The Inter Tidal and Beyond: The Harvest of Sea and Shore

Communities that live in risk-laden environments and whose margins for subsistence and material well-being are tightly drawn tend to cast the net of resource capture as widely as possible across what is available. For Hebridean communities, what could be harvested from the sea and the shore provided essential support in terms of food, with fish, strandings, sea mammals, shell food and seaweed all being exploited. Fish, shell-food, sea-fowl and eggs were especially important as strategic foods, because they were available at a time of year when the previous year’s grain harvest was running short and in the case of fish and sea fowl, because they had the added bonus of being food that could be stored.    The role of fish though, raises added questions over the extent to which Hebridean communities were willing to fully exploit such a resource, especially when it came to deep-sea fishing for cod.   The seaweed that could be harvested from the inter-tidal shore and from just below the low-water mark also had a critical role in many parts of the Hebrides, especially to the north and west, as a key additive to arable and even as a food for livestock during winter.