Chemical beach...

Instead of doing the tourist beaches today we decided to go down to Chemical Beach to photograph the stack and the old chaldron waggon wheels in the sea. Unfortunately it wasn't a particularly low tide so I only saw the top 9" of the 160 year old iron castings.

Nearly broke my neck climbing down the stone block sea defences, 6ft cubes of rock to protect the soft soil cliffs from eroding further. They look easy to scramble over but it's only when you're on them that you realise some are quite polished and teeter over 20 ft gullies and gaps just waiting to snap your bones.

It's not a pretty beach, there is no sand and amongst the large boulders and pebbles are blistered red lumps of iron ore waste from a long gone Victorian Iron Works. The beach is made up of untidy rocks and red stone chippings. Pipes and chains hang from the cliffs, remnants of the old Dawdon Colliery.

Chemical Beach got its name from Seaham Chemical Works which occupied a nearby site in the 1860s. By the 1890s it was marked on the OS map as 'disused'. The wooden piles, visible by the magnesium limestone stack were supports for a rail track used by wagons for tipping mine waste from Dawdon Pit into the sea.

The pic is fairly standard but I added an 'equalization' filter to the sky to bring out the constituent colours and give it a 'chemical' feel.