Pretty gardens

I recently wrote about visiting Hallsands in Devon and how the village was destroyed by the sea in 1917 probably because of the dredging of gravel offshore. I watched one of my favourite programmes this week - Coast which featured South Wales - a beautiful area in which I grew up. Part of the programme was about sand and gravel dredging from the sea bed off the coast at Porthcawl, one fifth of an eight mile sand bank has already been removed and nobody has any idea how this will effect the coastline. Also as the programme pointed out - sand is a finite resource, once it's gone it's gone. Apparently it's all so we can make our gardens look pretty . . .