‘The fear has properly set in’: how it feels to watch my

Inverbervie, on the north-east coast of Scotland, faces an existential threat, with storms carving away metres of shoreline. Can anything be done to save what is left?

A decade ago, on my friend’s birthday, we took a huge tent and stayed the night at our local campsite. We laughed as we put the tent up where the grass met the shingle beach, the sunshine glistening on the water, the sound of the waves scraping the stones. I remember a night of ghost stories, teenage gossip and chasing each other with seaweed.

But the land where we pitched our tent is no longer there. It’s somewhere in the North Sea.