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After paying, we will send an immediate confirmation and email your ebook file within 24 hours. PDF ISBN: 978-1-917251-15-0
version: bookmarked pdf (pdf text cannot be edited, printed or copied - email us if you need this capability.) Imprint: Triarchy Press
List Price: £12.50 Publication: 31st March 2026 Format: Paperback ~ 92pp. Size: 13 x 21.6 cm ISBN: 978-1-917251-14-3 Tags: Systems Thinking, Lyme Bay, astrolabe, slavery, Lyme Regis, Horatio Morpurgo, John Fowles, navigation, About the Author |
A Guide to the Unconformity
When a long-lost 16th‑century mariner’s astrolabe is recovered from the shallow seabed off Lyme Bay by an A‑level schoolboy in 1967, it should be instant headline material – a small coastal town’s brush with the first wave of globalisation and the Age of Exploration. Instead, it vanishes quietly into a museum in Salem, Massachusetts, leaving barely a ripple in local memory.
In this lovely little book, writer and activist Horatio Morpurgo follows that astrolabe’s faint wake back through Lyme Bay’s unstable cliffs and seabed, into the 16th‑century wars of religion, and on into our own, equally unstable century. The “unconformity” here is both geological and historical: a break in the record, a missing layer, a gap in how a place understands itself. Drawing on local archives, seabed surveys, oral history and years of campaigning for marine protection in Lyme Bay, Morpurgo uncovers a different story about this stretch of the English Channel – one in which empire, extraction and enclosure meet acts of resistance and repair. Climate breakdown, fisheries policy, the politics of designation and the future of coastal communities are all read against ice cores, carbon cycles and contemporary migration politics. A Guide to the Unconformity is part coastal walk, part archive‑rummage, part moral reckoning. It asks what it would mean to pay real attention to one small corner of coast – long enough for it to start speaking back – and how that attentiveness might help us navigate a century in which, as Morpurgo suggests, our sense of direction can no longer be set only by the instruments that launched us into the Anthropocene. "one of the ways anywhere keeps on turning into somewhere is precisely by throwing the unexpected at you. This is one of staying put’s pleasures."
~~~~~~~~~~~ "Beneath the Undercliff runs a feature known as ‘the unconformity’. A geological term, this is the plane, some argue, along which the major landslips occur. A Cretaceous stratum immediately above it dates to about 100 million years ago and others situate the crucial fault-line here. Just below it are Jurassic Mudstones and Blue Lias laid down 180 million years ago or earlier, in which minor failure surfaces also occur. In any case those 80 million missing years, that colossal break in the sequence, is the unconformity. It dips seaward, clearly visible in winter as a ‘spring line’ along parts of the cliff. At Humble Point it runs right along the foreshore. Higher than average rainfall, soaking into the porous layers above it, increases the weight of the rock and the probability of landslides. Geologists differ on the detail, but all trace this coastline’s continual movement to a slip plane either within or close to the unconformity. I propose therefore that this term be upcycled for wider use, with the clays and earthiness of its original context still clinging to it. Awareness of the unconformity beneath our feet is what we need more of, faced with a world mediated by this more bewildering array of screens than ever, in which the crises proliferate and accelerate all around. It would be my word for that sense of an underlying rupture, whether or not it is translatable with any exactitude into the available idioms.." Fault Lines:The Fault Lines essay series explores the cracks in the stories modern civilisation tells itself — about progress, control, care, truth, and what counts as 'real'.
Each short book takes a single fault line in contemporary life and prises it open: a seam where systems grind against lived experience, where official narratives no longer fit what people feel in their bones. 1. A Guide to the Unconformity 2. Mind the Gaps |
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