This is an urban beach, a string of beige sand that’s bounded by tarmac and a firth-sea. Groynes, large wooden breakers, run at right angles to the shoreline to slow the leeching of sand. If the sea overtops, and licks the promenade, the groynes provide backbone. A practical, old-fashioned approach to keeping sand in its place.
The groynes have other virtues. They are long, thick-planked sculptures that lead towards the water. Visual breaks to the diminished ecosystem of a beach where seaweed, razor shells, starfish and plastic bottles are cleaned up regularly by a council tractor. Wandering down to the sea, we can lean against a groyne or clamber up and sit atop, looking out to the open sea where wind turbines spike the sky. If we run fingers over the wood’s grainy surface, it feels primed for North Sea waves and whatever is coming its way. Able to stay inert when a beach bonfire burns too close. Holding steady when a child runs its length and stands on one leg. Offering a safe berth to seagulls, cormorants and crows. A hanging spot for swimmers’ robes.
The groynes provide us with playfulness as well as being solid and dependable. Made of hard wood that will stand firm against a buffeting sea, they’re not constructed from oak. This new wood, that’s old wood, is not from here. It didn’t grow in Scotland’s small, wiry forests where trees are young and slight. The wood came from Guyana where abundant South American rainforests give moisture and sunlight to trees that reach thirty metres and take decades to mature. The glossy-leaved trees that are so tall and straight are Greenhearts, also known as Sipiri, Bibiru, and Bebeeru. Related to the laurels in Scottish gardens, they are twice as hard as puny European Oaks and grow almost nowhere else. These are the trees that provided the timber for repairs to the groynes on this popular beach.
Greenheart wood has an impressive pedigree. Shackleton’s ice breaking ship, Endurance, was sheathed in its planks. When the wreckage of his boat was discovered in 2022 over 3000 metres down, the wood was still sea-ready, immune to the wash of a hundred years of Antarctic ocean, and its decks covered with sea-squirts, brittle stars and anemones. Greenheart timber was also used for the dock gates in Liverpool and has provided wood for fly-fishing rods and walking sticks. Prized for its toughness, it’s almost as fire resistant as concrete and metal. Nowadays these trees are felled and milled for boats, railway sleepers and groynes, shipped across the ocean from Guyana where over three quarters of the land is thickly forested.
Imagine the exuberance of a Guyanese forest which births these trees and where there are over 8000 species of plants and 1200 different animals and birds such as jaguars, spider monkeys, and harpy eagles. Sparsely populated communities are connected only by rivers. Trees drip with ferns and orchids cling to branches. The leaves, blooms and tendrils of foliage overwhelm with their mingling of pungent oils. Nurtured by rain, mist and spray, this nearly pristine forest plays with our dreams of other, older worlds.
Musing on the verdant deliciousness of this place, we should consider the ambiguous history of Guyana’s rainforest. Seeds set thousands of years ago after the last glacial age. Lightly used and nurtured over centuries by its indigenous people. Surviving heavy felling through the shameful years of British and Dutch colonialism and slavery. The forest maintaining its composure when chainsaws sliced through the trees’ half metre trunks because Greenheart is so dense it needs the bite of tungsten carbide to cut through its timber. There are other things we need to know. The growth of illegal logging is a creeping sore as it is in neighbouring countries like Brazil. Troubled Venezuela butts against the Guyanese border. There are minerals to be mined, endangering the richer understory of the forest. Indigenous communities fight to protect their land rights. More than half of the total population lives in poverty. By contrast, significant oil reserves have been discovered offshore, making foreign companies lustful.
The rainforest is precious as part of the ecosystem for defence against climate change. It absorbs carbon dioxide through leaves, wood and earth. It adds water to the atmosphere which becomes clouds and regulates rainfall in the vast Amazonian basin and beyond. It is a home for precious species, some endangered and many which aren’t found elsewhere. But on Guyana’s North Atlantic coast, the land lies an unsettling one to two metres below sea level with a 280-mile concrete sea wall protecting its coastline. As the Antarctic ice that Shackleton’s ship met head on melts and releases it’s pure, ancient water, the ocean will seep onto Guyana’s land just as the northern sea will suck and bite at the coastline here.
It’s a generous exchange that a Scottish beach is lightly protected by trees grown in a country 5000 miles away. The tough, sand-gritted wood of a Greenheart groyne is a discrete symbol of joint resistance and collaboration. Gazing out to the grey-blue horizon, we can imagine canopies of green on the other side of our big-small world. A lush rainforest and an urban beach twinned by wood.
Susan Elsley
Susan Elsley writes fiction and non-fiction embedded in natural environments. Her short stories have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She won the Ennis Festival short story prize (2024) and was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize (2025), Bath Short Story Prize (2024), Alpine Fellowship Writing Award (2023) and Moniack Mhor’s Emerging Writer Award (2019).