Guardian: Before the coast became our national park and playground, we once feared the sea. It was where "beauty, horror and immensity united", as the Romantics might put it. This phrase sprang to mind watching the church tower of Porthleven cowering behind terrifying blasts of spray this week, and seeing a section of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's South Devon railway, the engineering marvel that snakes along the south coast, reduced to something like a rope bridge at Dawlish.
Those whose homes have been wrecked...