Immerse yourself in the Celtic landscape of my island home, as we take another restorative stroll. This time, we explore the pitted, lunar landscape of an ancient sea-worn volcano.
This walk takes place on the southern coast of the Isle of Man, on a warm afternoon in early April.
We reclined upon the soft knitted grass by the rocks, overlooking a wind-sired sea. The air was southerly and Sahara-warmed. And I felt the rare delight of wanting for nothing.
We had spent the last hour walking off our packed lunch, exploring the slaked rump of coastline called Scarlett, site of a prehistoric volcano. We picked our way over stepped, cracked shelves of hardened lava, and petrified mudslides riddled with fossils, scratching our palms on barnacle husks and basalt rind. To the rhythm of the tide’s ingress, we inched along a grike ledge, where I fought against my parental urge to hover protectively. Sharp rocks below rang, claxon-like, but years of wandering and clambering have instilled in my girls a caprine surefootedness.
Soon, we were up and over, into a series of natural trenches—left, right, left again—home to ancient lichen continents, forelands and peninsulas reaching deep into folded fissures and dank nooks. I found myself traversing a nation of bone brittle antlers, yellow rubber ears, pocked orange zest… I paused to open my hand-lens. Holding it up to my eye, I was instantly reduced to the size of a gnat, exploring yawning caverns, and galleries of living, lurid stalactites, beyond the reach of all but the elephantine red mite.
Three-hundred million years ago, this island would have been at the equator. A tropical paradise. Now, after the most dilatory migration, we are nearer the Arctic Circle than the Galápagos. But there is a rocky foreshore a little further along the coast, where the intertidal erosion has peeled back the layers and the years, to reveal a bedrock of fossilised sea floor, replete with ripples in the sand, coral fauna, and the echo of a palm-strewn shore with its exotic menagerie. To stand there is to enjoy a balmy, equatorial Tuesday afternoon, preserved for all time.
We scrambled down into another rent in the lava field, onto a shingle corridor wending its way seaward. To my delight, I spotted a driftwood choke, and after some rummaging, became the proud owner a staff, eight-foot tall and sea-parched. I wielded it as a third leg over unsteady ground, like the happiest troglodyte.
I stopped to inspect one of a plethora of rocks that seemed to be equal parts basalt and hole. They looked like oversized sponges, or prehistoric potatoes, wireworm blighted. Some of the holes were large enough to insert a finger, and rounded secret bends into parts unknown. I have seen profusions of such rocks all over this coast, and have always assumed them to be the petrified remnants of boiling lava, shot through with bubbles of searing off-gas. But my potato hunch was much closer to the mark, for these, I have learnt, are the homes of bivalve molluscs—tiny clams, mussels and scallops who painstakingly burrow holes in the shear rock, for protection against the relentlessness of pounding breaker and hounding predator.
With echoes ricocheting along the rock-face, furtive waves could be heard slipping into the channel ahead, pilfering pebbles on the retreat. Our route, however, lead us up and away from this hidden cove, and onto the springy matted grass that would be our temporary bed.
After hearty trek, we were glad to find the perfect spot for a sit. To sit and observe, to soak in every sound and scent, is the keystone to a good walk. It forms the sought-for destination, the point of apogee in a wide arc, the halcyon promised-land you’ve been picturing in your mind’s eye. Einstein said that two objects, moving in opposition, are in distinct relative frames, and thus, they experience time, space, and reality, differently from one another. To the landscape, we humans are simply motes flying past. To us, it is the landscape that rushes by, sometimes in a blur.
Only when you slow down, to match that thing you observe, do you enter its own frame of relativity, its reality, and truly begin to understand its point of view. So, to cease, for a time, our eternal fidgeting—our constant motion and frenetic human busyness—is to unfurl, like the petals of a flower, and become part of the landscape’s experience.
It’s so important to slow down, I believe, just long enough to stop being in your own relative bubble. To cease being just another piece of flotsam , and to live, briefly, as part of something much larger than oneself.
And so we plonk down our behinds, into the comfort of a yielding red fescue futon. With that unbidden groan of relief that seems to come with increasing regularity these days, we segued from transit, to long-sit. From free radicals, reacting to everything, to inert groundlings, wanting for nothing.
To recline is to open out your senses, to let go of secret burdens, and let the world do the rest. Now, instead of chasing view and horizon, I could let the sea come to me.
I watched the water, as incumbent purls drew closer, swelling in anticipation as they awaited their turn to splash against the rocks. Toward the front, lambent waves curled about themselves, sunbeams ensnared in their midst. They hung momentarily, at the peak of their arc, casting a blinding flash. Turquoise sea-glass held up to the sun, before breaking against the shore.
The four of us lay in various stages of repose. Eyes closed, my wife attended to the patterns of a white-noise symphony. Audial kaleidoscope. My daughters, on their backs, stared at a pageant of fluffy clouds. And propped up by my elbows, I gazed out to sea, matching my breath to the sigh of the tide.
From the eighteenth century onwards, British doctors prescribed to a gamut of patients a prolonged dose of restorative ‘sea cure’. Whether suffering from tuberculosis or melancholy or leprosy, people were sent to the coast to imbibe the remedial properties of seaside living. Today, cold-water swimming is enjoying a renaissance (one I sometimes partake in myself), recognised for the science-backed health benefits it brings. But if that all seems too bracing, there’s always the wave-smashed aerosols that suffuse our coastal fresh air with a mineral-rich tang. Simply inhale, and be healed.
However we label it—alchemy, adjuvant, or ameliorative ambience—it’s true that people living within one kilometre of the sea, are 22% less likely to develop mental health issues.
And so there I lay, recharging. Convalescing from modernity. A salt-stacked breeze laved my face. It’s cool hand scrubbed clean the residue of a busy week, leaving spirits bright. I could feel the sweet suppleness of a body drained of tension, and a mind at peace.
Over there, sifting through rock-pool pickings, a little egret lurked, apparition-like, over the blennies and shrimp. It’s so rare to sight this chalk-white heron, here on the island. It’s ghostly form is laced with an almost preternatural air. The worldly guise of a forgotten goddess, perhaps, or the soul of a long-dead sailor. Dotted about the sodden foreshore, the oyster catchers gossiped. Legs motoring like wind-up toys. Their skittish calls—lobed and serrated—are one of my favourites, evoking the evening soundtrack of our former home, just across the bay.
Somewhere about, I heard the herring gull’s anguished lament. Besieging Why? Why? Why? across the water. I dared not dwell too long on what precious things it might have lost. You see, it is for these perfect moments, almost dreamlike, that I live for. Snuggled up like mice. Mammal heat sensed and shared at our sides. Magical moments penned in the margins of daily life, they reveal to us a glimpse of what it’s like to really live without need or want. A moment of contented transcendence. Like that briefest feeling of glorious weightlessness, at the apex of a playground swing.
Out here, we are free from that engineered feeling of lack, that our phones and TVs promise us is real. Out here, on this spit of lunar coast, there’s no point looking for a phone connection. Mercifully, there are no signal bars, zero Gs. We sit in absentia of wi-fi hotspots. Which means there is no temptation to take a cold dip in a sea of information; digital anxiety, packaged as truth. So, in as much as eyeballs and ears, the Great Outdoors has, in us, a captive audience. Nature’s IMAX. And I am richer than the kings of antiquity.
I am grateful this sparkling seascape isn’t sullied with interruptive ads. It does not try to sell me anything. It guarantees me nothing—for I must enjoy the sunshine as long as it lasts. The comfort of my green grass bed, the rainless clouds, the toothless wind. I am not entering into a transaction, for things to which I must feel entitled. There is no small-print to read. Only the take-it-or-leave-it invitation to make myself at home and enjoy—to enjoy the hen harrier scouring the links, the sunshine surfing the waves.
To enjoy being, for this moment only. And the next. And the next…
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