Searching for moonscapes, finding microworlds

Back in the days before free pixels, when I took 40 photographs in a fortnight, not an hour, when you waited weeks to see the pictures you'd taken, the first time I went to Fleswick Bay my photographs came back a month later with a picture of the moon's surface.

Being out west, I walked over St Bees south head to blow away cobwebs and look for moonscapes. I expected wind and got autumn sunshine, too hot in my fleece layers. The last time I was here, on a blustery November day with the carpenter, we huddled in the lee of the lighthouse, determinedly eating our picnic and taking our first ever selfie to prove it.

After a beachful of round pebbles, dog-walking families and sandcastle builders, a heavily eroded cliff path, a headland of miniature memorials, bright gorse and big, big views. The clifftop fairly busy with the dog-walking families, the new path inland from the collapsed one not wide enough for passing in gangs.

St Bees beach with Black Coombe	The old path
Bright gorse	Looking south beyond the Factory

To the west, the sea, Snaefell and the Isle of Man; to the north, Criffel and the Galloway hills; to the east the Western fells; to the south, Black Coombe and the Factory. This is where my parents grew up, the views they grew up with, there throughout my childhood but not ingrained on my mind - I can map the western valleys, but not the western fells. The post-industrial coastal towns are different from the eastern market towns in my mind, and I'm certainly snobbish in the way I think about them. When the Gap was open earlier this year, there was talk of the north-south divide in the county, but the east-west divide (with a dialect divide going back to the different varieties of Vikings) was more present in my childhood. As an adult I recognise the importance of the west - far more populous than the east, economically important, but harder to reach.

View south with gorse

Over the cliffhead and down to the beach, past an array of discarded plastic in which I can see little to collect, even as a frequent forager of other people's discards.

My Cumbria Coastal Way guidebook, published in 1994, says "Fleswick Bay was once the haunt of smugglers, and it is easy to imagine the small dark caves concealing kegs of brandy and bottles of whisky. The bay is a good place to look for semi-precious stones such as agates and has a wonderful sculpted sandstone shore."

Fleswick beach south	Fleswick cliff north
Fleswick cave	Barnacles

My moonscape is no longer in a cave - the cliff must have receded and the caves shrunk, leaving my moonscape outside. In what remains of the cave, 100-year-old public school boy graffiti, in elegant script, and just one moonrock.

Posh graffiti	More posh graffiti
Moonscape 1986 (approx)	Moonscape 2016

Limpets had gathered in the craters of one outside moonrock; back in the cave I arrange pebble eggs in the shallower crater cups of the younger indoor moonrock.

Limpets	Eggcups

And then out into the light for a quick look at the barnacle rocks, huge lumps of sandstone crusted grey with barnacles, barnacles on barnacles, barnacles on limpets. One rock has lots of inch-wide dark circles, looking from a distance like indentations, drip cavities, but with no cliff cover to provide the drips. But the darkness isn't shadow - each indentation is a mussel-nursery, two or three dozen tiny mussels crammed together in their cradle, protruding slightly, ready to open when the tide comes in. Some of the indentations are slightly larger, mussel-free, still with water. Something dark and spherical, like a large marble, below the water in one - thinking it might be a baby urchin, I gave it a prod and got an unexpected squidge. I'd forgotten about sea anemones. And as looked further the rocks were covered in slightly bigger pools, very round, looking manmade as though scoured in concrete. Something about the geology of the sandstone leads to very round pools and very round pebbles. The pools contain pink and green seaweeds, dark red anemones, indigo mussels, yellow-white limpets, and astonishing microworlds.



Next year, when I stop making things from other people's patterns, I'll make embroideries of Fleswick beach - barnacle rocks of linen thread on linen cloth stained with Egremont Red, and lots of dense French and bullion knots, and circular rockpools, tiny aquaria peered at through a light surface veil.

Winkles	Barnacle textures

I went over an eroded cliff to see the unexpected moonscapes that had amazed me as a child when the photos came back, and found an eroded cliff had exposed my moonrocks to the light. I walked over fallen pieces of cliff and found unexpected microworlds that amazed me as an adult. My world has changed and the coast has changed, and Fleswick Bay has new wonders to discover.

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.