Ambitious British Coastal Conservation Project Passes Notable (500th) Milestone

HORDEN, England — One of the world’s most ambitious conservation projects has just passed a notable milestone--preserving the 500th mile of British seacoast as nature made it.

“Now Enterprise Neptune is set for the next 100 miles,” said National Trust chairman Dame Jennifer Jenkins at a wind-swept cliff-top acquisition ceremony the other day.

“Enterprise Neptune” is a remarkable attempt to save beautiful sections of the British coast that somehow have escaped the intrusion of bungalows, beach huts and fish ‘n’ chip stands.

For 23 years, bit by bit, the heritage-preserving National Trust has used this appeal to buy a headland here, an island there, a beach somewhere else. Its target is 900 miles of coastline, and its 500th mile puts it more than halfway.

Ironically, the 500th mile’s beach is a mess.

Called Warren House Gill, it is backed by dramatic cliffs slashed by deep, tree-filled gullies on a wild stretch of North Sea coast 230 miles north of London.

But the beach is black, oozing with slag and ground-up coal. A huge coal mine tops a headland directly to the north. Behind the beach towers the mucky slag heap of another coal mine. A third is on the cliffs to the south.

But Jenkins, almost being blown off the perpendicular cliff, said “time and tide” would make the beach golden again. What matters is that it, like Enterprise Neptune’s other 500 miles, will escape the fate of the coasts of Spain, Italy and France.

Unchecked development there, Jenkins said, has brought “the total despoliation of the Mediterranean coast, from Gibraltar to Yugoslavia.”

Yet when the National Trust surveyed the 3,000 miles of coastline ringing its own England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the result was hardly reassuring.

“Postwar planning machinery was failing to check the spoliation of the coastline,” a Trust document says. It found a third of the coast “already developed beyond the possibility of conservation.” Another third was too uninteresting and dull.

“But the remaining third--something over 900 miles altogether--was of outstanding natural beauty and worthy of permanent preservation.”

So the Trust recruited Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, to launch Enterprise Neptune in 1965 with the audacious aim of buying every unspoiled mile.

“It is the most ambitious coastal conservation project in the world,” Jenkins said.

The National Trust “formally recognized this as its most important conservation problem” because the Trust is more than the stately homes for which it is best known. The Trust owns 190 historic houses, including 87 of the grandest, as well as 51 villages and 24 castles. About 8.5 million people visited its properties last year.

But this 93-year-old charity’s full title is “The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.” It also owns more than 550,000 acres of land below the Scottish border--Scotland has its own trust--and protects another 77,000 acres.

A good portion of that acreage adjoins the coast. For Enterprise Neptune--which has raised $18.5 million in donations--buys more than beaches.

“Acquiring coastline does not mean simply buying the thin line around the edge of the map,” a Trust official said. “It involves buying farms, woods and buildings, cliffs and moors, marshes and dunes.”

For each of its 500 coastal miles, the Trust controls and protects 225 acres of land. It buys not only the water’s edge but “the land behind it as far as the skyline” to “protect the land.