Seaglass and limpets

Fell road and factory - dunes and rockpools - pebble and seashells - what a beach should be

To Seascale to see if the beach is deserted. My grandparents lived in Seascale from the 1950s, my parents were married there, we went there in summer, for half terms and for Christmases. Driving from Cockermouth, took an impulse turn onto the fell road, the road that routinely made me car sick as a child, the road Grandad attempted to drive up in the snow one winter despite the Road Closed signs.

To the left the western fells, to the right the sea appearing, on the iPlayer Southernality singing a song about driving and freedom and escape And from the mountains to the sea... don't it feel like Heaven is close. And in front, in the dip between two hills, the Lune Gorge moment for heading west, as the Factory appears on the shoreline with the Morecambe Bay wind farm beyond. We still call it the Factory, a family folklore word from when it, and Grandad, manufactured electricity. Nowadays it's the Site.

From the mountains to the sea...	Heading West

At the beach, after a detour to visit Grandma's bench, I went to look for the dunes. When the world was smaller and my legs were shorter, they seemed to be further away along the beach than they are today. And they are much diminished - just about possible to picnic in the first one, but I'm sure there were more and deeper dunes 40 years ago, that a family group of six or more could happily picnic in.

Rockpools from the dune	Snaefell

The rockpools are largely submerged by a tide that behaves correctly here - six and a quarter hours in, six and a quarter hours out, not this head-of-the-firth two hours in, thirteen hours out thing. The beach is fairly busy with families with dogs at the start of half term. Sometime after I'd left, in the early 1990s, the people left the beach as the Sellafield scares started. My book of the Cumbrian Coastal Way, published in 1994, describes an air of neglect, and for some years that seemed a fair description to an infrequent visitor, lessened from what it had been.

I remember being back here sometime, probably with my brother, alone on the evening beach drawing alpha-beta-gamma particle was here signs in the wet sand. I remember making flippant jokes to southern student friends about glowing in the dark. I remember my ambivalent anger at the disuse of a great beach, my uncertainty about the Factory and nuclear power as a member of the Green party and a member of a family that worked there. Knowing its importance to the Cumbrian economy and - working alongside academic experts on energy policy - knowing about the long-term costs.

As I've always done, I picked up handfuls of pebbles - smooth eggs of St Bee's sandstone, tiny fragments of mussels, limpet, periwinkles, cockles, tellins, razorshells, towershells. One day I will take a handful to Julie Gibson and ask her to make me a mosaic picture of Seascale beach.

Sand dunes for picnics, wet sand for castle-building, dry sand to wiggle toes in, rockpools to investigate, smooth pebbles and seashells, marram grass and thrift, wormcasts and bladder wrack, seaglass and driftbricks. Everything a beach should be. With the optional extra of a nuclear reprocessing plant.