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Campaign for Coastal Defence
Selsey Life April 2011
The £1.5m coast defence works at West Beach Selsey have just finished.
They may prolong the life of the sea wall on this stretch of the town’s coastline for up to 10yrs, but only if we can get funding to keep “recycling” the shingle.
“Recycling” means mechanically moving the shingle. It’s needed because the natural process of longshore drift moves the shingle slowly along the coast. If you don’t intervene, you eventually lose it all (after 20yrs, this had happened at West Beach). That’s why we have wooden groynes – to slow down the movement. You can tell which way the shingle is moving by looking at a groyne: shingle builds up against one side of the groyne, then gradually spills over and moves onwards.
Selsey is special because we have what’s called a “drift divide”, somewhere near the end of Hillfield Road. Each side of this “drift divide”, shingle moves in the opposite direction – so along the east side of the Bill the shingle moves east towards Church Norton; on the West side it moves west, towards Bracklesham. The “drift divide” is not a fixed point but moves around, over time.
Whilst beachwalkers and fishermen know that our beaches and offshore banks change shape regularly, there is surprisingly little scientific data on this. It’s something we need to address, because shingle is vital resource for a place like Selsey. It protects our sea walls from being undermined - approximately a quarter of all Selsey’s properties rely on these sea walls to protect them from coastal flooding & erosion.
There is also a lot of money invested in our shingle (the recent works placed nearly £1m worth of the stuff on the beach). We need good data on how fast and what direction this shingle moves, to determine how often and how much of it needs recycling. In turn, this allows us to calculate how much money we need to hire a digger & dumper trucks, to return the shingle to where it was placed.
At West Beach, the residents are gathering just such evidence. With the help of the Manhood Community College, they are putting radio frequency ID tags into 400 pebbles, which they’ll put onto the beach in carefully selected locations. Using a tracking device they hope to track these pebbles and provide a map of the way shingle moves around the beach.
Armed with the data, we can try to get the money to do the recycling. If that’s not enough to get on with, we may now have to fight simply to keep the legal right to recycle our shingle!
Legislation preventing this could be imposed on us, through two cuddly-sounding measures – “Special Protection Areas “ (SPAs - for birds) and “Marine Conservation Zones” (MCZs - for marine life and geology). Behind the facade of protection for birds & seas, these contain inflexible regulations harmful to people living in places like Selsey, because they could stop us managing our shingle... the only means of protecting Selsey from erosion & coastal flooding. More on this soon