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Sophie
Pierce |
Writer and Broadcaster |
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Whether
you are six or sixty, the thrill of hunting for cowries never fades, says Sophie Pierce August 1948. A fifteen year old girl lies on her stomach
in a dark, wet Cornish cave, while a storm rages on the beach. Totally absorbed, she sifts and scrabbles through
the cold, gritty sand at the bottom of the rock face. She is looking for cowrie shells. That was my
mother, and now, over fifty years later, I too have the cowrie bug. It’s an obsession which seems to run in
families. We’re not interested in shells
generally, only the cowrie. So what is
it about this tiny, egg-shaped shell, with its ridged porcelain-like surface,
and its distinctive central lip, that is so addictive? The obvious thing
is that cowries are beautiful; they are also quite hard to find, but that of
course is a major part of the appeal.
They are one of the British coastline’s best kept secrets, and cowrie
hunters are rather proud of that fact. Sue Vintcent, 68,
has an old butterscotch tin full of cowries collected during her childhood. She uses them as counters in games, and
says she’s never been able to resist looking for them when she’s on a
suitable beach. “They’re like little
pearls; it’s a challenge to find them because they’re so small and subtle.” Why British
cowries are so little known is unclear, because the cowrie itself is found
all over the world, in all shapes and forms, and its shape is deeply
familiar; indeed tropical ones are often to be found in British seaside gift
shops. Wherever cowries crop up, they
are given special significance, being used as money, jewellery and fertility
symbols. Dr Graham Oliver
is an expert in molluscs at the National Museum of Wales. He says the shells
have varying meaning according to where they are found. “In Africa and the Indian Ocean they are
used as currency; across the world they are used in all sorts of ethnographic
decorations, particularly as a substitute for the eyes, with the slit of the
shell turned outwards.” Here in Britain
we don’t have such strong cultural traditions around the cowrie, although it
is believed that hundreds of years ago British mariners took them with them
on voyages to trade with people they met abroad. Nevertheless among some families the shells
hold an almost mystical appeal, and hours of every holiday will be spent
looking for them. Two cowries are
found in the United Kingdom: Trivia monacha which has three spots on top, and
Trivia arctica which is plain; they are never bigger than about 1cm
long. They are found mainly on the
west coast of Britain and Ireland, and are home to a small sea snail, which
of course has died naturally by the time the shell appears on the beach. The
shells tend to be found at the bottom of rocks and cliffs, among other shells
and shingle of a similar size. Precise
locations are fiercely guarded secrets among hunters, but they can be found
anywhere along our western coasts from north Cornwall to the north of
Scotland. Collecting
cowries does not damage the environment.
Douglas Herdson from the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth says it
can be a good way of introducing children to the fascinating world of marine
life. “Picking up empty shells and
taking them home is fine, it doesn’t do any harm at all. Just don’t let youngsters start buying
exotic shells in shops, because the animals that lived in them are all too
likely to have been killed.” Chris Thomas, 52,
a physicist at the University of Leicester, must be one of the UK’s keenest
cowrie hunters. In fact his whole
family are completely hooked. They compete fiercely with each other to find
the most, and Chris even has a website (www.ion.le.ac.uk/~ect/cowries/)
devoted to their cowrie quest. One of
a family of four, Chris’s cowrie habit started as a child, inherited from his
maternal great-grandparents. He says
it really took off while they were on holiday in north Wales. “We were staying
with some maiden aunts, and started playing with cowries inside on wet days,
competing to find them hidden around the house. We then progressed to looking for cowries
on the local beaches, and what started as a childhood diversion has now
become a fully fledged obsession.” Chris says his
cowrie quest started to get really serious when he was in his thirties. He now devotes his British holidays to
cowrie hunting, mainly in North Wales, and says he has no time for other,
more usual, beach activities. He and
his partner Mary spend so much time looking for cowries they even wear strap-on
knee pads for the job. Chris has a
particular rivalry with his brother Colin, who he says is even keener than
him. Colin, an amateur pilot, regularly flies from his home in Oxford to far
flung corners of Wales and Scotland for cowrie day trips. They send each other postcards during their
respective hunts, reporting on running totals. Chris says his
record cowrie haul was 1700 in three days, collected with his sister
Lorraine. She is another obsessive.
Later this year she is getting married on a tiny church on a half tidal
island off the coast of Wales, where the family collects cowries. Naturally, the invitation has real cowries
stuck on it. Chris has around
eight thousand cowries, which he displays in tall glass spaghetti jars. But
not everyone keeps them, and certainly most cowrie hunters don’t have so
many. For most people it’s more a case
of taking a few home, and then coming across them years later in a drawer or
a button box, and wondering where you found them, or which holiday they were
from. This year we’ll
be going to Cornwall again, along with my mother and father, and my brothers
and their children. Three generations,
aged from 2 to 80, will gather to hunt cowries, lying for hours on damp,
gritty beaches. The thrill of the hunt
never fades. |
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