Slapton Sands – TumbleStone

“Exercise Tiger” 75th Memorial on Slapton Sands

One of my favourite beaches is Slapton Sands in Devon, England, a pebble beach I visited in 2016 and 2017.

Me at the south end of Slapton Sands, near a WWII gun emplacement, 2017

Petra on Slapton Sands, a pebble beach, in 2017

Stones from Slapton Sands

TumbleStone Blog has a series of Posts on this fascinating beach and its history and geography. The first Post, dated 8 September 2016, is here. One of the Posts discusses the tragedy of Exercise Tiger, a practice for D-Day, with a planned landing on Slapton Sands. Slapton Sands had a number of similarities to Utah Beach, where US soldiers were to land. On 28 April 1944, in the bay off Slapton Sands, the convoy of landing craft carrying US troops was intercepted by German E-boats. Two of the landing craft were sunk and one badly damaged, with the loss of 749 of the US servicemen. Due to the secrecy surrounding D-Day and its preparations, the disaster was kept secret and often it was decades later before relatives learned what really happened to their fathers, brothers or sons.

To commemorate the 75th anniversary of this tragedy, an installation artist, Martin Barraud, has laid 749 bootprints in the pebbles of Slapton Sands.

The installation was unveiled by the Remembered charity and will raise money for veteran employment projects. An article in the Daily Mail on 28 April 2019 provides an excellent and well-illustrated account of Barraud’s project as well as the history of “Exercise Tiger”.

Source: ITV www.itv.com/news/2019-04-28/american-d-day-troops-remembered-in-devon-beach-art-piece

Source: ITV http://www.itv.com/news/2019-04-28/american-d-day-troops-remembered-in-devon-beach-art-piece

Source: Daily Mail www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6967251/American-soldiers-killed-Nazis-secret-D-Day-rehearsal-remembered-UK-installation.html

Source: Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6967251/American-soldiers-killed-Nazis-secret-D-Day-rehearsal-remembered-UK-installation.html

See also this short BBC video clip on the installation.

Martin Barraud is in the middle of an ambitious installation project in the UK called “There But Not There”. His aim is to make visible the dead of World War One, giving them a shape and a name. As an Evening Standard article puts it, “There are ghostly Tommies in St Pancras station, in a chapel in the Tower of London, in a football stadium: either a six-foot aluminium silhouette with head bowed, or a Perspex figure you see, then somehow don’t see, sitting down.” Barraud, has given every one of them the name of a real soldier.

Martin Barraud sitting amidst perspex figures of WWI soldiers. Source: Evening Standard http://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/artist-martin-barraud-on-his-project-to-memorialise-fallen-first-world-war-soldiers-across-the-a3812606.html

By November this year, the centenary of the end of the war, he hopes to have sold a figure to represent every one of the 883,246 men from Britain and Ireland who died, the funds to go to military charities.

The Rough and the Smooth: Excerpt from My Retirement Function Speech, 5 December 2016

[After 30 years as a lecturer at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand]

I recall standing at the front of a lecture theatre maybe 20 years ago, about to introduce Dr Russell Bishop from Education as a guest lecturer to my second-year class in social research methods. I had asked him to talk about Maori social research approaches. I had not met Russell face-to-face before and, chatting before the start of his lecture, we realised that we had both grown up in rural Southland, a world away from where we were standing. He said, “Imagine that – two country boys like us, ending up here, teaching at the University of Waikato.” And I’ve always had that sense of wonder, and even privilege, in being a University lecturer.

Earlier this year, in anticipation of retirement, I started up two new ventures. One was to take up the hobby of beach stone polishing. This involves spending time on beaches, looking for interesting stones, a not unpleasant pastime. Here are two stones that I found at Birdlings Flat, near Christchurch – they look rather rough and dull and plain. You put a bunch of these of varying sizes in a small rubber barrel, add water and grit and later polish powder, then roll them around for a few weeks. The outcome is like this – the dull surface is worn away, the stones become nicely rounded and smooth, and bright colours and patterns shine out. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there for the university, or for what we do with students…

Two Birdlings Flat quartzite stones “in the rough”

Two Birdlings Flat quartzite stones polished

When I started tumble polishing, it was difficult to find useful and practical information on the internet about it, so I started a blog called TumbleStone where I write about the process. I also write about the beaches where stones are found.

It turns out that tumble polishing stones is not a bad retirement hobby for an academic who is still a geographer at heart. For example, six months ago my wife Petra was in the south of England, in Devon, and brought back some stones from a beach called Slapton Sands. Doing some research about Slapton Sands, I have discovered all sorts of interesting things about that beach – it’s a barrier pebble beach protecting the largest freshwater lake in south-western England; it’s a beach under threat each year from winter storms; and in early 1944, 30,000 acres around Slapton Sands was evacuated all of its 3,000 residents for 6 months so that the American army could undertake exercises prior to the Normandy landings. One Exercise, Exercise Tiger, led to the loss of about 750 soldiers and sailors, due to a German torpedo-boat raid and inadequacies in escorts and communication, and this tragedy was kept secret for many decades. In the 1970s a local guest house owner, who was in the habit of walking the beach looking for interesting things on it, heard about an object a mile offshore that snagged fishing nets, discovered it was a sunken US Sherman tank, eventually pieced together the story of Exercise Tiger, salvaged the tank, placed it as a memorial on Slapton Sands, and wrote a book called “The Forgotten Dead”… Lots of material for a geographer to research and write about…

[See here for the first Post in the Series on Slapton Sands.]

Slapton Sands, Part Six: The Beach Stones Polished

The 59 stones from Slapton Sands were put through the usual five-week cycle of tumble smoothing and polishing – one week each of tumbling with 100 grit, then 220 grit, then 320 grit, then a tin oxide pre-polish, then a tin oxide pro-polish:

Comparing some of the polished stones with what they looked like “in the rough”:

Slapton Sands, Part Five: Beach Stones in the Rough

In his 1954 book, “The Pebbles on the Beach”, Clarence Ellis has a chapter on “The Coastline of England and Wales”. There he writes (page 125):

In the middle of Start Bay is a bed of shingle that must not be missed. This is the extensive bar at Torcross that encloses the lagoon called Slapton Ley. There is one very unusual feature about it. Its pebbles do not come from the rocks of the Bay. Many of them are flints, yet there is no chalk or other flint-bearing rock near to Torcross. The other pebbles are quartz, including very small ones that are pear-shaped, and granite from Dartmoor.

The website of the Slapton Ley National Nature Reserve has some good information on the bar, its beach and its stones. This Reserve is managed by the Field Studies Council in partnership with the owners. Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust, along with Natural England and South Hams District Council. Their website highlights the significance of “longshore drift” which is when waves hit the shore at an angle and will move stones and sediment in a certain direction along a stretch of coastline. The website continues: [Note: August 2019 – The website has recently been changed and no longer contains this information]

Slate is the bedrock of Start Bay and so is found in the cliffs bordering the beach. It is a metamorphic rock, changed from clays by heat and pressure, but is relatively soft and so erodes easily. You may find large pieces of slate near the cliffs that have recently been eroded but because it breaks down quickly it is hard to spot much slate on the centre of the ridge. Schist is a very resistant metamorphic rock, and forms Start Point headland jutting out to sea at the south end of Start Bay. It was formed in the Devonian around 395 million years ago. The schist and some of the slate has seams of quartz running through it. Quartz is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust and you will be able to find plenty of it on the ridge. It is a milky white. You can find some igneous rock on the beach, most transported by rivers that have their source on Dartmoor. Quartzite is pinkish and forms a very smooth pebble. It can be found just offshore and was transported up onto the beach by rising sea levels. Most of the shingle making up the ridge is flint; it makes up about 80% of the material on the beach. Flint is only found about 30-40km offshore from the present day coastline which suggests that Slapton Sands originates from this area.

During the visit to Slapton Sands in mid-2016, a few handfuls of stones were collected (59 individual stones in all). Some jasper and quartz are apparent. The photos below are of dry stones followed by some photos of them wet, hinting at how they might look when polished.