Traces

"Before it's your favourite place, it's a place you've never been."


I am lucky to live in Cornwall, England and the photograph above is the place I love more than any other.  The thing I particularly love about this place is that it is off the beaten track - others know about it, but it is not a place that fills to the brim even in the height of summer.  The first time I went, I was with my partner and nephews and, fully clothed (it was freezing), the boys rolled down the dunes and into the river that meets the sea, surfing the sand like board masters.  We came time and again that holiday (we were northern then) and parked high above the cliffs and meandered down to this special place. We've been often since - and always, rain or shine, it is a beautiful place. It holds its secrets - that aquamarine sea, its promise always there and sometimes tantalisingly so.  I'm not fooled by it.  I read it.

I am an enthusiastic sea swimmer and on calm days there is nowhere on earth like this cove but if you dip your head under the water you can see the wreckage of a ship - a cargo ship - which left a mass of stuff on  the beach for locals to sweep up and store for future exhibitions.  And there it remains as a reminder of the danger that lies on the coast of this part of Cornwall: jagged rocks, hard on the surface of the hull (and on your feet if you're unlucky enough to kick them).  There are secrets on the seabed.  If you're lucky, occasionally, a seal bobs along beside you. The seal knows more than we do and only appears when the waves lap gently on the shore.

The cove is protected when the sun shines, but when the wind whips up, the waves get ever bigger.  I have seen people ignore this, allowing their children to wade into the water with a recklessness that beggars belief. I have watched this, and given warning but people don't believe that the sea can be unforgiving or that it can turn on a sixpence and head back in with an alarming speed.   With hideous regularity people get cut off and need to be rescued.  In an average year, approximately 7,000 sea rescues take place.  Each year about 70 people die off the British coast.

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