Lanyon set out to remake landscape painting. As well as aiming to express the experience of being in a place, he also sought to portray a place in a way that made reference to its historical past and, perhaps, symbolic value. This painting was inspired by Levant, in Cornwall, where many lives were lost when tin mines that tunnelled under the seabed were inundated by the sea. Thus, he uses the fluid quality of the paint and the expansive, vigorous style of abstract expressionist painting to evoke historical events.