“Who’s this moving alive over the moor?”

and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

So the composition’s not perfect and the  light balance isn’t quite right but hey, I’m not a photographer and my camera’s a ten-year-old point and click, and this is  one of my favourite photos I’ve taken this year so here it is to celebrate World Photo Day and the anniversary of the invention of photography.

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Coastlining 25: Porthcothan – Padstow

Date:  Thursday 26th June 2014   Distance walked: 13 miles       Total distance: 243 miles

Minnows Islands, Porthcothan

snails at Constantine Bay

I set out from Porthcothan in a lull in the downpour. Pushing through the waist high vegetation up the cliff path on the northern side of the inlet that sloped up from beach to dune to cliff I was glad I’d had the forethought to roll my waterproof trousers up in the bottom of my bag when I set out yesterday morning. 

Coastlining 17: Lamorna – Sennen Cove

Date: Tuesday 3rd June 2014       Distance walked: 12 miles      Total distance: 155.5 miles

Tregurnow Cliff

Sun out. Sun in. Cloud cover. Mizzle patches. Clear. Jacket on. Jacket off. I started out on the path from Tregurnow skirting their land through bramble scrub laced with bluebells until I was directly below the farmhouse on the other side of the fox field. Globe thistles still at the prickle stage. Great sheaves of foxgloves – groves – gracing the waysides with their tall spires.

Carn Barges, where I rejoined the cliff path proper, was a rock form on the edge like a giant’s seat. Looking west there was the low white shape of Tater-du lighthouse on the next point of the cliff.

Coastlining 14.2: Mullion – Perranuthnoe

Date: 29th May 2014     Distance walked: 15 miles (131 miles total)    Height climbed: 2548 ft

Part 2: Porthleven to Perranuthnoe – 8.5 miles

Porth Sulinces

 

Previously on Coastlining: 14.1 Mullion to Perranuthnoe (Mullion to Porthleven)

Leaving Porthleven I appear to cross an invisible threshold. I perceive a change in the landscape. It is rougher, higher, more ‘remote’. Slate faced hedges cushioned with thrift. Grasses and plantains in flower. Kidney vetch, birdsfoot trefoil. Domes of wild carrot blooms like those brooch bouquets carried by brides who think that gems and paste can outdo real flowers. Foxglove spires spiking up from a cover of bracken below the path. Untouchable beaches below at Parc Trammel Cove and Porth Sulinces. The bulk of Trewavas Head in the distance, with its ruined engine houses perched on the edge. A seagull on the wing suddenly appears from below the cliff edge.

This is what it’s all about: with  the sea to my left and a skylark up in the subconscious space above my right shoulder.

Coastlining 14.1: Mullion – Perranuthnoe

Date: 29th May 2014     Distance walked: 15 miles (131 miles total)    Height climbed: 2548 ft

Part 1: Mullion to Porthleven – 6.5 miles 

Polurrian to Mullion Island

 

Previously on Coastlining: 13 Lizard Point to Mullion Cove

It’s a relief to get off the pavement and down the footpath at the back of the Polurrian Hotel after making it back to Mullion by a two-bus trip and a brief wait at Helston Sainsbury’s early this morning. Having been unable to describe to the taxi driver on Monday’s walk just where we wanted to be picked up I have by complete chance in choice of Mullion’s residential lanes managed to end up starting where I wanted to finish three days ago with Annie and Luna. Following a curve of steps down towards Polurrian Cove I glance back along the (half mile of) coast I’ve missed: there’s Mullion Island sticking out from the coastline looking like another headland.

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.

Capturing Lightning

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a dream. I was trying to catch up with two people who were walking ahead of me. No matter how fast I walked they continued to get further ahead, not noticing they had left me behind.