Cold Cockles

We parked at the Village Hall at Kippford looking over to where the Yacht club boats are pulled ashore, their white conch hulls wrapped in tarpaulins for the winter. When the tide goes down here the estuary is lined with soft mud, slick and slippy, sprouting at the edges with a whiskering of hard rush and sea kale. But at the far end of the lane that runs through the village, following the shore to the headland, the beach becomes rockier and hugged between the rocks, the mud gives way to a carpet of seashells.
Nearly all are Cockle shells; hard little bivalve hearts from the sea, common, like those washed up on every beach, cove and cranny around the coast. In life, for every single soft-fleshed cockle body there are two concave calcium cases, joined at the base and radially ribbed, like the welts of a jersey wrapping a wrist . Instead of 5 pink fingers protruding, there’s one yellow foot made to slide through the substrate of its sea-bed home or in a joyous bound of heel and toe, jump across the sea’s bottom in a swirl of sand before sinking back to siphon plankton.
In life, the two shells working together are the ultimate box, capable of complete closure.  Their function, like a box, is to keep some things in and other things out. The keeper of the box decides.  The cockle squats inside looking out, making choices of what comes in to share its living space, to breach its armour and what should be kept at bay. We sit inside our skulls and do much the same.
But on this rocky promontory  the cockles of the Solway reach the end of their journey. The soft bodies die, and their homes become a myriad white skeletal coffin boxes whirled by the tides until they are pulled apart. And they end up here, their double tombstones writing a wordless epitaph for countless cockles souls lost at sea..
They lie metres deep in drifts and banks, crunching walkways of shells, a bounty poured and raked by the waves like a Japanese sand garden around the dark defining rocks. But these still hold their form, cups of calcium, not yet smoothed into sand. They pile higgledy-piggledly or spooned together in random rows, arcs of sharp edges, hacksaw blade ridges, contrasting with polished insides, catching the November light, layer upon layer upon layer. They shift and crack like conchiglie pasta under our feet, grist to the mill of our careless weight. If they were snapping bones we would revere them more. As it is, we pick up handfuls of them and drop them as soon in a patter of discard; they are too many to comprehend or value individually.
But beside one bench a thorn bush blooms strangely in the winter sun with bleached white blossoms hanging from bare branches. Some shells have a hole worn right through, just made for threading on  the spikes. We find one in a thousand and place it on a spare twig; like other walkers that have passed, elevating these to become individuals and representatives given meaning to the mass, a tree memorial to an unknown shellfish. It seems fitting.