Laurie is troubled by coastal erosion, haunted by a dead uncle she never met and obsessed by an imagined girl who lived 7,000 years ago. Then she discovers a skeleton in the crumbling cliffs. It is the hot and dry summer of 2025. Laurie, an artist, a maker, delights in the natural world around her, and particularly the seabirds that soar above the massive sea cliffs at Bempton. Work, family and friends take Laurie between the two very different East Yorkshire landscapes: Flamborough, where she lives on the permanent, hard chalk of the Wolds, and the weak, friable clays and sands to the south, which are at constant risk of being taken by the sea. Laurie’s story is a homage to these lands, their long history, and it tells of the soft clays of Holderness, eroded by an unrelenting North Sea, and of the lands that have already succumbed to the waves, Doggerland.
The land that is there and not there is published in paperback in a first run of 50 copies. Email me if you would like a copy.
