It is a sea-fret day, the kind of day that sneaks in after misleading early summer sun. The kind of day that can only exist on the coast. We know that at home, inland, it is probably another bright and sunny May morning, but here all is grey.
Someone asked how I would describe the thin places. They are the liminal spaces, the portals, the in-between, neither-here-nor-there places. They are the undefined aching spaces where you realise that you, too, are part of the otherworld.
The Cley marshes are a very real and rational place. They are a managed space. They are, achingly, trying not to be so thin, but to have a fixed and firm future, where all survives, and migrants are welcomed, and Springs will follow on year on year and Summers and Autumns and
all the glories of the Winters. But we know it isn’t true. The Trust is making contingency plans – wrongly named – for they are not really contingent on anything but time.
And yet, on a sea-fret day, the Marshes become thin. They become edgeless, and muted, and alive and aloud, and time slows down, steals away among the reeds, and we step so willingly into the otherworld.
The otherworld. I say that as if it were a real and single space, but it is as multiple as the countless reeds we stand among. Each of us reaches into our own. And our own draws us in.
One thing I didn’t say when I was asked to describe the thinness of place: I didn’t tell you its colour. I didn’t tell you, because you will disagree. You will tell me it is shining white or golden buttercup or ladybird red. You will tell me it is the deepest of greens or the skyest of blues. And you will be right. Just as I am right when I tell you that its colour is sea-fret grey.
It feels like an otherworldly kind of day, and so I set out to notice all the grey, all the mistiness of uncertain doorways and sacred pathways.
I start with sky. Overcast. Like an overcoat, or a duvet, or an old wartime blanket. Heavy and comforting. A common pigeon sits on the gorse, ignored, but I love the subtle shades of pigeon wings, the muted grey-to-purple, precogniscent of end-of-season lavender. Norfolk flint in walls and rough pathways, hard, shining silver in the wet, but dull as pewter on a day like this.
Colours become subjective…old timber, weatherworn and salt-air-soaked, is grey to my eye, but others call otherwise. Likewise, the less-showy lichens on the bridge and the trees. One says a dandelion seed is white…maybe…if I get that close…but the whole head is soft grey, downy grey, much-loved-much-washed-sweatshirt grey.
Dandelion clocks. Aren’t they supposed to tell the hour of the year? Are they striking too early?
Steel cattle gates, fence lines and barbed wire.
Cattle gates. There are cattle on the marshes. Deep dark brown. Welsh black, I’m told, but my Welsh heritage was in the black of the mines and so I do not know. I know that I love the warm scent of cattle. I’m transported back to that innocent age of mucking out the shed on the scheme, when mucking out felt like a privilege. Perhaps it was.
Now herds are brought in to manage the marsh, a strange inversion of the old way.
Now a few head of beast stop us in our tracks. We look into their soulful eyes…their curious who-are-you? stares. A shy one rises uncertain, turns to lick away an itch, pretending it wasn’t interested in us at all. Cows. One of the most domesticated beasts of this island, and we stop and stare in wonder. Sometimes the otherworld is just another name for memory. Perhaps another name for loss.
Behind, an ear-splitting trill of a Chettys too close to miss, too hidden to see.
Grey-lag and Black Welsh in a Mexican stand-off. The cow bellows. The goose screams back. Is there something particularly sweet about that very precise patch of grass?
Geese fly over…without the grey noise of distant aircraft…we’re on their flight path and they don’t care: they’re swooping their wings for lift and we’re below and unimportant.
I’m told there was a heron. I didn’t see it.
I saw the egret, and the geese, and the swallows, and the first swifts of summer – all flying in, from their own thin places into this real, hard-managed, sanctuary.
Beneath the grey-reed thatches of the hides, the swallows nest. They win this game of hide-and-seek; we’re not hidden at all, but they carry on with their own game. A swallow in the sky, the first swifts of summer, things of this world…but there is an air of unreality when you stand a breath’s space beneath a wooden beam, and the swallow sits and watches you watching it…for a split-eon of time…before it decides it has more pressing business and flies out through the pegged open window, please leave it open, out over the grey scrapes, back into its own, real, this-world life.
