One day in the 1780s, the topographer William Gilpin sailed down the Lymington estuary in Hampshire and said of it that 'Its banks are mud, but of the best species; for they are clothed, like the other mudlands of the country, with sea-grass which gives them the air of meadows when the tide retires' (Gilpin 1791). Contemporary literature suggests that, until the appearance of a 'wasting disease' in the 1920s, it was the common condition of the intertidal mudflats and shallow waters of Britain and Europe to be thus clothed in sea-grasses, more usually called eelgrass or wigeon-grass.