It isn’t a spectacular beach. Normally I’d avoid it, preferring the tousled drama and romance of Devon cliffs that rollercoaster from toothy crags to sandy smugglers’ coves. Usually I’m looking for larks, kittiwakes and peregrines. This is bog-standard seaside, all ordinariness and fish and chips, where the English resort of Paignton meets the plain English Channel. There’s a pier with arcade games and rides; giant models of Darth Vader and Chewbacca; a field where the fairground arrives each summer. The smell of fresh doughnuts meets the tang of the sea; machine noise mingles with the screechy serendade of gulls.
But something has enticed me here. Stepping down on to the gritty Devon-red sand you can still feel something special. It’s a lingering extraordinariness, the enticing possibility of the oceanside.
A gang of turnstones skitters around upturned limpets, rocks and weed. Their nervous, gossipy, piping calls ring around them as they dash, take off and alight as a family on the seawall. A dachshund in a little coat scurries past, ears flying, joyous to be out in the sun. On the wide, shining expanse of low tide three boisterous spaniels run, and a collie madly chases a ball. Somebody calls out for her poodle to come back. Here we all are, spaciously dispersed and rubbing along, each enjoying private moments of feeding, play, peace and release. Whatever your mood, here at least you’re able to breathe the March air, its zing of spring, to wander or play or sit, when just across this stretch of sea others are not so lucky. What to do but just be? For this moment, in the salt-washed air with the rubbery-scent of bladderwrack and the sound of gulls, just to be human, alive, and kind is enough.
The sand inclines toward the water in textured stages. The crunch of cockles, periwinkles and razor clams meets my feet as I step toward the water. The surround-sound of soft wind and fizz of waves enters my senses and, in the core of me, something unknots. The new season’s light warms you from the inside, urging those of us who suffer from winter blues to come back to life.
Very soon it will be the equinox, when in both northern and southern hemispheres day and night will be equal length. And beneath the water here, invisibly, something has already shifted.
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Spiny heralds of recovery
While a swimmer braves a lap of the bay in his wetsuit, underneath him, hidden beneath the surface, unseen by most, are the seahorses. Their tiny, fragile, secret lives quietly prevailing. In parts of the Torbay seabed, just off Torre Abbey Sands, are the seagrass fields, the underwater meadows where the little horses live.
Vital for marine wildlife and as important as rainforest for diversity and carbon capture, the seagrass is being restored. Experts tells us the grass forests here are growing, with 10 per cent more coverage than in 2014. This summer, like a little herald of recovery, a rare spiny seahorse was spotted and filmed. Beside the rust-red cliffs and the busy riviera townscape, beyond the gritty sand. Who would have thought it?
I take my shoes off and feel the cold contact with the red sand, ground down from the windworn rumples of ancient cliffs. The local church and abbey are built from it, the colour stark in the remnant walls of the Bishop of Exeter’s medieval palace and tower. Geology, religion and biology interconnected; the sea creature, and the human; the mineral, and the water.
Landscape of home
To come to the coast is not just to recharge ourselves with the joys of sunlight, oxygen and serotonin but to be next to the water, to be more deeply human in the world. This is where our ancestors came to forage, and to speculate. Here we can be, as the poet Giles Watson says, “at our most alien and most delighted”.
The coast can be a wrecking ground, a place to think about how humanity is “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ where ignorant armies clash by night” as Matthew Arnold wrote in Dover Beach. Or it can be a place to be soothed by “an amen of calm waters”, for Derek Walcott in his prayerful A Sea-Chantey. Here is all the bubbling turbulence of our inner lives, as well as that of our non-human kin; here is animal, vegetable, mineral, and soul. It’s a dreaming place, the landscape of home, calling to us about amniotic bliss, closeness to loved ones; separation, tragedy, conflicts; voyage, piracy, even lunacy.
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All around the planet a riptide of emotion settles on coastlines. Leavings, arrivals, births and drownings. Land slips away like sand, land reshapes itself. How very small we are, and how tiny our habitable part of the Earth, yet what are we each going to do with our one short part in life?