RECENTLY, we have been witnessing the very sad spectacle of whales beached along some of our coastline. There has been something particularly moving about the ghastly fate of these magnificent seaborne mammals.

There doesn’t yet seem to be any explanation for these untoward and unusual events. Why a whole series of these princes of the seas should have lost their bearings more or less simultaneously is, for the present at least, a mystery. And this mystery adds to the drama of these events.

I don’t know whether readers of this column were as struck as I was, when looking at the pictures of the beaches concerned, by the fact that it was clearly well beyond the capacity of the people and the technologies available at the time when the whales were beached to move them back out to safety in the deep seas. One could sense the frustration of the people present, who clearly wanted to assist but who were equally clearly unable to provide any practical assistance because of the vast size and weight of the whales.

Twenty tons of whale embedded in the soft sands of a Norfolk beach is enough to defeat the efforts of a whole community.

No doubt, in due course, the investigations now being conducted will resolve the mystery and enable us to understand what went so wrong – and I very much hope that this will enable us to prevent a recurrence.

But the immediate sense of impotence in the face of these troubling events was in marked contrast to the news that on our own Charmouth beach a large group of volunteers had assembled to remove vast quantities of detritus that had washed up on the beach following the recent stormy weather.

All too often, we are inclined to treat the spoliation of our beaches as if this, like the beaching of the whales, were something beyond our control. But the splendid volunteers who have cleaned up the beach at Charmouth have demonstrated in the clearest possible way that even if social action cannot by itself rescue huge mammals driven by great forces of nature, such action can deal more than adequately with less dramatic problems on our beaches.