Sold-out Annual Parish Meeting hears Secrets of Shifting Sands

Stokenham village hall was packed last Tuesday for the Annual Parish Meeting, where a capacity audience at the all-ticket affair heard a talk by Gerd Masselink entitled “Coastal erosion in Start Bay – Can we have our shingle back please?”

Professor Masselink heads up the Coastal Processes Research Group at Plymouth University and is widely acclaimed as the world’s leading authority on the changing coastline of southwest England. He held his audience spellbound for over an hour with a series of photographs, charts, graphs and diagrams that spelled out in painstaking detail the reasons behind the rapid loss of shingle at the southern end of each of the embayments in Start Bay, the key factor responsible for the unusually high degree of damage sustained by both the buildings on Torcross seafront and the A379 Slapton Line road in the January-February 2026 storm sequence. Using detailed wave height and direction data he was able to show that it was a freak combination of wave direction, lowered beach height, and spring high tides, together with the wind direction of the previous two storms, that was responsible for the most significant destruction.

The talk was followed by a question-and-answer session, before adjournment for a more informal chat over a glass of wine. “It wasn’t an easy message to hear,” said one audience member, “but you can’t argue with the science.”

“It’s really made me think about how we’re going to have to adapt to the changing climate,“ said another. “There’s only going to be one winner in a battle with the sea.”