Sandy Hirst

I emerge from the wood and follow a path to a narrow neck of sandy ground crested with wind-blown marram grass. To my left, the wide mouth of the Tyne estuary and the flat sandbanks and dunes of the Belhaven shore beyond. On my right, the muddy bay of a salt-marsh and, over the river’s windings and the farmland, the prominent hump of Traprain Law. Further to the south, in a hazy distance, lies the unassuming line of the Lammermuir Hills.

In between, stretching away before me, a slender spit of sand and shingle, about two thirds of a mile long, lolls roughly south-east into the estuary. Sandy Hirst.

First impressions in pen and ink

I am walking along the left-hand shore. Spilling away into the shallows is a litter of random rocks and boulders dumped by the last glaciers. My boots crunch in the brittle layer of sea-shells washed up on the beach. I can hear gulls and crows and the indignant piping of oystercatchers. And always, the cry of curlews, their haunting bubblings and questionings.

At the tip of the spit I sit on a grass-cushioned sandy bank and look out over the sinuous channels of the estuary to the dark fringe of pines lining the opposite shore. Two swans fly seaward, low across the quiet water.

I am reluctant to leave, but eventually get up and make my way back along the south facing shore. Here, instead of the washing of the tide, is the expanse of salt-marsh threaded through with snaking gullies and looping ginnels. In spring it will be carpeted with thrift and, along the upper margins, sea-wormwood. Rub it in your fingers and take in the aromatic scent. Between the two shores are dense clumps of sea-buckthorn, impenetrable and viciously prickly, though, I’m told, bearing in their deep orange berries an elixir of life giving potency! There are also small groves of sycamores, their seeds blown across on the wind or washed up on the shore. Within, lush grass, cool and inviting. I come across the remains of a little fire-pit where someone has chosen to take time out from the world….

*

shoal of shingle
blade of banked sand
loose tongue salted
with thrift and wormwood
licking into the estuary
spreading the sea’s gossip
the wind’s rumour

shifting spit
the tide’s afterthought
littered with driftwood
strewn with wrack where
I kick over the mind’s traces
and watch the past breaking
on a tolerant shore

dissolving absolving

*

A moody sky over Sandy Hirst, watercolour

I am now a few shingly yards from where I started. I squelch across the edge of the marsh and step up onto firmer ground, where someone — in memory of someone else — has thoughtfully provided a low stone seat where I can sit and look back to where I’ve been. Sandy Hirst, a thin spit which, according to geologists is slowly being washed southwards…and perhaps because of that suggestion of impermanence it is a place I’ve become attached to. It’s wandering, like me. I like its unique formation and its feeling of remoteness, even though it protrudes from of an area very popular with families and dog walkers. Many people will walk round Sandy Hirst, but rarely at the same time. I usually have the place to myself.

It is one of the first shorescapes I explore with my pens, pencils and paint.

Looking across the salt-marsh, a pencil sketch

Here is a series of inky impressionistic sketches.

Later, Sandy Hirst becomes the inspiration for a set of more abstract explorations. Here are a couple.

These two paintings are done in acrylic on hardboard primed with sand and bits of vegetation from the site!

*

I am making my tentative way across the salt-marsh when I stop and gaze mesmerised into a wet gulley, the water oozing round my boots.

Salt Marsh

…this lobe of the estuary
bay of silt scrawled
with pools and gullies
fills and empties like a lung
drowns twice a day when
the tide sidles in engulfs
then settles in a pane of sky
and me standing on the edge
on spongy marsh-grass the tang
of wormwood and the curlew echoing

I sense the mischief in it
watching the water wink as
it rises round my feet
and catches my reflection

nothing between us it insinuates
these shifting surfaces our devious
windings furtive the way
we reshape ourselves!

and indeed I would stay
with the salt-marsh brimming
sucked into its secrets but wake
to the peal of their wild cry
that arrowhead of geese
clearing the air pressing north

*

I leave you with a painting of the estuary, brimful, looking south with Traprain Law in the distance, at around noon on the Wnter Solstice.