Just Around the Corner

Down the river path from St Gluvius towards Flushing sun was glazing the water of the incoming tide as it swilled up the estuary towards Penryn Bridge. Spring, I thought, is just around the corner.

Gylly and Me

Here’s something from the archives with a beachy theme and variable weather conditions – sort of appropriate for the August this year’s meteorology has served us I thought? It’s a series of snapshots of my relationship with my local beach during my time as an undergraduate several years ago now in Falmouth. Perhaps I should do a sequel some time? I’ve even managed to dig out some actual snapshots to go with. Comments and suggestions welcome as always.

I gravitated towards the beach for reassurance: not so much for the comfort of the familiar, but for the solidarity gleaned from feeling that familiarity with the place was imminent. I looked forward to learning what those rocks were, why there was so much seaweed, and why the sand made the soles of my feet so white that my pasty skin looked tanned in comparison.

Retrospective: 2014 in 14

This seemed to work quite well last year so here’s this year’s shot at a little recap of 2014 in 14 sentences with 14 photos I’ve taken during the course of the year. If you click on the first image you can read the text alongside the pictures as you scroll through if you prefer.

On a blue Monday that sits like a clear bleb in the dregs of January I stay outdoors all day relishing cloudless skies until the sun goes down off Pennance Point and the stars appear one by one then a hundred, like a reverse rash of freckles in the absence of light.

So many things, I think as they seem to appear from feint to sharp whilst I look for them, to be grateful for.

How light is they sky behind the dark.

The closest I get to Valentine’s day melancholia this year is the realisation as I sit planning my future ventures that I will be financially penalised for travelling alone.

But I do it anyway and before I’ve had time to think myself out of it the journey of 100 thousand words begins with a single step, several missed and cancelled trains and a hotter day in mid March than ought to be expected after such a tempestuous start to the year’s weather.

With the sea to my left and a skylark up in my subconscious to my right I map by eye and foot my progress west with the unfurling of spring: each day another flower open from three days before, bluebells spiking up that, next week and twenty miles further round the coast, will be in bud.

A different landscape every day for thirty days, spanning moods and seasons; from bare branches and blackthorn blossom to foxglove waymarkers signposting the path up through the boulders; umpteen unidentifiable green and cream umbellifers, to seedheads and flowering grasses, meadow and field yellowing under the sun.

A defining moment – at Nanjizal, on the south-western brink of the British mainland in early June – shrouded in waterproofs, hood up and drawn in so that my view was limited to a small oblong peeping out into dripping rain as I traverse yet another granite zawn enjoying it as much as any day striding out in the sunshine.

This is who I am now, one woman on a peninsula: read into that what you will.

Far away in the forest five female tawny owls kewick across a valley filled with trees as far as the eye can see.

Then on a cloudy and otherwise unremarkable September day I clamber the boulders of the border shoreline into Devon and pick a pebble off the beach with Piran’s cross in quartz intruding through the slate.

Better the weight of stones in my pockets from a walk on the beach than the weight of worry on the mind.

But before I know it I’ve forgotten that blue Monday in the depth of winter and that grizzled Tuesday on the cusp of summer as the year closes in again and my mind closes down, drugged by the lack of daylight in my life in more ways than one I find it can be hard to recall how far I’ve come, how much I’ve gained through the weeks and months in this sad lethargy of deprivation.

My first Christmas day in Cornwall, absent from the family madness happening somewhere else in the country – not ‘at home’, but somehow at home in the sense that I was where I should be – I look out at dawn from the window overlooking the bay and I see how light is the sky behind the dark as I watch the midwinter sunrise over Gribbin Head.

Coastlining 10.2: Falmouth – Helford Passage

Date: 9th May 2014         Distance walked: 8 miles         Height climbed: ~1175 ft

It is light by the time I return to Swanpool, not bright daylight, but a cotton-grey pre-dawn that retires any expectations of an exciting sunrise to make up for the non-sunset of last night. As I reach the beach I look back over my shoulder and can see a blush behind the cloud cover. Crossing the road over the bar between beach and pool I make my way uphill and veer off-road and on-path towards the little patch of woodland on Pennance Point. Turning round at the highest point of the hill I survey the view I’m so familiar with, seeing it with fresh eyes for the first time at daybreak.

Coastlining 10.1: Falmouth

[Pendennis Peninsula to Swanpool]                 Date: 8th May 2014    Distance walked: ~2miles

I leave the house half an hour before sunset and walk through the quiet residential streets of Falmouth town and up onto the headland that curls out southeastwards into the Fal Estuary. The road passes high above the docks which shelter in the northern lee of this spit of land where the water is deep, tidal and yet protected from the moods of the open sea.

Coastlining 9: Portscatho – St Anthony Head

Date: 3rd May 2014        Distance walked: 6.2 miles        Height climbed: 919 ft

New boots squeak clean. Residents greet me like a local as I make my way back through the village of Portscatho along the road above the harbour that leads to a dead end that leads to a stile that leads to the coast path. It’s been raining and everything looks and feels and smells very green. The first hillslope outside the village is covered in rows and rows of posts and tubes for young trees – part of the Diamond Wood plantation I believe – the sprouting heads of which are just beginning to peek out of the tops of the tubes like forced rhubarb. It’s hard to imagine what this will look like covered in woodland, apart from completely different. I keep my wool layer on and shove my hands in my pockets. The dew and rain-damp beads on the glossy leather of my new walking boots like a chocolate bar taken straight from the fridge into a warm kitchen. I’ve been wearing them in at home and for short strolls in the evenings. It’s a short and easy walk today: a smooth mud-ribbon of a path over a low gently undulating coastline, heading homeward for me.

False Lights

A Tale of Salvaging History from the Wreck of Cultural Myth

picture credit: BBC’s ‘Jamaica Inn’ (2014) fictional wreckers on location at Holywell Bay

Despite having lived in Cornwall for a while now I am still intrigued by the romanticism suggested by its rugged coastline and find myself drawn to the fantastic stories that accompany it. Here is a landscape that lends itself to adventure. To someone raised on a literary diet that began, pre-school, with Captain Pugwash, leading on – via Swallows and Amazons – to Daphne du Maurier’s gothic coastal romances involving shipwrecks, plunder and bodice-ripping encounters with pirates, every cove is a smugglers’ haven, every cliff path a desire line worn in through years of wreckers wreaking mischief with their lanterns on stormy nights. Barrels and caskets stacked in a sea cave above high water mark. Brandy for the Parson, ’baccy for the Clerk. Curtains drawn over the lighted windows of a nearby village. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over: so watch the wall my darling…