When the Slapton Line broke: learning with place

 

When the Slapton Line broke: learning with place

I have lived near Slapton for over twenty-five years. During that time, the Slapton Line has been part of the rhythm of my everyday life. I have walked it in all seasons and weather with my growing children, trained for a Marathon along it, spent endless days walk-thinking my PhD research along the beach and path, swam in the sea with my husband, learned about all the wildlife in the Ley, the shore and the ocean, volunteered at the field centre, and learned the history of this place through repeated visits. Over time, Slapton has become more than a landscape to me. It has become part of how I understand community, environment, and belonging.

Because of this long relationship with place, what happened to the Line over the past week or so has felt deeply personal, and I know that many others feel the same.

As many have seen, powerful storms and heavy seas have caused significant damage to the Slapton Line at Slapton Sands. Sections of the A379 coastal road have been torn apart by waves, and parts of the tarmac collapsed into the sea. The shingle ridge that separates the sea from Slapton Ley shifted again, leaving the beach so low that the waves were able to compromise the sea defences, reminding us how dynamic and fragile this coastline has always been.

The destruction at Torcross and Slapton Line – Photographs by Heather Wren

For local communities such as ours in Slapton, and others in Torcross, and Stokenham, the road closure has changed daily routines, travel routes, and the feel of the landscape itself. The Line is not just a road for commuting traffic and holiday makers, it is part of how people connect with each other and with this place.

Over the past few days, like many others in our community, I have returned to the Line again and again, trying to understand what has happened.

Grief, fear, and connection

My first response was deeply emotional. I felt immense grief, like the loss of a family member. I sobbed my heart out.

When I tried to understand why the emotion felt so strong, I realised to my surprise, it came from several places at once. Not only was there a huge concern for wildlife in the Ley, but there was also the shock of sudden and irreversible change to a landscape I know intimately. There was fear of the unknown future of the coastline. There was worry for people we know with homes and businesses in Torcross, and there was a feeling of disrupted connection to community. Although I live in Slapton, I feel connected to Torcross and Stokenham too. Years of walking, stopping for coffee, visiting the pub, and meeting people along the way have created a sense of belonging that stretches across these places. The road’s collapse felt like a rupture in those everyday connections.

As a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, my work explores how environmental empathy emerges through long-term relationships with place. In this research, I describe moments like this as affective intra-actions with place. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) concept of ‘intra-action’, these encounters are understood not as interactions between separate entities, but as moments where people, environments, histories, and materials become entangled and mutually shape one another. In such moments, the body often responds before the mind explains.

These experiences are not always comfortable, but I argue that they are often where empathy begins to emerge. Affective, embodied empathy can arise through grief, fear, uncertainty, and disruption, as well as through joy or connection. Donna Haraway (2016) describes this kind of engagement as ‘staying with the trouble’ remaining present with difficult environmental realities rather than turning away from them. Staying with the changing Slapton coastline, emotionally and physically, becomes part of learning how to respond ethically to environmental change.

Place, in this sense, teaches through feeling as much as through thinking.

Walking the closed road

At first, my husband and I resisted being cut off by the broken road. We walked along the closed road to Stokeley for coffee or to the Start Bay Inn for a drink, trying to maintain familiar routines.

But the road felt different.

Without traffic, there was an unexpected quietness. The absence of cars changed how bodies moved through the space. People walked in the middle of the road. Children rode bikes freely. Runners passed without the sound of engines behind them. Dog walkers stopped to talk. People stood together looking out to sea.

The Line had become something else, temporarily transformed from infrastructure into shared public space.

In my earlier research, I found that changes in how bodies move through environments can shift how place is experienced and understood. Slowing down often creates conditions for noticing what usually goes unseen. This echoes work in environmental and posthuman education research that shows how attentiveness to place can emerge through altered rhythms of movement and sensory engagement (Page, 2020; Trott, 2022).

In my PhD research that I completed in 2024, similar moments of slowed, embodied engagement with environment allowed new understandings of place to emerge through affective, sensory intra-actions between the human and more-than-human (nonhuman entities). Walking the Line without traffic felt like another example of this process. When movement changed, perception changed. When perception changed, learning became possible.

This is part of what I describe as the pedagogy of place (Page, 2020) the idea that environments teach through encounter, rhythm, disruption, and shared experience.

What has emerged from the new coastline so far?

Walking along the damaged stretch of coastline, I became aware of things I had not seen before. The erosion had exposed the roots of sea carrot plants beneath the shingle.

Sea Carrot Root – Photograph by Heather Wren

Seeing those roots felt strangely symbolic. It was as if the coastline was revealing something about its own history, showing what usually remains hidden.

In my earlier research, I found that moments of disruption often bring invisibilities to the foreground, allowing new relations between human and more-than-human worlds to be noticed. Page (2020) describes this as part of the pedagogical potential of place, where absence, remaking, and the ‘in-between’ become sites of learning. The exposed roots made visible the layered ecological processes that usually remain beneath the surface of everyday experience inviting me to think about the roots of the shoreline and how the road was built upon it covering up what is naturally there.

I found myself wondering whether the sea was reminding us that the Line has always been temporary, always dependent on deeper ecological processes. Perhaps the exposure of roots was a reminder to return to foundations, to think again about how we live with this coastline rather than against it. In my thesis, similar encounters with material change such as erosion, water movement, and shifting stones prompted reflection on how environmental empathy emerges through affective, embodied intra-actions with more-than-human processes over time.

At the same time, the wildlife in the Ley and Sea seemed to carry on as usual. The local Seal (Sally/Sinbad) did summersault’s the water, Swans swam gracefully under Slapton bridge, the sound of the Cettis Warbler continued to catch my attention, as did the flash of blue of the Kingfisher (Richard) who fishes under the bridge.

Wildlife each side of Slapton Line – Photographs by Heather Wren

The contrast was noticeable. What felt like a dramatic rupture in human systems appeared as just another moment within longer ecological rhythms. This difference in temporal scale reflects what posthuman and new materialist research often highlights: human disruption does not necessarily align with ecological continuity, yet both coexist within the same place (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010).

This too felt like a lesson from place. The coastline was not only changing physically, but also teaching about time, resilience, and perspective through its material processes. Facer (2013) describes this as the importance of temporal imagination the capacity to understand present experience as entangled with past histories and possible futures. Standing at the damaged coastline, the exposed roots, shifting shingle, and ongoing rhythms of the Ley made these layered times visible, inviting reflection on how this place has changed before and will continue to change beyond us.

Finding history in the shingle and sea

One part of my PhD thesis in 2024 involved what I called swimming-with-data, where I gathered photographs, recordings, objects, and reflections whilst responding to ‘moments that glow’ (MacLure, 2013) which connected to water and the sea and then entered the water while thinking with them. Swimming became a way of learning with environment through the body, allowing sensory experience, memory, and material encounter to shape understanding rather than beginning with explanation.

Recently, this way of learning with place continued in an unexpected way. On one visit, I took my metal detector along the beach and found a World War II bullet casing in the shingle. Holding it in my hand connected this moment to Operation Tiger and the long history embedded in this coastline. The encounter felt similar to the emergences I experienced during swimming-with-data, where material objects and environments prompted new ways of thinking through embodied experience.

That work was grounded in the idea that place is pedagogical. Places teach through sensory experience, memory, resistance, and change. Slapton has been teaching me for many years through the sea, the Ley, the shifting shingle ridge, and the histories held within this landscape.

The found bullet casing made the idea that past, present, and future are entangled through material encounters (Barad, 2007) tangible. The object connected wartime history, coastal erosion, wind, waves and my own presence on the beach in that moment. The coastline became a meeting point of times, forces, materialities and stories.

This moment also reminded me of the Sherman tank memorial at Torcross, which was raised from the sea decades after Operation Tiger and now sits overlooking the beach. In my thesis, I wrote about the tank as a material reminder of events that are no longer visible but remain present in the place. The tank was rusted by the sea that once held the bodies of soldiers and the debris of war, meaning that the material object itself carries traces of those entanglements. It becomes a visible marker of histories that are otherwise dispersed through water, sand, and memory.

As Golanska (2017) suggests, places can hold memories that are not easily seen or narrated but remain embedded within their materiality. The tank, the bullet casing, the shingle, and the sea together form a kind of distributed memory of Operation Tiger. Some of that memory is visible in monuments, while other parts remain submerged, dispersed, or slowly eroded.

The materials gathered through these swims were later brought together into an assemblage, which I expressed through a short film combining images, sound recordings, writing, and moving water. In posthuman and new materialist research, an assemblage can be understood as a temporary coming-together of human and more-than-human elements through which meaning emerges (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Bennett, 2010). Rather than representing experience, the assemblage allows relationships between bodies, materials, memories, technologies, and environments to remain visible and active. The film therefore became not simply a record of the research, but part of the research itself, continuing the intra-actions between water, memory, place, and perception.

Click here to watch the assemblage film

Slapton holds memory in its materiality.

The sea, the shingle, and the land continue to move those memories around, revealing some while covering others. This ongoing process of remembering and forgetting is part of how place teaches. Just as swimming-with-data allowed water to become part of the research process, these encounters with wartime material remind me that learning with place often emerges through unexpected intra-actions between bodies, materials, and histories.

In this way, the recent changes to the Slapton Line feel less like a break from my earlier research and more like its continuation. The coastline continues to participate in the research by inviting attention, reflection, and response.

The road collapse feels like another moment in that ongoing learning. A difficult one, but still a lesson.

The wind, sea, broken tarmac, and shifting stones seem to be asking questions about impermanence, adaptation, and responsibility. They remind us that this coastline is alive and changing, whether we are ready for it or not.

Creating a shared assemblage

Because this moment feels important, both personally and collectively, I am beginning a new assemblage of experiences connected to the Slapton Line since the storm. Not only is this part of my ongoing research, but I am also hoping that it is an important archive of feelings, thoughts, intra-actions between the human/more-than-human as we grapple with climate change together as a community. Therefore, I would like to invite others to contribute.

If you feel connected to Slapton, Torcross, Stokenham, or the Ley, you are warmly invited to share emergent photographs, memories, drawings, recordings, reflections, or observations about the Line and what has happened using the method of responding to glow moments (what invitations from the environment are you alerted to as you think about the future of our place together?).

These contributions will become part of an ongoing collective assemblage exploring how people and place learn with each other over time during periods of crisis and adaptation which I may use in a future exhibition/publication.

You can contribute by scanning the QR code here:

Or click here

From the broken Slapton Line to the Slapton Learning Garden

The experiences at Slapton are not separate from the research I am now developing. They are part of what has shaped a new project I am currently preparing: an application for an ESRC New Investigator Grant, which would support the creation of a transdisciplinary learning garden in Slapton.

The grant I am preparing is a three year the project. The project builds on my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Exeter and focuses on how affective, embodied empathy can emerge through learning with land, food systems, biodiversity, and community place-relations.

The proposed learning garden would be developed in partnership with several organisations already connected to this work, including:

• University of Exeter (CRTE)
• Slapton Field Centre (Field Studies Council)
• Devon Food Partnership
• Stokenham Area Primary School
• Indigenous collaborators in Australia through RMIT Melbourne

Together, these partnerships aim to explore how environmental education can move beyond classroom-based knowledge toward relational, place-based learning experiences.

What the learning garden will do

The learning garden is imagined as a living research and learning environment where children, educators, researchers, creating  community members can explore environmental questions together.

Activities in the garden would include:

• growing food and learning about food systems
• habitat restoration and biodiversity observation
• creative and sensory engagement with land
• seasonal community events
• student workshops with the Slapton Field Centre
• collaborative learning with Indigenous knowledge partners
• creative assemblage-making and storytelling

The aim is to create conditions where environmental empathy can emerge through experience, much like the moments described here at Slapton. In this sense, the learning garden grows directly from the same pedagogical idea: place teaches.

Responding to the UK Nature Security Assessment

This work also responds to wider national concerns. The UK’s Nature Security Assessment (2026) highlights biodiversity loss, food insecurity, ecosystem degradation, and climate change as interconnected risks affecting long-term social and ecological resilience.

Importantly, the report highlights that resilience cannot be achieved through infrastructure and technology alone. It requires social learning, community engagement, and stronger relationships with the natural world across generations.

The learning garden is designed as a small but meaningful response to this challenge, exploring how education, community, and place-based learning can contribute to environmental resilience.

Moments like the damage to the Slapton Line make these issues feel immediate and real.

Invitation to be part of the project

The learning garden is still in development, and community involvement is essential to shaping it.

If you are local to South Devon and interested in:

• environmental education
• biodiversity and food growing
• creative engagement with nature
• community learning spaces
• local environmental change
• volunteering or collaboration

I would love to hear from you.

You can:

• contribute to the Slapton assemblage via the Padlet
• get in touch about the learning garden project
• share ideas about how this space could support the community

This project grows from place, and it will grow with people.

A personal note

I want to acknowledge that this reflection is written at a time when some members of our community are facing very real uncertainty, particularly those whose homes, businesses, and daily lives have been directly affected by the damage to the Slapton Line. My intention in writing this is not to take away from those immediate concerns or the seriousness of the situation.

Instead, I am trying to make sense of what is happening through my relationship with this place, both as a neighbour and as a researcher. I hope this piece creates space for shared reflection and connection, while recognising that for many people right now, practical challenges and difficult decisions must come first.

Please sign the petition to ask Parliament to consider our cause by clicking here and share far and wide!

My name is Dr Heather Wren, and you can email me at hw474@exeter.ac.uk

 

References

 

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Facer, K. (2013). Towards a research agenda for the future: Futures education, temporal imagination and the role of education in a changing world. Futures, 52, 135–142.

Golanska, D. (2017). Remembering from the deep: The materiality of memory in coastal landscapes. In Memory studies and material culture (pp. 93–110).
(Use the exact edited volume details from your thesis reference list.)

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232.

Page, T. (2020). Placemaking as pedagogy. Routledge.
(Adjust title if your thesis uses the edited collection version.)

Trott, C. (2022). Climate change education for transformation: Exploring the affective and embodied dimensions of environmental learning. Environmental Education Research.