The Zero at Newlyn

When people ask why I moved to Newlyn, I tell them about the light, because that is the answer they are expecting, and because the light here is genuinely ridiculous: a flat, silvered, upturned-bowl light that once made a whole school of painters give up on London. It is a good answer. It is not quite the true one.

The true one is that there is a small hut at the end of the South Pier, and inside it, the height of everything begins.11The painters were the Newlyn School: Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley and their friends, who came for the light in the 1880s and stayed for the fish. Their pictures are mostly of people mending nets and looking stoic about it. I am fond of them anyway.

Let me explain, though I know I am about to lose some of you. If you have ever looked at an Ordnance Survey map and seen a small number beside a dot on a hilltop, 248, say, you have been told how far that hill stands above something. The something is mean sea level. But the sea, as anybody who has stood on a beach for more than ten minutes will know, does not have a level. It has a mood. It goes up and down twice a day, more at the full moon, less at the quarters, higher when the wind leans on it and the pressure drops, lower in the long blue calm of a September high. If you want to measure from the sea you first have to decide what the sea is doing on average, and to do that you have to watch it for a long time.

So, between 1915 and 1921, somebody watched it. A tide gauge in the hut on the pier recorded the height of the water, hour after hour, for six years: through the war, through the influenza, through whatever was happening in the lives of the people reading it that we will never know about. At the end, the readings were averaged, and the average was declared to be nought. Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Every height on every map of mainland Britain is a distance above that number.22I have tried to imagine doing anything every hour for six years. The closest I have come is worrying.

I spent twenty-three years making maps, and I knew all of this the way you know your own postcode. It was a fact in the back of a manual. I had never once thought of it as a place until the autumn after I left the Survey, when I came down to look at a house I couldn’t afford, and walked out along the pier in the rain because there was nothing else to do while I waited for the estate agent, and found it.

It is not much to look at. A squat, whitewashed building the size of a garden shed with ambitions, sitting on the very end of the granite, with the trawlers nudging at their ropes beside it and the gulls conducting a long-running dispute on its roof. There is a small sign. There was nobody about. I stood in front of it for longer than I would like to admit, with water running off the end of my nose, feeling the way I imagine some people feel at the source of a river: a bit foolish, a bit moved, and very conscious that this was not the kind of thing you could explain to the estate agent.

From here, the height was carried inland. Surveyors with a level and a pair of staffs walked it up the country in short, careful steps, a few dozen metres at a time, reading the difference between one staff and the next and adding it up, all the way to Scotland. Wherever they paused they cut a mark into something solid, a church tower, a bridge, the corner of a bank, so that the next person would not have to start again from the pier. You will have walked past hundreds of them. A horizontal bar above a broad arrow, chiselled into the stone at about knee height. Each one says, very quietly: here, exactly here, is this far above the hut at Newlyn.

These are benchmarks. They are why this website is called what it is called, and they are, I think, the most modest monuments in Britain.

The part I didn’t know, until I lived here, is that the zero is no longer at sea level.

The gauge is still working; it has been working, with interruptions, for more than a century, and the record it keeps is one of the longest in the world. What it shows, if you plot it, is a line that wobbles a great deal from year to year and goes, very steadily, upwards. The sea at Newlyn is now something like twenty centimetres higher than the sea those observers averaged in 1921. The zero stayed where it was. The water moved.

So the number that every map of the country is built on is, strictly speaking, a photograph. It is the sea as it was in a particular six years, the years my grandmother was a girl, held still. The water lapping at the steps below the hut each morning is already a hand’s breadth above it, and climbing.33A hand’s breadth is my measure, not the Survey’s. I am retired. I am allowed.

I find I don’t mind this as much as I expected to. I spent my working life among people who were very serious about accuracy, and I am one of them, and I know what it means that the ground beneath our maps is a fixed decision about a moving thing. But that seems to me to be true of most of the zeroes we measure ourselves against. The weight we were at twenty-five. The town we grew up in. The version of a person we knew before they were ill. We pick a moment, we average it, we call it level, and we go on measuring from it long after the water has moved on.

I live at about thirty-one metres, give or take. I know this because there is a benchmark on the wall of the chapel at the top of my hill, and I have done the sums.

Most mornings I walk down to the harbour, which takes me from thirty-one metres to roughly four, and I go out along the pier as far as the hut. I don’t do anything there. I stand for a minute and look at the water, which is higher than it was, and at the hut, which is exactly where it was, and I think: this is where it starts. Everything else in the country is measured from here: every hill I ever drew, every mountain I will never climb, the chapel wall, the kitchen table, me.

It is a comfort, I find, to stand at the bottom of something. Then I walk back up the hill and put the kettle on, thirty-one metres above a sea that isn’t there any more.