Bog Myrtle & Peat

Sea-pinks are returning to the coast, and the rocks are bristling with strands of crimson pigment. I used to come here with my parents and now I bring my son to squeal and shriek along the strandline. He runs beside his puppy on the sand, then they pause to prod at something dead in the wreckage of heaving weed. I found a porpoise washed up here once; its skeleton was four feet long from nose to final fin. I pried away its skull and carried it home; now it sits on a shelf in my workshop, and nobody can tell me what it is.

The little dog has never tasted brine before. She laps at the waves and sneezes, then she runs in a tightening pattern of circles with her tail trailing behind her like a loon. The whole place reeks of family memories, even down to the rasping, blown-out shapes of individual shoreline oaks and crab apple trees; the stump of an old pitch boiler and the heave of the island which lies between home and the Lake District. It all falls within a span of what’s home, and even when I play with the idea of travelling across the world and riding the marches of what’s possible, I haven’t really thought what it would mean to go and be away. 

A handful of curlews moves along the shore. My son is old enough to spot them now, and I worry that I have forced this knowledge onto him because ever since he was very small, I have held him up to better see or hushed him to hear these birds. I have placed binoculars in his hands and I can’t help but hope he’ll love them too. So now when he points out a curlew, I feel guilty that he’s only trying to please me. But he’s also good at other birds, and he’ll make me slow the car for better looks at shelducks or ravens in the roadside fields. He’ll even point at birds he hasn’t seen, because we see things when we’re together, and sharing the act of seeing is more important than having something to look at.

One curlew flies towards a slip of rocks and lands there on the water’s edge. Ten minutes later, it begins to rail and bark in hoarse and chilling alarm. I don’t have my binoculars, but the bird is calling for panic’s sake and there are often otters hunting on this shore. Then it’s up and away, and there’s only a sound of waves on sand and the humm of bees in the willows. We take our shoes and socks off and place them on rocks which are spattered with citrus yellow lichen. We go to paddle in the tide and the puppy soaks us by jumping up and around our knees. The water is so cold that it makes our joints ache. My son throws a cable of kelp into the water so the little dog has something to bring back – but she doesn’t know what “fetch” is yet, and the kelp nods away towards the Isle of Man.

Almost as we’re ready to go, a distant shape appears on the southern horizon – quick and black as a midge. It seems strangely familiar above the receding tide; familiar as the feeling of silt and sand between my naked toes. And then my son and I are dancing for the first swallow of 2025, high and to our right above the village and north towards the hill.