I am not here to make a journal, or to represent this shore, or annotate my ‘process’. I am here to do it. I have the hours of light, and as far as I can, the night, to listen to the sea, touch it, smell it, and maybe to hear some imagined voices.
The sun rising behind me wakes the other shore, shining on Criffel, while here, on these sands, it’s still cool and wet from the night. A whole day, until sunset, to walk this stretch, to nestle in the grasses when the tide is up, to wander out when the sands and rocks see light, to feel this estuary.
Others write with authority about these sands and the human histories of this place. Others record it in photography and sound better than I ever will with my phone. But I am not here to make a journal, or to represent this shore, or annotate my ‘process’. I am here to do it. I have the hours of light, and as far as I can, the night, to listen to the sea, touch it, smell it, and maybe to hear some imagined voices.
A flock of Cumbria County Council JCB diggers convene in the car park, leaving their diesels to run while the drivers coffee up for the start of the day. They move out in convoy to the land behind, peat and marsh and farm, full of buried things. Behind, too, the straggle of single-storey homes, walled gardens, facing the salt winds and sunsets. My back is covered.
Across there are lights, haze, cliffs that cannot be touched. Here, grasses, sands and rocks, underfoot. Between, the sea, for the eyes, the ears.
The swales fill and empty. The winds are calm, the tides breathe easily all day. Even so, the sea can frighten me. I practice saying ‘Mawbray’. I find yellow chrysanthemums laid on the rocks, as if to remember someone.
Many birds avoid me, as do dogs, single men and families. My attention is on the sand and the brown waves. I do not keep notes. I take a few desultory photographs. I make a large number of structures from wood and shell and rock and plastic and then break them down before the sea finds them.
Mostly, I listen. And do nothing. And by darkness, I am liquid, my bones are waves and the rhythms of a voice are in my head.
