A Still Seaside
Being beside the sea every day brings a sense of peace and is an unconscious form of meditation for me. It is something so deeply rooted in my psyche that I did not realise I missed it until I was away. For three years I’d look out of high windows and see nothing but sloping hills and dense clusters of trees from the middle of the moors.
Now I’ve returned to the North Wales coast. It is Philip Larkin’s mid-century seaside that I also return to. Not only because his satirical attack on advertising in ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ has immortalised the very town I’ve grown up in, but because of the end of ‘Here.’
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shape and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkactive, out of reach.
In my experience, being beside the sea is an ‘unfenced existence.’ It is quiet, it is blinding, and it most importantly offers us on its shores something unobtainable in a world where we can get anything. It is, as part of the meditation and innate calmness, stretching your eye out as far as you can see, to that flat, dark line of the horizon.
Yet when you think you cannot see any further, you see past the offshore windfarm, further to the distant speck of an oil rigger, or a container carrier ship - a great hulking dark vessel - that is an unimaginably long distance away. It is the act of staring further than our built up modern streets and cities allow the eye to.
!
Those hovering hours between the tides, where the shore will change once again, encroach or retreat, is when I feel the most settled. I have enough sand in front of me to explore, enough of the frigid foam to tip-toe through, to feel content. In the middle of our rare baking sun, the sand is hard packed and warm, yet the Irish sea stays the same shocked cold.
As a child I remember I stood calf-deep in the rising tide and stared out, transfixed by the flat vanishing line. I felt I was rooted to the earth at the corridor where the sky met the sea. I felt I had moved with it, had been pushed along until, when I looked back, my family had moved. Shocked, I thought the sea had swayed me without my knowledge. We’re hypnotised by it, I believe, drawn in by the improbable proportions of our eye.
There are still some wild, unreformed beaches where I live. Without the concrete proms and jagged defences. Once they’ve been left behind, there you are, standing on sand and rocks older than anything else around you. This is the deep peace. There’s a derelict lighthouse, bright white turning algae green at the base, surrounded by sinking sand and sopping mud.
The lighthouse keeper’s house, solidly made from Victorian red brick, is only visible from its chimney jutting out between its duney grass-bed. I visited it on a wild day, the beach stripped of people and dogs as, under the rain and the wind, sand skimmed the surface and battered our faces. The chimney, so large and imposing when I was a child, became the source of inspiration in much of my early writing. When we found it at the edge of a wild and crumbling dune, only half of it stood upright, knocked over and vandalised. It looked nothing like how I remembered. I vowed to protect what it became in my mind and went home after our search, disappointed. And yet, contrasted with the built up sea defences and the windfarm, being in an untamed and wild coastline creates almost a historical vacuum, harking back to the original Victorian day-trippers boarding the train and racing to the beach. Nothing stays the same forever exposed as it is, and this is the way it should be.
In the tumult and the horror and the confusion of attempting to build a future when the foundations of the world as we know it have been shaken in the last six months, I have turned to stare out at the unfenced existence of where I grew up. The winter holds quiet, empty beaches, great cold winds and storming clouds unfurling from the mountains. When the future feels bleak and pointless, I watch from my window how it changes from hour to hour, always rolling into a new colour, the sea and sky a harmonious meeting.
I root myself to that shimmering surface, sometimes a glowing white between blue and silver, sometimes muddied and a storm-stoked navy. The shifting sands and the smoothed stones - sometimes dark pumice, sometimes a granite fragment - roll onto the sand from different tides and different times. Somedays, it is enough to know that unshakable certainty: the tide will return.
Written by Holly Miller
My name is Holly Miller and I am a writer, Associate Editor at Refresh Magazine and podcast co-host of Culture Hang. I am working on my first novel and my writing can be viewed on my website: writerhollymiller.com