Christmas day Runswick Bay 2007

Now that's how to celebrate Christmas: around a fire on a beach with the sunset sky, wine and marshmallows.
Runswick 2 hours before high water, Kettleness headland with sunset clouds.
The centre of the bay is an eroding sloping delta of boulder clay: it is covered with scrubby woodland, much of it hawthorn and pretty impenetrable.

Runswick Bay 23 December 2007

No filters, no tripod, no photoshop.

Runswick Bay cliffs

The shale here is very friable, heavily stained with iron and the cliff is in a constant state of collapse. A couple of northerly storms and this section of shale will be gone.
A few metres to the north, the shale becomes more solid and oozes oil. The oil content allowed the shale and brushwood pyres in the alum works to smoulder for months.

It's all just a little bit of housestory

A holiday shack, close to the beach, Runswick Bay. It's as small as it looks: down stairs is a two-person sofa, a worktop with a small gas cooker and sink, and a ladder to a sleeping platform in the roof. An electric cable runs in from somewhere. What it lacks in creature comforts and privacy (you wouldn't want to get amorous in there unless you wanted the whole village to know about it) it makes up for with the most wonderful view over the bay. It is tilted, rotting and rusting.

Seaweed and littoral litter.

A sunny, cold, December Sunday, a completely deserted beach so time to have a walk and see what's on the beach: here saw wrack (Fucus serratus) amid torn up Laminaria digitata.
Bladder wrack: Fucus vesiculosus.
This was the day and the view (the suffering I go through for you...) and I decided to have a look at the flotsam seaweed (I have a microscope, at some time this blog will be going microscopic, and I'm interested in what microscopic critters shelter in seaweed) so I went and had a closer look...
Cack. Tangled up fishing monofilament line. I had a carrier bag in my rucksac and found a second on the beach, and wandering along the high tide line I collected all the fishing line and net I could find.
400 metres of collecting, two carrier bags full of filamentous crap.

Kettleness ground cover

What little can stay alive on the bare shale surface,: it's northerly facing with little soil, is scoured by high winds and gets plenty of salt spray: