Every structure on that frontage has a number, an owner, a build date and a maintenance record. Groyne 9 has none of those, and it is the only one on the beach in perfect condition.
I inspect coastal defences for a district council. Twelve miles of frontage, three towns and a lot of nothing in between, and I have walked all of it four times a year for nineteen years.
The job is a walk with a clipboard and a camera and, latterly, a tablet. You go along and you look at every structure and you grade it. Groynes, revetments, the seawall, outfalls, steps. Each one has an asset number and a condition score from one to five and a set of photographs, and that goes on the asset register, which is the single most boring and most important document any council holds, because when a house goes into the sea the first question anybody asks is what did you know and when.
The register goes back a long way. Ours starts in 1911 in a bound volume and it has been retyped and digitised twice and it is complete. Every structure has an owner, a build date, a material, a designer where one is known, and a maintenance history.
There are eleven groynes on the frontage I want to talk about.
The register lists ten.
A groyne is a fence into the sea. Timber posts and planking, running from the top of the beach down to below the low water mark, at right angles to the shore. It is there to stop sand and shingle travelling along the beach, which it does by getting in the way, and you can tell whether one is working by looking at it: the up-drift side is higher than the down-drift side, sometimes by two metres, and there is a step in the beach where the groyne is.
They are numbered from the harbour arm going east. Groyne 1 through 10 in the register, and I have graded every one of them dozens of times, and I can tell you which planks are soft on each.
Between what the register calls 8 and what the register calls 9, there is another one.
I have called it 9 in my own head for so long that I have had to be careful in this account, so: I will call it 9, and the register's 9 and 10 are what I will call 10 and 11.
I did not notice for four years. That sounds impossible and it is not, and the reason is worth saying because it is the whole texture of this.
A frontage of eleven groynes looks like a frontage of eleven groynes. You walk it, you count them off against the list, and if the list says ten and there are eleven, the thing your brain does is assume you have miscounted or that two of them are one structure with a gap. I did that for four years. I did it on a tablet with a form that made me tick each asset off in order, and I ticked ten boxes on a beach with eleven groynes on it, sixteen times, without ever noticing, because the form did not have an eleventh box and the beach was not going to argue.
What made me notice was a claim, because it always is.
A man's beach hut was undermined and he wanted to know whether the council had let a groyne fail, and I was asked for the photographs of the two nearest structures, and I pulled the file and the photographs of what the register called 8 and 9, and the hut was not between them. It was between 8 and something else.
Groyne 9 is in good condition.
I want to be very clear about what that means on that coast. Timber in the sea is a losing battle. The posts get eaten by gribble and worm from below, they get sandblasted at the beach surface, and the planking works loose in every storm. A groyne built in the 1950s is a row of stumps now. A groyne we rebuilt in 2004 is at condition three and will need work in five years.
Groyne 9 is at condition five. Sound posts, tight planking, no rot at the waterline, no missing bolts, the whalings straight.
I have taken a sample. Twice. I have a corer and I am allowed to use it on our own assets and I used it on this one anyway, in 2015 and again in 2021, from the same post, from the side that faces down the beach so the hole does not show.
Both cores are greenheart, which is a tropical hardwood that has been the standard for marine work for a hundred and fifty years and which we cannot get any more at any price. Both cores are sound all the way through. And the second core, taken from a hole six inches from the first, has the first core's hole in it, healed over, which timber does not do.
Here is what I have looked at, in the order I looked.
The register, all of it, including the 1911 volume and the two retypings. Ten groynes on that frontage in every version. No amendment, no deletion, no marginal note.
The maintenance ledgers, which are separate and which record every load of timber and every gang that ever worked the beach. There is no entry that can be made to fit an eleventh structure. The 1954 rebuild covers 1 to 6. The 1978 covers 7 to 10. Nobody has ever bought timber for 9.
Aerial photography, which is where I expected to settle it. We have coverage from 1946, 1961, 1972, 1988, 1999, and then annual from 2006.
It is in all of them. All the way back to 1946, which is an RAF survey flown in April, and there it is, eleven groynes, the ninth one in the middle of them, and it is casting a shadow the same length as the others.
Ordnance Survey shows ten.
I raised it once, in 2017, in the mildest possible way. I put a line in my quarterly saying there appeared to be an unregistered timber structure between assets 8 and 9 and recommending it be surveyed and added.
The reply was that unregistered structures on the foreshore are usually private and that I should establish ownership with the Crown Estate before creating an asset record, which is exactly the right answer and exactly what the process says.
The Crown Estate has no record of it.
I did not take it further, and I have thought about why not, and the honest answer is the one I do not like: if it goes on the register, it becomes ours, and if it becomes ours we are liable for it, and one day somebody will have to maintain it, and I do not want to be the man who sends a gang of lads out to work on it.
The last thing.
Groyne 9 works. It holds a beach. There is two and a half metres of shingle on its western side and there is a scour on its eastern side, which is what a working groyne does, and that shingle is why the promenade behind it has never been overtopped in nineteen years while the stretch beyond 11 has been overtopped four times.
There are about sixty houses behind that shingle.
So I have stopped writing about it and I have started doing something else instead, which is that every inspection, after I have ticked my ten boxes, I walk out along it to the low water mark if the tide allows and I look at every plank and every bolt, and I write what I find on a piece of paper that goes in a drawer at home and not into any system.
Nineteen years. It has never needed anything.
But I go and I look, because the arrangement seems to be that somebody keeps it in repair, and I have never once seen who, and if it is ever my turn I would rather find out on a Tuesday with a clipboard than on a night in November with the sea coming over.