Mark Williams, The Coastal Forager
Take Mark's new book to the shoreline on your every visit!
Wherever you are in Ireland, you aren’t far from a coastline. Mark Williams, author of The Coastal Forager and the foraging guide who runs Galloway Wild Foods from his home in South West Scotland, describes this intertidal zone as “one of the last accessible truly wild places… where beauty and treasure cling to every rock”.
We’ve been following Mark’s work for a good many years, and were excited to buy his book. For everyone who wants to understand and enjoy this truly wild habitat, we’d recommend you order it, pronto. Right now is a good time for foraging, with the Easter low tides, and longer, warmer days ahead.
Galloway Wild Foods offers foraging and wild cookery camps, retreats and courses and Mark is an expert in seaweed, fungi, preserving, mixology - whatever lives or moves in the intertidal zone is his thing. The book collects all these skills together between the pages, in a humorous and readable collection of tips and information.
The book opens with a discussion of what exactly is foraging and how does it differ from hunting. Mark then charts the coastline according to habitats: just what kind of zone are you standing on right now - salt marsh? Shingle beach? Cliff? Wood?
Each one of these habitats will have related plant species. We took the book to our nearest craggy beach and yes, we found rock samphire and sea campion. Local sandy habitats are full of silverweed, sea radish and scurvy grass. Now we know where to look for orache or wild thyme.
The salt marshy tidal lagoons of west Cork have always been great for samphire, now we’ll head back and look for sea plantain. The book is also a bible on seaweed.
Our first full forage using the book was to fulfill a long-time desire to catch and cook a razor clam. We got one! In fact we got three, but were too intimated to pull the first two up from the substrate. We also found a sand gaper and cockles (kudos to Max Jones from Up There The Last for introducing us to the best local beach for finding shellfish.)
Along with all this info about where to forage, Mark adds tips on every page – if you don’t come home with a razor clam, then at least collect some of their shells for writing out plant labels for your vegetable bed. You’ll find it easier to catch your razor clam with the sun behind you, so that you’ll spot the water jets. Freeze the limpets, then make them into ceviche.
Honestly, every page…
We foraged our razor clam using the salt method “the least sporting, but often the most efficient”. We brought home just the one, because we wanted to understand how to cook with it before taking any more. Mark gives extended instructions both for eating it raw, sashimi style, and for cooking, which translates as cook it briefly! We’ll do sashimi next time, but this time, we blanched in a shallow pan for 30 seconds, then used some foraged sea lettuce as a sling to put it on the fire. We made such a mess of trying to cut out the stomach section that we compensated by dicing it, the foot on one side (the nicest bit) and the rest on the other, doused with some wild garlic butter and eaten with coffee spoons.
Mark describes the experience well: “Catching razor clams involves timing, stealth, observation and trickery that, when combined accurately, climax in a glorious reveal that has most folk squealing with delight”.
So: towels, swim suits, dry robes, The Coastal Forager. We must go down to the sea again, because that’s where the wild things are.
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