Silecroft

Everywhere you look you're reminded of the passage of time. Everything from the way the pebbles that make up the shingle have worn smooth and the evolution of the plants that grow among them (the sea cabbage especially) to the sheds people have built, then abandoned. One, on a rise just behind the shingle, barely hangs together, its rotten planks burst apart by the wind exposing tea, salt and pepper still sat on a shelf, a rusty bicycle. Another, its door come away, is full to what is left of its rafters with brambles, the leaves pressing their eager faces up against the window.

There are few buildings. Most of those there are are strung out along the top of the rise behind the shingle. A few yards inland, there is a small cluster of bungalows, built in what once must've been a 'cheap and cheerful' style but which now haunt us with visions of a world for which we can find no modern equivalent. Mod cons – principally, the internet – have had to be grafted on.

There is a road down to the sea that ends in a car park. People come here to walk their dogs, entertain their children or just sit and look. The tracks down to the shingle are lined with pebbles people have painted and left there. This is a pebble painter's paradise.

Sometimes, from here, you can see the Isle of Man on the horizon. When you can, it's a mirage: if the conditions are just right, the atmosphere refracts the light, making the distant island (which lies way beyond the visible horizon) appear surprisingly close. You can see its principal hills spread out from left to right. I've never caught it in the act of appearing or vanishing, though, although, the other evening, conditions were such that you could only see the tops of its hills poking above the milky obscurity. One can see how myths arose of magic islands that appear and vanish and, scanning the horizon to see if you can see Man from Silecroft, it's easy to start doubting the science that tells you that what you're witnessing is no more than an atmospheric effect.

Of Lighthouses and Lagoons

We recently returned from a holiday in Cumbria. We stayed for a week on a caravan site in Haverigg. The site's situated on the edge of a lagoon on the far side of which stands a lighthouse. The lagoon was once a vast industrial site - an iron-ore mine - which has since been flooded and turned into a nature reserve. Literary associations kept popping into my head all week: every time I looked out of the window and saw the lighthouse I found myself thinking of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and of Mr Ramsay telling his son that the weather wouldn't be fine. 

Fortunately, it was fine. I didn't have to resort to cutting out pictures from the Army and Navy Stores catalogue to while away the time. And then, looking at the surface of the water, which stretched away to the lighthouse from just outside the door of the caravan, I couldn't help wondering what lay beneath it. It would be interesting, I thought, to lower an underwater camera into the water, to explore the landscape of the lagoon-bed see what remained of its industrial past. I was reminded of JG Ballard's The Drowned World - another book I very much enjoyed reading. I had a silly thought, too, that this was the way Mordor might look, fifty years after the defeat of the Dark Lord, the pits of the orcs landscaped, filled with water and turned into bird sanctuaries and suchlike.

It's a few miles north of Haverigg to Silecroft beach. You get there down a road that winds back and forth over the railway line through a series of level crossings. There's very little there - once you've driven through Silecroft village, there's a small caravan site, a handful of old, substantial houses, a couple of bungalows and little else. The beach itself is a shingle beach that curves away to the north for miles, up towards Ravenglass and Sellafield. On a good day, we were told, you can see the Isle of Man. On our first couple of visits, try as we might, we could see no sign of it. Then, one particular clear morning, we drove down to the beach and there it was - hilly, substantial, filling a good part of the horizon. It's easy to see where myths of magic vanishing islands come from.