Symbolic Forest

Regular readers might remember that two or three years back, I visited the Buck Beck Beach Bench, a strange and delightful bench built up from driftwood on one of the remoter stretches of Cleethorpes Beach. I haven’t been back very much since that visit, what for one reason and another, but I did keep following the Bench and its creators on social media. Because of that, I knew that twice since, it had been completely destroyed by storms; and then, rebuilt. After all, the Bench first started as a ramshackle, makeshift affair for dog-walkers to sit on whilst they waited for the tide to turn, and it was created by slow, organic growth rather than some grand plan. When it is destroyed, it comes back, recreated with the same impulse to create something, build something, and create a record that people stood in a particular spot and stared out at the ever-changing ocean.

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Keyword noise: Cleethorpes, beach, coast, river, estuary, Humber, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, shore, shoreline, folk art, bench, Buck Beck Beach Bench.

“Are you going to go and watch the sunrise on New Years Day?” said more than one person over the past week or two. Initially, I agreed, it seemed like a rather nice idea. The sunrise is too late at the moment for me to really go and see it on a work day such as the Winter Solstice, so New Years Day seemed like a suitably symbolic alternative. However, I had second thoughts. A long-distance running race was scheduled for that morning. Not only would it bring crowds, but it also would block off my usual access to the beach from around sunrise until well after lunch. I thought better of trying, so had a lie in instead. On the 2^nd I had other plans, which I’ll tell you about later in the week; so finally, today, I headed down to the beach for my first sunrise this year.

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Keyword noise: new year, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, beach, dawn, sunrise, coast.

A month or so ago, I wrote about going walking on Cleethorpes Beach in the early morning, and I said at the time that as the tide goes out and comes back in, I would come back here with more to say about it. Well, I’m not the only one. Yesterday The Guardian published a travel article about just how nice a place Cleethorpes is to visit, including the beach of course, and including the thing I was always planning to write about in Part Two. So, before you click on that link there, read this first.

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Keyword noise: Cleethorpes, beach, coast, river, estuary, Humber, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, shore, shoreline, folk art, bench, Buck Beck Beach Bench.

Since changing jobs, I’ve been going for early morning walks most workdays. For about an hour or so, I’ve been walking up to the woods overlooking the village, or following the riverbank and canalbank, or walking across the fields to the next village and back. It’s a really good way to start the day. When I go to visit The Mother, though: well, there aren’t really any interesting places to walk and back in an hour. There aren’t actually very many public footpaths outside the village itself; there’s no river, and the woods are too far away. I was at a bit of a loss.

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Keyword noise: Cleethorpes, beach, coast, river, estuary, Humber, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, The Cute Accountant, shore, shoreline.

They do say that if you want to go looking for fossils on a beach, you should go in winter when storms disturb things or bring clifftops tumbling down. So just after Christmas, we went to Dunraven Bay, just near the mouth of the Afon Ogwr, because frankly if you want to be able to pick fossils up randomly off the sand on a beach, the coast of South Wales between Porthcawl and Cardiff is one of the best places in the world. Dunraven doesn’t just have fossils, though, it has a haunted garden. It did have a castle, but the castle was demolished in the 1960s, leaving behind the walled garden and the ghost that lives there.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, De Cymru, South Wales, Bro Morgannwg, Vale of Glamorgan, Bae Dwnrhefn, Dunraven Bay, traeth, beach, môr, sea, fossils, ammonites, garden, walled garden.

Last month we popped back up north, for a family wedding; and fitted in a side trip to Whitby.

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Keyword noise: acrobatics, alcohol, Banksy, beach, boats, breakwater, drinking, drunkenness, graffiti, handstand, harbour, lifeboat, lighthouse, Mary Ann Hepworth, North Yorkshire, photography, RNLI, sea, shoreline, Venn diagram, Whitby, Yorkshire.

Another lazy weekend this weekend. Wanting to get out of the house, though, we took a trip to Portishead.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, architecture, beach, harbour, North Somerset, Portishead, sea, seaside, Somerset.

Today’s blog is like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles where you have to spot hard-to-find differences between two apparently identical pictures. To make it a little bit different, though: here’s a carefully-prepared Spot The Non-Difference puzzle, where (for a change) you have to spot the hard-to-find connection between two apparently little-related pictures.

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Keyword noise: Atonement, beach, Cleethorpes, Ferris wheel, filming, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, location.

This June was originally going to be Photo Month on this site, given the oodles of photos I took on holiday. Unfortunately, I took so many photos on holiday,^* I still haven’t managed to sort through them all yet.

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Keyword noise: arch, archaeology, beach, castles, church, Cornwall, cove, fogou, medieval, photography, ruin, sea, shore, souterrain, Tintagel, tunnel.

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Keyword noise: beach, Dee, estuary, Merseyside, photography, resort, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

As promised yesterday.

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Keyword noise: beach, Dee, estuary, Merseyside, photography, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

And, I’m back, myself. From an Easter Weekend away. We went out on an excursion through the Wallasey tunnel,^* to the seaside. Photos to come later in the week. H thought about walking out to sea,x to wade across to the Hilbre Islands, but the tide wasn’t quite right, and the water started creeping up to the knee.

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Keyword noise: beach, Easter, estuary, Hilbre, holiday, islands, Liverpool, Merseyside, river, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

Well, not many words. Yesterday: a walk on the beach.

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Keyword noise: beach, Devon, Exmouth, photography, river, sea, shore.

Photo post of the week: photos from the archives, because I haven’t been out and about. These are all from 1996, I think; so this is what the 1990s looked like, to my eyes at any rate.

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Keyword noise: Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, beach, black and white, footbridge, history, photography, railway, seashore, dunes, sidings, tower block.

Time to do some looking back. Some of these memories will be good, some bad, and none are in any particular order.

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Keyword noise: 2006, beach, memories, Memories Of The Year, moonlight, new year, relationships.

Some time ago, I mentioned that I’d been down to the beach to take some photos, to play with a camera lens I’d just bought. Well, here some of them are, at last.

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Keyword noise: beach, clouds, dunes, photography, sea, shore, sky.

Driving to work this morning: the sun was warm, and the sky blue. Leaving the office at lunch time: the car was hot, and I zoomed along with the windows down.^* “Lovely,” I thought, “why not go to the beach?”

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Keyword noise: beach, lunch, rain, sea, seaside, summer, weather.

Went for a walk on the beach today, to try out a new camera lens.^* I’m told that brisk exertion can be good when you’re feeling down; and struggling through the biting wind across the dunes always seems to leave me more cheerful than I was before. When I was too tired for the sand, I moved down and walked along the firm mud at the edge of the saltmarsh instead.

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Keyword noise: beach, cold, photography, Nikon, walking, weather, wind.