February. Friday.
8a.m. In a beautiful room of monochrome shades, black and white, silver and grey…and a wide panoramic view of the sea. The night’s cloud is breaking up, shifting the light on the water, catching attention for lost minutes at a time. I’m at gull-flight level. Some of them soar above me, some swoop below, others glide past at eye-level. There are gentle waves caressing the beach; the tide is two hours past the high, beginning to expose hard, wet sand.
Why am I assuming it is hard? It could be sink-right-in sand for all I know.
The road and pavement below my window are quiet. It is February, closed season for seasiders. Perhaps I’ll come back at the height of Summer, just to experience the difference, but really I am thinking this is where I want to be for the next Winter Solstice. A quick search suggests it might not be possible.
Last night I dreamed of delicate birds’ eggs, their shells sculpted like flowers. I dreamt of leaving all my belongings in a white plastic bag beside a lake, forgotten. It was gone when I went back for it. I dreamt about my friends. But it is morning now, I have coffee, and am sat at a table, looking out to sea and down onto the promenade, contemplating a walking and writing day ahead.
A mixed flock of gulls, herring and common, draws my gaze skywards. They’re not going anywhere, not hunting, not feeding, not chasing to mate, just circling. I am sure it must be purely for the joy of flight – the way we occasionally, even at this age, feel compelled to run down a hill.
It is a lazy flight. There is a lot of gliding between wing-beats, like a rower who pulls a few strokes and then lets the current take him aways before pulling a few more.
I wonder how long I could happily sit here just watching the gulls and the sky and the sea, and the few passing people below. If I lived here, would I tire of it? Would I miss having a garden? Could I really swap greenery for shades of blue and grey, and the beige of the beach? The beach is a drab shade. No soft golden or silvery sands; the sea comes daily up to the wall, soaking and scrubbing, and leaving behind mossy weeds and a harvest of cuttle-fish.
Equally though, there are no ugly mountains of boulder-rock breakwaters, only the old-fashioned timber groynes, nearly buried, stumps rising like some prehistoric henge whose ritual significance has long since been forgotten.
Mist smudges the horizon. There are no lights on the pier.
A stooping gent in a blue woollen hat throws a ball for two yapping terriers – their barks penetrating the double-glazing. A runner in shorts. Everyone seems to be wearing blue today – including me. Perhaps it marks us as coastal dwellers rather than hill-folk. There is always the exception though: an elderly couple – she is walking determinedly backwards – not in blue, but a bright pink jacket, softened by the barely-flapping skirt (probably tweed), thick tights and sensible shoes. A border collie races to the water’s edge, finds nothing of interest and lopes back up the beach. Another runner, in day-glo vest and shoes: his style is inelegant, he has a question-mark stoop that seems to be designed to provide as little streamlining as possible.
There is nothing visible in or on the water – only the distant turbines out in the mist. Turning slowly. Lethargic ghosts.
How would it be to spend a whole day at a window such as this, simply documenting the life that passes by, all the small details of the world beyond the window? Perhaps I will do that one day. Here. Or somewhere else. It makes for slow, lazy writing, much like the flight of the gulls.
Then I remember that I am here to walk.
There are walks that are full of complicated directions, over paths and styles that may or may not still exist 30 years on, where you (by which I mean “I”) have to keep referring to the route guide and the map. Fortunately, there are also those where the directions amount to “face the sea, turn left, and just keep following the path until you hit the next road…turn left again and you’re back where you started.” The walk around The Naze is one of the latter. It is a simple matter of keeping the water on your right until you hit road again. I suspect the actual path has shifted somewhat inland in places since the book was written. Coastal erosion continues and, while I understand the financial, personal, ecological rationale for wanting to “protect” landscapes and townscapes, there is another part of me that wants to simply allow the sea to have its way with us. Sooner or later it will anyway, and maybe we could better deploy our resources in trying to create, recreate, rebuild, (re)discover, alternatives elsewhere.
I don’t pretend to know how that will work, or even if it could. I do know that we are fighting a losing battle – that we have still not learned the lesson that Canute was trying to teach. We cannot turn back the sea. We cannot prevent erosion, longshore drift, the collapse of cliffs. I hate the expression, but I think the mindset is correct: we do need to look at “managed retreat”.
The problem is that word ‘retreat’. As a nation we hate anything that smacks of defeat, and retreat (managed or otherwise) really does. The truth is that our island (like all islands) is a shape-shifter. Beaches move. They get covered; they get scoured. They enlarge; they diminish. Our rivers silt up, but ultimately all of the hill water wants to find its way to the sea, so new channels form. Humans do not like this changeable nature of land. It reminds us how contingent we are.
I wonder when that happened. When did we become so incompatible with change? When did we become so fearful of the nature of things that we wanted to freeze everything as it is? More importantly, how do we move back towards the acceptance of the shiftable nature of the ground upon which we stand?
I have no answers.
This walk starts with a little retreat of my own. I plan to walk the first stretch from town up to the peninsula on the beach. The tide is low enough to give a good stretch of sand walking, but I quickly discover that the winter defences are still in place. Flood gates are firmly fixed across the beach access points. I can get down onto the sands, but it is unclear looking ahead where I might be able to clamber back up from them. I circle back and up onto the road.
In my short circuit, I pick up a first piece of sea glass, not quite smoothed enough, but I decide to keep it anyway. I start to pick up shells. They are a rarity on my local shingle beaches, but here is an abundance. I want to fill my pockets. I want to take home a bagful. I remember a sign I saw recently that stridently reminded me that to take anything from the foreshore is an offence!
Oh dear. I must resign myself to being a criminal because I always go home with a pocketful of pebbles or a handful of shells, or occasionally with a good clunky chunk of flint that will hold open a gate, or stop the slither of border stones under the decking.
I compromise. I let got of a handful of complete shells that I didn’t have a real plan for and set myself instead in search of the broken ones, the shells that are well on their way to becoming grit or gravel, the ones that have let go much of their outer-ness and expose their innards. There is something even more beautiful about the internal structure of a whelk shell, the pearlescent core of twisting corridor, that outshines its more robust, sea-washed, spiral.
It is pure coincidence that one of them reminds me of the flower/egg of my dream the night before.
I leave the beach and walk the prom, and the twisting, dead-end lanes of beach huts; the huts are all boarded up against the winter surges. Blind now to the beauty of the sea. In another contrary moment, I wish more people understood how beautiful the beach is at this time of year whilst also being grateful that they don’t, because a large part of that charm is the absence of the hoards who must use these hundreds of cupcake-coloured huts.
I don’t begrudge them. I have a beach hut of my own. Though mine really is a shack, where I dump my gear when I want to walk or swim. The table in my Edwardian chalet is rusting. The papers of my poems on the over-engineered notice board will need to be replaced this year, they’re curling and spotted with spider poo. The paint peels off the walls within days of application. I sweep it out. The sand comes back in. The buddha smiles on. Empty wine bottles serve as sea-shoe dripping posts. Plastic crates hold towels and shawls and plates and WD40. A football team beach towel is a homage to my late cousin. Elegant beach-life it is not.
Back in Walton, I imagine that all of these pretty-painted huts are prettier inside, prettier than mine, better maintained. I imagine few of them see people just off-load and go swim. These are party places, picnic places, whereas if I’m honest, mine really is just a lock-up.
I don’t begrudge them. I actually want to come back in the height of Summer and see what this beach-hut enclave looks like in full swing. There are poems from some of their denizens (The OAP Beach Hut Massive) laminated and tied to the railings in the railway station – poems from the elders, alongside drawings from primary school children. I am indescribably pleased by the care and connection that has gone into making that happen.
In another corner of the station is a bug hotel, with notices on bee and butterfly identification and honeycombed pyrography by refugees and their support teams. Pollination and cross-pollination does not only happen in the insect world.
Back on the sea front, there are tiers of huts climbing up the cliff. All brightly painted. I wonder about the hierarchy. The upper reaches have the best view, the lower ones the better beach access. Is it like native American totem poles where (contrary to popular belief) being low on the pole was a signal of high status…your carving being where it could be seen and admired, not hidden high up where you could be barely made out? Or is it an age thing? Do you aspire to the beach-level when there are children and youth and romance and the urge to run out immediately into the water, then become more willing to settle for the view from the top in exchange for not having to climb all the way down and back up again?
I leave the town behind and reach The Naze itself. The nose. The peninsular that not very long ago persuaded the town to change its name from Walton-le-Soken to Walton-on-the-Naze.
I’m intrigued by the Tower. It has the air of a watch-tower, except that all of its windows are to the landward. Information boards speak of its use during World War II when the area was a military installation.
Shortly after the outbreak of war – an expression that suggests ‘war’ is some king of alien creature, waiting in chains for an opportunity to break out, and not some man-made construct at all – shortly after the declaration of war, let us say instead, a Chain Home Low radar site was built between the tower and the cliff-top, which could detect both approaching aircraft and shipping within a limited range.
RADAR was new technology at the time, and it would be 1942 before the boffins came up with the idea of mounting a huge aerial on top of the tower to increase the scanning range.
Photographs of the time show how incongruous that looked, though it was presumably effective. Nowhere on these particular ‘interpretation’ boards does it tell us that the tower was originally what it most looks like: it was a navigation mark for the ships sailing into Harwich.
Although built by Trinity House, the fact that it is called a navigation tower rather than a lighthouse suggests that it was never intended to have a permanent light. There are suggestions that it may have been used as a beacon station, which to me sounds like an as-and-when arrangement. I can only assume that the Harwich approach was already well served with lights, and that this additional aid was more of a day-time check-mark.
It seems that its latest use is as an art gallery, but it is unclear whether it will open for the upcoming season. I don’t pause to investigate much further. I simply head out on the path that will lead me all the way around the headland.
From then on, I realise, it really is a simple matter of being led by the nose. You can only simply keep walking, with the water on your right and the marsh on your left, through trees, out on the open booms. It is the kind of walk that needs no navigation, so you can simply sink into the moment-to-moment-ness of it.
Which is what I did.
I walked. I caught glimpses. I took photographs, more as a field-note thing than as an artistic one. Somewhere along the line I thought about Julia Cameron and her injunction that we should have “Artist’s Dates”. We should, she said, take ourselves out, at least once a week, alone, to refill our creative well. It has been the part of The Artist’s Way, that I have struggled with, without understanding why. Today it becomes obvious. I allowed myself to be mis-led by Cameron’s ideas of what such a date might look like. The truth is that I have been taking myself out on Artist’s Dates all of my life: only I called it ‘going for a walk’.
Going into the daisy field or over ‘the seven hills’ in the snow as a child – those were Artist’s Dates. Every time I pack a bag and a map and catch a train and go for a walk somewhere I don’t know too well – that is an Artist’s Date. Every time I wander around a new city taking snapshots of street art – that is an Artist’s Date. Every time I walk my most familiar beach picking up stones or shooting pics of seagulls and seaweed – that too is an Artist’s Date.
Whenever I don’t “try” to take pictures, when I don’t “try” to write, whenever I let myself off the hook and think sometimes a walk is just a walk, that is also an Artist’s Date.
In all of these activities I am refilling the well. Even when I am focussed on writing or photography, I am also mentally snapshotting the walk on a different, subconscious, storing-it-away level.
I find myself once again walking a war trail, much as I do when I navigate the pathways of Guernsey. The scars of the war are everywhere. My parents were too young to have been involved except as observers, as children, but they had siblings old enough to fight – or to have been excused the fighting because they were mining the coal or farming to feed the nation. Some of them would die all the same.
When I see the relics of WW2, it feels personal. Not in the way it would have to Mam and Dad, but only at one remove. I remember the stories they told about the war and just after, and I try to understand how ancient the history must seem to even the generation below my own. When I read about, touch, the history of that war, and the Cold War that followed, I’m bringing the past into my own lifetime, the fear we had then – fear that should be as real again now but somehow doesn't seem to be.
I wonder if the disconnection our young have with the real world, here and now, makes it even more impossible for them to feel their connection to the past. There is a deep concern to be noted in that. As a species we struggle to learn from the past, but if we’re not even aware of it, as a real and recent thing, how little hope can there be?
Away from the tower the paths, year on year, inch away from the crumbling cliff edges. Beyond the trees the beach is scoured to bedrock. There are the remains of two WW2 pillboxes that started their life on the cliffs, guarding the very sea that has taken them, that submerges them twice a day and will eventually erode them to become part of the beach.
I crouch down to photograph the winter remnants of alexanders and sea thrift, both dark brown against a slate grey sky. Skeletons of last Summer. Ghosts everywhere I look.
Trees. I’m in love with winter trees in all their nakedness, their hosting of lichen, their free limb-stretching against the sky, their structure. It has struck me this Winter, just how much I prefer them to their Summer show, when all is hidden in drapery, leafy clothing. Everyone around me is ‘waiting for Spring’ but I am holding on to these last few weeks of departing Winter: the feathered branches against pale skies have a delicacy about them that will soon be lost for another year.
Down on the beach are the bones of trees that will not see another year, the ones who have succumbed to the latest landslips. Both crowns and root-holds have been ripped from them. Trunks are bleaching, where the moss is slowly being washed away, or dying. They become abstract sculptures, unexplained, waiting for the waters to take them away, break them down and make them anew, eventually.
Trees. We could learn much if we revered them less, and listened to them more, if we just looked at what they do, and what is done to them. What would we learn, if we saw each tree as a person? How then, would interpret his/her life?
I wondered if I was the only one to pause by these relics, these wrecks, these dead and dying land-slip trees and think them beautiful still? I wonder if anyone will think that of me when I finally slip off my own cliff down onto the beach.
Will anyone ever see my bones and hold them the way I hold these bleached branches and the broken shells? Of course they will not. Perhaps in doing so, I am also honouring all of the bones of my own ancestors that I never held.
Rounding the corner into the estuary, I stumble across broken and blocked fences. “Danger” and “Do Not Enter” signs. Alternative tramped-down paths navigate the blockade. I pass an abandoned heap of un-used wire cages, the kind intended to hold rocks and be placed to shore up banks and try (again) to tame the waters. Their plastic wrapping is shredding into the wind and presumably blowing away out to sea or inland onto the nature reserve, a strange kind of preservation. I suppose at some point the money ran out.
Walking down towards a lagoon, I stumble over rusting ironwork. It has the look of railway lines, but I guess it is some previous incarnation of the fence-line. Dumped. Left to rot. It never fails to surprise me how much ‘stuff’ just gets left where it falls. Here the grass is growing over it, and no doubt it will eventually rust down into the earth, leaving nothing but a gridwork of iron-traces to challenge future archaeologists.
On this side of the sea wall, the water will be brackish. Saltmarsh. It is lush with greenery. A few metres further on, on the other side of the defences, a similar pool is salt-water, bordered by sand and brown things, shelving beaches rather than boggy grassland. Among the sparse marram I find a rusting sheet of corrugated roofing material alongside a fish trap that is a cat’s cradle of rustwork and plastic and rope. Its only catch is half a house-brick, softened around the edges.
Pieces of tree-trunks and off-cuts of branches decorate the lagoon shore, like abstract art or washed-up creatures. They are images I will come back to and muse upon, maybe make something of. These are the well-filling moments. These are the sights and thoughts and feelings that seep into the subconscious, to steep and compost and form links with other thoughts from other days.
Across the waters, there is the ghostly image of the cranes at Felixstowe or Harwich. In the mist it has the appearance of gigantic vessel, a spaceship floating about the earth, about to land…or a warship, those cranes like giant guns about to be levelled and launch their missiles.
I turn my gaze back to the near side of the river. I’m into mudflats now. One of my favourite landscapes. Glooping channels at low tide, with that distinct stink of salty-rotty-mud. Channels that on the flood, will fill and become creeks, banishing the birds and lifting the boats, making islands of the grassy hummocks that rise above the ooze.
I’m intrigued by the serpents of fine deep-channel water courses that wind across the general mudflat, like silvery snail trails, with no discernible reason for their zig-zaggy course from one bank to the other. What subterranean obstructions, what random tide or wind patterns caused them to form? If I come back tomorrow, will they still be here or will they have decided to take a different route?
On the footpath, there is an abandoned trainer. Just one. Its innards look well-sweated, but the outer is scarcely scuffed. Another of my random fixations is the ‘lost things’. One day I will write a book about them or at least make a calendar – a year of found things. Sunglasses left in the woods, gloves on fence posts, a trainer on a footpath miles from anywhere, just the one. I figure this shoe has probably floated off a boat somewhere and been washed over the sea-wall, its owner none the wiser as to where it has ended up.
I know that, ethically / ecologically, I should clean up these found objects, stop them polluting the environment but somehow, poetically, I feel a stronger desire to leave them where they lie.
An MSC container ship lurches out of the mist. Blunt ended back and front, it is simply a floating box. Impossibly large and cumbersome. I don’t even pause to wonder what it is carrying. None of those on board would know.
A lone curlew lifts one leg as if for balance as it leans forward delving its long beak into the mud. Other than an occasional piercing cry from another of its kind, and the ever-present wind, the air is surprisingly still.
Then the geese burst in, out of nowhere. Brents. Any pretence at flight-order breaking up as they come in to land on the saltmarsh. Unlike the more familiar honking and squabbling of geese, this crew come down whirbling…the sound is like the contented purring of a cat: a soft, satisfied sound.
At the next corner I reach the improbably blue of the Walton Channel, open water. More Brents. These sound more traditionally discontented. They line up along the edge of the channel, all facing into the wind, like passengers in an airport heading for the departure gate, being shepherded by tour guides, the occasional bird back-tracking and seemingly keeping them in line. The image solidifies where the incoming tide meets the downstream river and the floating birds seem to congregate at an invisible barrier, waiting for permission to go further. Or perhaps just waiting for the stragglers to catch up.
A walk along the muddy creeks would not be complete without an old boat, abandoned, waterlogged and leaking its forgotten story into the mire. I am not disappointed. A painter, waterfilled, peeling blue paint rests high on the grass bank. Fibreglass, she will not age with the grace of our favoured old boat at Blakeney, then a larger metal hulk, also lacking in romance. I wonder about their stories all the same. Whose were they, why were they abandoned, will they ever be retrieved. I find a metaphor for our lost people in these boats. It saddens me.
I realise I’m scavenging. One minute an abandoned boat, the next the beautiful sinuous curves of the borrowdyke reed-lined and finding its own way. The next minute a heap of iron boat chain, just dumped and forgotten, links fusing together as they rust back into their unformed state. I snap the website address of The Lady of the Twizzle just because I’m intrigued by her – even more so when I later look her up on-line.
I’m walking up-river now, back towards town. Along the way I have met one solitary man (blue-tooth earphones in), one contented birdwatching dog-walker, and a three-generation threesome (only the grandmother said hello). I wonder for a second how this path is on a sunny Summer Sunday and decide that a February Friday is by far the better time to come out here.
I take a deep breath as I reach the promenade again, breathing in the open sea – and realise it’s only just lunchtime.
