How beachcombing helped Shetland author Sally Huband

“I think if you had to pin it down to one thing that isn’t hope or curiosity it would be excitement,” she says when I ask her to distil the appeal of it. “Say there’s a storm brewing here in Shetland, in the past they would have dreaded them really because they’re disruptive and violent and scary. But now when I see one forecast I feel a rising sense of excitement because I know that, depending on the direction, it’s going to drive a lot of drifting objects to shore. Then you get up the next morning and the wind’s maybe still going but it’s easing a bit, and getting down onto the beach is just really thrilling. Knowing you might find something but might not find anything. But it’s exciting not knowing what you might find.”

Huband documents her haul on Instagram in photographs which lend even faded and sun-bleached plastic a strange kind of beauty. But her particular obsession is something very different and considerably rarer: a sea bean, the name given to the large tropical seeds which float across the Atlantic from the Caribbean. Over the years Huband’s passion became so intense and all-consuming that she has now written a book about her hunt for one – Sea Bean: A Beachcomber’s Search For A Magical Charm.

For centuries sea beans and other forms of drift seed have been much prized by the communities of north-western Europe as mystical objects with life-saving or life-giving properties. They are especially connected with childbirth. In Norway, where the name translates as ‘loosening stone’, sea beans would be given to women to hold during labour in order to help the baby come more easily. Sometimes they would be rubbed on their stomachs or even be boiled in water and made into a kind of brackish tea. Iceland has similar traditions, and in the Westerns Isles the name in Gaelic means ‘the saving of Mary’. There, a labouring woman would hold a sea bean while the midwife circled her sun-wise and recited prayers. “And so the old ways mixed with those of the church,” Huband writes, “and labouring women felt hope in the face of possible death.”

In the Faroe Islands, where they are known as sea pearls, they are considered lucky. They are often stowed on fishing boats to protect the men while they are at sea, and on the island of Nólsoy Huband meets fellow naturalist Jens-Kjeld Jensen who always carries one in his pocket as a protective charm. He translates a Faroese saying for her: “Luck follows the sea pearls, they bring wisdom to the finder. A man carrying a sea pearl will not drown at sea.”

Elsewhere in the book Huband visits the Dutch island of Texel, which takes beachcombing so seriously that it appoints officials to oversee the collection of finds and the auctioning off of anything of value which isn’t claimed. And she delves deep into a beachcombing subculture, those whose own passion is for putting messages in bottles and trusting them to the tides. Or ‘sea post’ as Huband calls it.

She details the use to which the people of Foula put sea post to in 1892 when they were running out of food. She relates how Shetland native and sea post aficionado the late Donnie Henderson would rise at 5am to send messages, and how he formed deep friendships with many Norwegian people who wrote back to him when they found one. And she hears from a friend whose niece found a message which simply read: “You nosey c***”.

A naturalist and conservationist by trade, Huband was born in Portishead near Bristol in England’s south-west. Her childhood views were of a coal-fired power station and a chemical works, and beyond that the sluggish Severn Estuary. But although she grew up by the sea she says she didn’t feel “any mythical or uncanny connection with it. I just found it quite terrifying really. It was just miles of endless sinking mud.”

Moving to Shetland changed all that. She arrived in the islands in 2011 after spells in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, relocating with her helicopter pilot husband and their infant son. In Shetland the seas rage, the winds blow hard, and the haar can drop fast and hang around for days. She didn’t need a map to tell her she was nearer Stavanger than London, and as anyone who has been there knows the cultural and linguistic bonds between the archipelago and its northern neighbours are deep and abiding. “Shetland is quite a remarkable place, one of these places where myth and folklore feel very possible. It’s such a remarkable seascape and landscape that your mind is more easily opened to this otherworldly element.”

A perfect place to hunt the elusive sea bean, in other words. And does Huband find one? Yes, eventually. She had it with her when she took her sea kayak on its maiden voyage recently, she tells me.

But there was something else driving Huband’s need to scour the strand-line and spend hours outdoors in wild weather. So as much as her book is about beachcombing, it is also about childbirth, motherhood and the lives of women in island communities both today and throughout history.

On an even more personal note it is also a memoir of Huband’s own struggles. She writes openly about her miscarriages and movingly about the invasive medical procedure which follows, known as an evacuation of the retained products of a conception. She broaches her depression and the dark thoughts about self-harm which seized her and which she didn’t feel able to talk about in case she was deemed unfit to look after her son. And throughout the book she writes about the chronic health condition which has afflicted her for over a decade now, a debilitating form of arthritis.

With no rheumatology care available on Shetland during the pandemic, the last few years have been especially hard. On top of that, Huband caught Covid-19 early on which triggered a bad relapse. Too often, her beloved beaches became unreachable. “I’m just starting to get it managed again, so it has been a long two years,” she says.

So Huband had more than just beachcombing on her mind when she sat down to write Sea Bean, her first foray into long-form writing.

“There were three things I wanted to get across,” she says. “One was the absolute joy, curiosity and strangeness of beachcombing and what that can open up to you. That leads into the second point which is how beachcombing makes everything feel very inter-connected – the oceans connect you to different communities, you feel more connected to the oceans themselves, to the past, the present and the future. But there’s another layer of interconnectedness that I wanted to explore and that’s how having a chronic illness changes your relationship to the place in which you live.”

In that respect she wanted to do more than just write another nature book. She wanted to plough a new field and write about nature from the perspective of somebody with a chronic illness. She wrote “with intent” because “these things are really important” she says.

“So if you had told me that when I moved to Shetland I’d have written a book not only about Shetland but also about my body, I’d have laughed. It was never the plan. It was never the plan to be a writer. It’s just how things have unfolded.”

Sometimes it isn’t just the tide which throws up the unexpected.

Sea Bean: A Beachcomber’s Search For A Magical Charm by Sally Huband is out now (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99)