The North Sea
Alistair Moffat
Book of the Month November 2025
Reviewed by Ingrid Brubaker
Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty…
Alistair Moffat’s book The North Sea starts with the Shipping Forecast. As a child in the nineties and early noughts I often lay sleepless in bed, my MP3/radio player in my hand, listening to the shipping forecast listing familiar and unfamiliar places. I imagined being out on the rough waters, picturing the sailors and fishermen tuning in to the same calm reading as I did.
Only as an adult did I realise the popularity of this broadcast, and that I was not alone in my fascination for, what the author describes as, ‘a national lullaby’.
These names and places meant a lot to Alistair Moffat too and are the springboard for his travels in his latest book, in which he travels along the coast of Britain that faces Europe and the North Sea. The book is divided into sections based on Moffat’s wanderings and covers the coast from his starting point in Kent all the way up to Orkney and Shetland. It is interspersed with historical anecdotes and facts, and it covers a lot of bases from south to north of the British Isles.
There is much in this book for history buffs, and especially the first 150 pages cover a lot of Anglo-Saxon and Roman history. There are delightful stories about cultural history too such as the history of sea swimming and beach holidays, fish and chips, golf, and wild salmon. The stories Moffat shares often seem like very loose strands, but they are in the end all connected by the North Sea. The book necessarily covers a wide range of topics, as the history of all the places along the North Sea is long and complex.
Personally, I tend to find nature and travel writing only as interesting as the observations of the writer and the people they meet along the way. I think you can only write grippingly about a place if you include the people of those places. When reading Moffat, what came to mind were two other books on a similar topic, Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea (1983) and Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (2015). The difference between these two books, one being a thoughtful travelogue and the other mostly focused on the writers own view, lies in the time the writer spends with the people they encounter either physically or through observation.
Moffat falls into the same category as Theroux – able and willing to speak to the people they meet and observe without casting judgment. Moffat encounters a number of characters who stay with me after the book is finished: the man he sees on the balcony in Margate, who ‘sits on the edge of the land, perhaps on the edge of life’ and the woman he meets watching a Lancaster bomber plane with tears on her face. Moffat shows such empathy and interest in other people’s stories and that shines through his whole book.
North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain is published by Canongate Books
Ingrid Brubaker is a Norwegian-American PhD researcher and writer whose work is mainly tethered in literature and ecophilosophy. She lives in Inverness.