Sitting on the past, looking to the future.

The West Cumbrian coast path passes through a strange mix of human habitat bordering on the wild of the ocean. The maritime and industrial pasts leave marks etched into the landscape and the social patterns. It’s always been a place where immense wealth has jostled side by side with extreme deprivation. Despite the re-branding as ‘The Energy Coast’ with its nuclear decommissioning and wind farming industries this disparity has not changed. And yet, between the straggle of industrial landscapes and ribbons of bleak houses the ancient red sandstone cliffs above St. Bee’s remain, topped by green agricultural fields ending in a tumble of sea grasses and gorse before the cliff proper.


The cliff path from Sandwith to Fleswick beach was deserted today with just the cormorants and gulls playing in the updrafts above a churning grey North Sea. Hannes and I ate our picnic sheltered under the brow of the cliff and then like every other visitor, felt the compulsion to walk to the rusty hulks of metal half buried in the grit.


At that moment, in the slack between high and low tide, there was a stillness that belied the evidence of the colossal forces that could make and break such a scene. A held breath, for Hannes too perhaps, between what has been, what is and what will be.


Only afterwards, looking at this picture, I could see that stillness is not passivity.