Time Passes

On our regular trip across the County to East Devon today I took this photo of the detail on an old print hanging on a wall. It shows the beach at Sidmouth looking east and the red sandstone cliffs. Sidmouth was visited by royalty and became a fashionable seaside resort. The bathing machines are long gone and there are now very few working boats.  The rock stack was known as Chit Rock but no trace of it now remains.  The red cliffs are undeniably part of the town's popular appeal, but not all of it's early residents were so impressed. The artist David Jones who lived here for some years in the first half of the 20th century wrote "I don't much like the red cliffs about here. On some days it's like living under a vast baulk of chocolate- they turn the bitter sea also into a kind of cocoa lake". I must admit to also having some mixed feelings about this place. I had newer thought though whether or not I liked the red cliffs. I just accepted that they were red and they were there. I suppose landscape artists tend to look at things differently.