Doom Bar - Description

Description

The Doom Bar is a sandbar at the mouth of the Camel estuary on the north coast of Cornwall. The bar is composed mostly of coarse sediment carried up from the seabed by bed load processes, and it has been shown that there is a net inflow of sediment into the estuary. This inflow is aided by wave and tidal processes, but the exact patterns of sediment transport within the estuary are complex and have not been fully elucidated. There is only a very small sediment contribution from the River Camel itself: most of it is deposited much higher up the estuary.

There are three persistent sandbars in the Camel estuary: the Doom Bar; the Town Bar at Padstow, about 1 mile (1.6 km) upstream; and the Halwyn Bank just upstream of Padstow, where the estuary changes direction. All three are of similar composition; a large proportion of their sediment is derived from marine mollusc shells, and as a consequence it includes a high level of calcium carbonate, measured in 1982 at 62 per cent. The high calcium carbonate content of the sand has meant that it has been used for hundreds of years to improve agricultural soil by liming. This use is known to date back to before 1600. High calcium carbonate levels combined with natural sea salt made the sand valuable to farmers as an alkaline fertiliser when mixed with manure.

In a report published in 1839, Henry De la Beche estimated that the sand from the Doom Bar accounted for between a fifth and a quarter of the sand used for agriculture in Devon and Cornwall. He also stated that around 80 men were permanently employed to dredge the area from several barges, removing an estimated 100,000 long tons (100,000,000 kg) of sand per year, which he said he had been "assured by competent persons" had caused a reduction in height of the bar of between 6 and 8 feet (180 and 240 cm) in the 50 years before 1836. Another report, published about twenty years earlier by Samuel Drew, stated, however, that although the sandbars had been "pillaged" for ages they remained undiminished. An estimated ten million tons of sediment was removed from the estuary between 1836 and 1989, mostly for agricultural purposes and mostly from the Doom Bar. Sand is still regularly dredged from the area; in 2009 an estimated 120,000 tons of sand were removed from the bar and the surrounding estuary.

There is a submerged forest beneath the eastern part of the Doom Bar, off Daymer Bay. It is believed to be part of the wooded plain that existed off the current Cornwall coast before it was overcome by sand dunes and beach sand during the last significant rise in sea-level, which ended around 4,000 years ago. Exposed as they are to the Atlantic Ocean, the sands of the area have always been prone to sudden shifts: several houses were said to have been buried one night during a powerful storm. According to tradition one such shift led to the formation of the Doom Bar during the reign of Henry VIII (1509–1547), causing a decline in the prosperity of Padstow. Today, the sandbank covers approximately 0.4 square miles (1.0 km2), linking the beaches near Harbour Cove by sand flats, although the actual size and shape varies.

The name "Doom Bar" is a corruption of the older name Dunbar which itself derives from dune-bar. Although the bar was commonly known as "Dunbar sands" before 1900, the name "Doom Bar" was used in 1761 (as "the Doom-bar"), and it was also used in poetry, and in House of Commons papers in the 19th century.