Low Tide Tours

59 Replies

PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook

As a child I had always been fascinated with the idea of a low tide tour of the Thames.  Going out on the flats you can find anything, from last weeks trash to bits of pre-Roman history.  Muck-raking yesterday’s garbage doesn’t sound exciting to most, but I always wanted to do it.

By the time I made it to England, the tours had been changed.  The tides of time, as they say.

I took a new low tide tour.  Pre-flood 21st century – Not quite as romantic as finding bits of medieval or iron age flotsam and jetsam, but still fun.

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Read here about mudlarking.

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Word count = 100

Friday Fictioneers is hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.  This week’s prompt is here and uses a photo © Sandra Crook.  Read more or join in by following the InLinkz “linky“.

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I’m not here right now… I am pretty much out of the blogging loop this week, so I apologize ahead of time if I miss your FF post this week.

 

59 thoughts on “Low Tide Tours”

  8. Joanne Sisco

    I have an equal desire to go to Fundy’s Bay in New Brunswick. As you may know, they have the highest tides in the world and there is a hiking trail that crosses Fundy’s Bay at low tide. You have to know what you’re doing because you certainly don’t want to be caught on the trail when the tides start to come in. I’ve seen pictures and I’m fascinated by it.

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      I’ve seen some good pictures of the different tides, including some my parents took while visiting a few years ago. It would be interesting to be so far from the high tide mark, a place normally underwater.

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  9. Abhijit Ray

    Man is a creature of habit. Glad you found an alternative to your childhood passion. I think finding things on river bed may be easy, sifting trash from artefact is more difficult.

    Liked by 1 person

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  11. Bear

    There was an area… down by the ‘flax’ ( a small, man-made waterfall for the old papermill)… a little sidelet off the main creek… an indentation in the limestone walls that made up the creekbed… Anyway, down there, every spring, right after the spring floods, you could find stuff… little miniature bottles that had once held medicine, perfume, etc. Nowadays, the same style sells at antique stores for quite a penny. I collected them, for every five, I got a quarter which seemed like a lot to me at the time. I also found old scalpels, clamps, etc. Years later, I learned that there used to be a pharmacy/doctors office just above. So wonder I didn’t kill myself with an old dormant disease of some sort. I still like to walk along the river bank where I live now and look for things… Mostly it’s trashy beer bottles. But, sometimes, I find a real treasure.

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      When I was a kid we used to dig through what I now assume were trash heaps behind places where the houses had been gone for over 100 years. One thing I collected were shell buttons – I used to have hundreds of them (I grew up 2 miles from Lake Erie, so “lake shells”, not “sea shells”) Yeah, it is surprising that we didn’t find some ancient disease in our treasure hunts… The old pharmacy, though, is scarier – all of those sharps!

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      1. Bear

        Oddly, I never found a needle, and in truth the scalpels were so rusted with age that they’d not even cut wet paper. hehe! I used to have a whole collection of shell and wooden buttons all found along the creekbed and down through the gorges between Clifton and Yellow Springs, Ohio. I’m actually hoping to pick up a button this weekend at the living history event in Williamsburg, Ohio.

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      “Visit pre-icecap-melt world!” Yes, a tourist industry for the twenty second century ;) I hope we are smart enough to not let it happen, but I am not holding my breath.

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      Actually, I haven’t been there in over twenty years and I really want to go back! I don’t know if I will do any of the low tide much tours, but they do sound interesting….

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  15. Marilyn Armstrong

    We used to do that on the beaches in Israel, especially the ones that were originally Roman or Greek. I found all kinds of coins, mostly Roman, but occasional Greek or Arab or Jewish. But at the beach, it’s less like mucking and more like … swimming?

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      I’m not too surprised, though I know these days Israel keeps a very tight rein on artifacts found in the country. I’m sure it would be much better than the Thames in many ways – being on a beach in balmy Israel would be better than in the much in cold, wet England ;)

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      I don’t want to know what they find out… just like the K-T boundary, I think there will be a layer of plastic in the fossil record that shows the ending of human kind….

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  19. delphini510

    I didn’t know these trips existed until I read your post. Messy and fascinating with finds going so far back in history. I enjoyed the BBC article, thank you for enclosing it.

    Miriam

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      I think just as there is a layer in the rock strata, K-T boundary, that is full of extra-terrestrial debris that shows where the dinosaurs became extinct. I think 65 million years from now there might be a plastic layer that shows where the humans became extinct….

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    1. trentpmcd Post author

      Hi Penny – you somehow got sent to spam! Anyway, I rescued you ;) It is a great term. I do think it sounds cool, but not 100% sure if I’d be up for it. Not all of it is ancient artifacts – there is a lot of modern garbage mixed in. Oh well,but when you do find something old…

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    2. trentpmcd Post author

      If Antartica and Greenland melt, we’ll have a 60 meter/200 foot rise in sea level. The Thames Barrier might not make it ;) (I just Googled it and they are looking at upgrades to take sea level rises into account. Oh well, maybe this was New York …)

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