limpid landscape – low tide at pett level

No wind, a little sun and some cloud and low tide so the beach is revealed offering a large expanse for strolling, digging for lug worms, bird watching and play in the pools – the gulls and oystercatchers are busy too.

This landscape in the foreground and the distance is etched in man-made lines but, close to, the organic forms of nature can be discovered. Crambe maritima throwing up pink bulbous shoots already . . .

. . . sand particles, clays and rocks with smooth rounded surfaces make small individual landscapes within the larger landscape and always changing amongst the constant of the lines of groynes – some hundreds of years old and some highly decorated by the tides.

Signs of peat extraction  – methodically cut in parallel lines – and the dark, almost black, slippery ground surface of the petrified forest that stretches elegantly into the sea, show again how man interrupts nature. Nature’s lines are altogether more beautiful.

Turning to the west from the path along the sea defense, reveals a different vision of quietude – the brow of the ridge running from Winchelsea along Wickham Rock Lane with Icklesham beyond.

And the poem, it describes me or as I feel within my self.

There is particular music

Hunted for, dug up

Near airy, planet-spaces,

Or on the cold, sure lip

 

Of a cliff that will not take

The climb of a white break

But only permit a foam

Rising. So I make

 

A music out of places

Unsurrendered to,

Watched on careful nights,

Not circumscribed, no view

 

Caught in the camera-mind

To be developed later.

Words are music to find

In the places the colder, the better.

 

But I have needed South

And its unambiguous sun,

Its haze and fire on the breath.

Since childhood I’ve been one

 

Never at ease at home

Relishing loneliness

Creating out of shame

Measured happiness. Elizabeth Jennings Particular Music