The North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain by Alistair Moffat review: 'wonderfully descriptive'

His subject here is the 800-mile east coast of Britain, which he very sensibly divides into six as per the Shipping Forecast - Thames, Humber, Tyne, Forth, Cromarty and Fair Isle. With that framework in place, he is free to explore the most dramatic, revealing, and moving stories from each, as well as examining the cultural links between them.

Are there any? Sometimes you wonder, yet Moffat makes a good case for his contention that “the North Sea made us who we are”. In the early eighth century in Jarrow, for example, the Venerable Bede worked out from corresponding with coastal monasteries as far away as Iona, that the stars looked different in different places and so “by the breathings of the moon” were the tides. A couple of centuries earlier, those same tides had already brought floods to the other side of the North Sea, which in turn brought land-hungry Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailing west to England.

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Of course, history can exclude as well as include, and Moffat is excellent on Anglo-Saxonism, the 19th century notion that the English (and some Lowland Scots) were descended from the inhabitants of the “free forests of Germany”. In his childhood he loved watching a TV drama about Hereward the Wake, an English rebel against William the Conqueror in the fens of East Anglia (which at one time apparently spread far beyond their current area to cover an estimated quarter of England’s landmass).

The TV series was based on an “all but unreadable” novel by Charles Kingsley – an Anglican priest, social reformer and Christian socialist - who proclaimed that Queen Victoria was the direct descendent of Odin and described the Irish as “white chimpanzees”. Quoting similar bigotry from 1950s Fens writer and broadcaster James Wentworth-Day (1899-1983), Moffat wonders whether such attitudes persist in the strong showing for Reform in Fens constituencies in last year’s general election.

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So yes, his writing is both personalised and opinionated (not least in deploring the sale of the British National Oil Corporation in 1979 to fund tax cuts rather than building up a massive sovereign wealth fund), but it is frequently wonderfully descriptive, knowledgeable and concise too. And in the event of anyone expressing things better - for example, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas’s truly amazing reportage on a 1943 bombing raid over Berlin from aboard a Lincolnshire-based Lancaster or Alcuin of York’s description of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne - he provides the original source instead.

As an academic subject, history has become so specialised that we sometimes lose sight of its sweep. This has always been one of the great strengths of Moffat’s writing and this book is no different, ranging as it does from analysing the linguistic and ornithological evidence linking Bass Rock to the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer to looking at the rise and fall of holiday camps and fish and chip shops in the 20th century. Sociable polymaths like him are a rare breed, but for books like this, an indispensable one.

The North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain, by Alistair Moffat, Canongate, £20

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