Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea

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The sea sits at the heart of Charlotte Runcie’s inquiry, approached as a force that has shaped our imaginations and our lives, and as something women have had to reckon with in particular ways. She moves through what the sea has meant across ages, tracing how it has inspired, fascinated, and unsettled, and how her own attachment to its deep blue took hold.

Her route takes in ancient Greek myths, poetry, shipwrecks, and Scottish folktales, each offering a different way of looking at water that refuses to be held still. The sea appears as story and as fact, as lure and warning, its surface always shifting under the weight of what we project onto it.

Through these crossings, Runcie asks what the wild, untameable waves can show us about fear, longing, and the hard edges of being human.