited museums and record offices, graveyards and harbours, a notebook and pen now firmly in my hand. I wrote an imagined version of my Granny watching the ships load and depart when growing up, and short fiction set on the estuary. Writing allowed me under the skin of the place.

Even as curiosity took me beyond the coastal path, my writing remained underpinned by physical activity. To experience the tidal ferocity on this great estuary, I paddled in a kayak out to the formidable, ship-wrecking, bar where estuary meets open sea. The book had revealed that one of the historic ships of this fleet, Bessie Ellen, formerly owned by a nephew of my great-great-grandmother’s, was still sailing. I was able to go aboard to follow sea roads of the West Coast between the isles of Scilly and Orkney, roughening my hands on hemp rope to share my forebears’ experiences. When I went to my bunk, curling against the hull where oats or lime had once been carried, I didn’t sleep but opened my notebook, transforming passages across the fathoms into words.

Needing the discovery, the writing itself, to be physically grounded in place and senses, I knelt to trace letters carved on mossy headstones rather than researching online; held the hefty shipping register that recorded a century or more ships’ names and transfers of ownership in sloping copperplate handwriting, signed by my great-great-grandfather, Francis Drake.

No-one could accuse me of being a quick writer. The many filled notebooks are testimony to this as well as the tower of A4 drafts made translating notetaking into a book-length narrative.

This was the further grand adventure.

---

Sea Marked: Throwing a Line to a Coastal Past publishes on the 4th September 2025.

Linda Cracknell is a writer of narrative non-fiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts. Her first story collection was nominated for a Saltire Award (now Scotland’s National Book Awards) and the Robin Jenkins Award for environmental writing, and her essay collection Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, about journeys she took on foot in Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Kenya, was serialised for BBC Radio as a Book of the Week. All of Linda’s writing is inspired first and foremost by place, and she teaches creative writing, especially nature and place writing.