Another Life Michael VineyAfter a bit of turmoil in one's life, it can be good to find nature insisting that nothing much has changed. Back on the shore, back in my anorak and wellies, I stirred up a swirl of golden plover, white bellies catching the sun like glitter-dust. They belong to just this point in autumn, to just that vector of the sky. They drew me north, to the half of the long strand where nobody much wants to go.
Compared to the orderly south beach, tamed by the tractors' bee-line to the corner of the dunes, the north strand is raw, unruly and rough-edged; even, in places, a mess. The channel that divides the two halves carries the river from the mountain and it gropes its way out to the waves like a blind eel, turning again and again from the resistance of the sand. A couple of summers ago, a neighbour took out a digger to excavate a short-cut for the river, a mighty ditch carved between tides. It was worth trying, he concluded mildly, as the sea smoothed it over.
The trouble with the river is its invitation to the ocean, the way it brings the spring tides, once a fortnight, surging up its sinuous estuary between sand and land. There is always a fresh, ragged fringe at the grassy edge of the fields, a constant retreat of fence-posts and sheep-wire. And seawards of this dynamic nibbling is the grander evidence of erosion; an apron of wave-worn peaty terraces stepping up the shore. We are looking at centuries here; long depositions of peat interleaved with inundations of sand, like a layer-cake of chocolate sponge and cream. An ancient shore has been stripped back in the four decades I have watched it; an accelerating constancy of change.
Those same decades seem to have grown steadily leaner in any flotsam worth stooping for, still less bringing home.
Should I read into the current dearth of sea-beans a change in the currents of the North Atlantic drift, or destruction of the Central American jungle from which the beans once dropped into rivers? Both seem equally probable. I am left, in a poor exchange, with the regular delivery of small, white plastic balls, inviting fantasies of ping-pong tournaments on the lower-class decks of cruise liners.
There was, on this occasion, however, a splendidly old-fashioned piece of driftwood; a whole, polished bole of a fir tree, four or five metres long, complete with the stumps of its canopy branches. It had a much-travelled look. And better still, it had been claimed in an old-fashioned, beachcomber's way, hauled up to the dunes and tied round with a strand or two of brightly-coloured twine. A year from now, it could still be there, inviolate, as the custom has always been along this shore.
So that had not changed. And nor had the route of the otter's tracks; a long, unswerving line from the dunes to the waves.
This, too, spoke for the wild privacy of the north side, since, rather than waiting for high water and a short scurry into the waves, the otter had taken its time to cross the wide gleam of sand. I knew where it had come from; the pond of icy rainwater penned up behind the dunes. That is the otters' bathing-place, where they wash the sea-salt from their fur, a necessary grooming.
All the residents, then, were in place. The Arctic plovers had wheeled away nervously to the south side, settling into invisibility on the duach beside the lake. But the common gulls were at their own roost and washing-place, a sheltered, private pool, and the great black-backs flanked the estuary at its entry to the sea, one to each sand-spit like stone eagles at a gate. All the crows were where they should be: ravens on their fence-posts, hoodies on the distant cliff, itinerant choughs trailing exclamations from one flat pasture to the next.
I had come, if for any purpose, to find the curlews, which autumn invariably calls to the far northern corner of the strand and nowhere else along its two kilometres. I feel this constancy must make them "our" curlews, locally bred on the bogs.
They were missing from the strand; with the tide still hovering on the turn and the sand so long exposed, its sparse marine life was, I suppose, still locked away. But a cry of cour-lee! lifted my eyes to the grassy slopes above the dunes and the little flock, perhaps 20 birds, that probed the sandy ground. Later, when the migrants come, there could be hundreds of curlews, their slow chevrons swirling across the hillside in an endless prospecting of the coastal fields. But for the moment, a score of birds, a single, wistful cry, seemed quite enough.