Reflections on a Summer Sea Book

Trevor Norton's Reflections on a Summer Sea is partly his scientific autobiography and partly the scientific biography of a remarkable tidal inlet from the Atlantic. Professor of marine biology at the University of Liverpool, Norton cut his teeth as a young research student in the mid-1960s at Lough Ine, a small sea loch in county Cork, Ireland. Since 1923 Lough Ine has been probed and prodded by countless generations of students from Ireland and Britain who have counted, identified and wondered about the extraordinary diversity of life that inhabits it. Their published results have made Lough Ine famous amongst ecologists and marine biologists the world over. Reflections on a Summer Sea provides a wonderful evocation of this little corner of Ireland, the scientists who have worked there and how it has changed over the decades. Norton writes with ease and charm and a particular familiarity engendered over many years. Ireland and the Irish tend to lure the English into an overly romantic and nostalgic paternalism which Norton generally manages to keep at bay. He is aware of "the harsh unyielding land that wears a man down and into an early grave in soil too shallow to dig". But his constant obsevations of quaint advertisements "Cahirsiveen Gun Club--Shooting Strictly Prohibited" still add a pervasive note of whimsy. Norton remarks on the efforts of Jack Kitching, one of the founders of the research station, to maintain the spirit of the 1950s, "when joints were for carving not smoking , when students were 'good chaps' and 'grand girls'", who were "content to Swallows-and-Amazons away their summers". Here he hits just the right note and his true story could well be about what Arthur Ransome's young heroes got up to when they went to university. A good read for all natural scientists of a certain age and fans of Arthur Ransome. --Douglas PalmerRead More