If you were to stand in the middle of Derbyshire, you’d be the farthest you could get from the sea in the UK – about 100km or 62 miles. In such places it’s possible to forget you live on an island. But the sea surrounds us and, taking into account our 6,289 scattered islands, we have about 31,000km (19,300 miles) of coastline.
Along that epic shore lie regions as diverse in culture as they are in land formations, ecologies and dialects. From the remote, weather-beaten north of Scotland to the azure seascapes of Cornwall, Britain is ringed by one of the longest, most varied coastlines in Europe.
