Hi! I’m Emily Willis – welcome to my website! I started writing this blog when I fell in love with beach walking. I used to work and live in a city in the North of the UK, but having grown up in the countryside near Stockton-on-Tees, I always had a hankering after open spaces with big skies, and would spend a lot of my weekends driving to the coast for long walks or to swim (I am affectionately known as a little bit mad by my husband for swimming at Blyth in the middle of December!)
Recently I have been lucky enough to move to within walking distance of the sea. Having the ocean so close by has changed my life. There is a plethora of research out there about the health benefits, both physical and mental, of being in proximity to water, particularly salt water (visit Walking Benefits for more on that!) My mother gave me a bracelet engraved with the famous line from the EE Cummings’ poem ‘whatever we lose, either a you or a me, it’s always ourselves we find in the sea’. I find that line so arresting. Certainly, whenever I stand on a coastline, there’s this feeling of transcending borders – land and sea yes, and also whatever other borders we subsequently find ourselves questioning that manifest in our lives. The oceans have been on this planet over 5 billion years – longer than most anything else, aside from volcanoes. They have seen things, and I think it’s fair to say, they have things to teach us. For me, some of those things are self knowledge, and peace. Standing on the edge of the sea, such a vast and ancient landscape, is to stand on the edge of oneself; to feel at once greater than oneself, and yet so very small in the face of it. I don’t mean small in the way that big corporations, discrimination, or war for example makes people feel small. Rather, small in a very natural way – in a way that shifts everything else in your life into perspective. The sea can hold your emotions – many that are too big for your life and spill over, and wash them back to you, changed. The sea cares not who you are, what you’ve achieved or haven’t; it treats you indiscriminately. Mercilessly sometimes, yes (and that’s what you feel when you plunge into an icy cold north sea!).
A lot of scientific research is dedicated to activities that happen on land, perhaps because it’s visible, and bound up with human activity. But almost 80 % of earth’s animal biomass makes its home in the sea, and 90% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean – it deserves our awe, and our protection.
One of my bucket list items is to walk the whole way around the UK via coastal paths, completed in segments. This blog is a record of those walks. I realised as I started these walks that there are scant articles that give a fully comprehensive overview of the UK’s coastal walks – where to park, local amenties, terrain, accessibility, safety when swimming etc – you have to do a lot of digging and piece together various trip advisor reviews to get an overall picture. So, I decided to put some articles and videos together, and hopefully they will be of some use to any fellow beach walkers!
More info about me? – I studied an MA in Creative Writing at UEA and previously read English and Related Literature at The University of York, where I co-founded the literary journal The Narrator. My collection of poetry ‘Lizzie on the Rocks’ was published by Mudfog Press in 2019 and is based on a walking trip from Seaham to Redcar and back (about 70 miles). The collection is interested in the wildlife, and the industrial and maritime heritage of the local area and how this is woven into our relationship with the sea.
Did you know that 700 species of marine animals are in danger of extinction directly as a result of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans? I currently work for a Tech company and as part of my role in CSR working with charities, we organize beach cleans in the local area – I extend a hearty welcome to anyone who would like to join one of these – just get in touch – or organize your own, and help spread the awareness! Thanks for joining me here and hope to see you back again soon!
Emily Willis publications:
Contact:
Find me on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-frances-willis-098b16a5/
http://thenarratoryork.wix.com/the-narrator
