Approaching the Solstice the days are long and island days are always even longer, slower. There is more light, more space, fewer people, happier people it seems. Voices carry further across water, so does laughter.
What I had thought to be church bells may have been the harbour buoys talking to each other.
I woke to wet roofs and wondered that I had heard no rain; perhaps there was none and only sea fret coming in to settle.
I woke early and set out early, recalling again our walking guide in Spain twenty-odd years ago, who geared all of his walks around mid-day, and did not understand my frustration at wasting the morning. “Would you rather be up and out, and back so early in the afternoon?” he asked me. Yes. And yes. And yes. It’s always been my way to walk as much of the walking as I have planned early in the day, before the heat or the anabatic wind kicks in.
I am not a fan of stupid-early rising which, for me, simply means being up before you were wise, as my Mam would have put it.
But if I have slept and wake with the light, I can ignore clock-time, and it is a greater pleasure to start out in the cool of the morning. If it means I have walked as far as I intend to walk – or usually further, because undoubtedly I will have mislaid my route, which isn’t quite the same as losing your way – that is a bonus, a gift of time in which to eat a slow lunch over a book, have a swim in the pool, lounge on the beach, give in to the call of the sea, brave its chill knowing that once you’re in, you will giggle with the playful, joyful, sea-ness of it all, or indeed to do
anything else unscheduled. I might window-shop, for example.
Once I might have actually shopped, but now I have no-one at home expecting holiday-bring-backs, so I’ll only buy if something really calls to me – tells me that I want this for myself, or that maybe it would make a present for some-one’s next birthday. It has to shout loudly though, because at home I am still in clear-out mode.
I might take my camera out to play. I might go looking for ‘found text’.
With long island afternoons, I get to do all of the above.
After dinner, I come back down to the beach to look for sea-glass, to sit to write, to realise how much I like this beach-bum aspect of myself…
…hair semi-bleached, salted, untended, letting the style and the colour grow out, happy to tie it up during the day – something I didn’t have the confidence to do for many years, my hair was something to hide behind – but now…pah! It is what it is; I like it long, but I’m happy to pull it back off my face; I can’t see my face most of the time, and no-one else needs to look, so why care so much about it?
…feet bare and still sandy;
…skin varying shades of sand-scoured, sun-kissed, age-worn;
…eyes stinging from a day of brightness and sweat and suncream.
I understand, finally, that I don’t want to live beside the sea. I want to live surrounded by it. I set to seriously considering the option. Am I capable of starting over so fundamentally, yet again? Or will frequent visits to islands, different but similarly small and isolated places, will that be enough to satisfy my yearning?
It is a question to travel with for a while.
Meanwhile, a tide turns as I watch. Mallards strut the sands demanding titbits.Teenagers sit in quiet conversation, then meticulously gather up their things and take their empty beer bottles home. Two younger children play a simple game of catch. Stray women, alone, walk up and down the beach looking for their own kind of treasure. A jet ski roars away, out of place. Old people hold hands. Dog-walkers say hello. Gulls take to the air to ride the evening thermals.
Islands, especially small, inhabited islands are special. They have unremarked thin places, where ancient times breach the veil. They show on the maps as tourist spots, or simple geographical features, survivors of history and prehistory, or risks to shipping, or mere curiosities.
The only way to know a thin place is to be there, and to thin your own porous armour. Sometimes, the only way to know a thin place is to happen to be there when it chooses to be thin…the thing about portals is that they open and close – and we don’t always have the key. It can be by chance.
Or maybe nothing is ever by chance. I do not know.
I walked along the coast on a cloud-shrouded morning and came upon Peninnis Head.
I am told that the lighthouse there now has an LED with a range of nine nautical miles, a reduction from its previous twelve. This simple fact led me down a warren of information on the lighthouse itself and the Trinity House Aids to Navigation review of 2010, and all manner of related technical information. I did not find the specific recommendations for Peninnis Light or why it, specifically, had its range reduced.
I did learn that lighthouses and lightships are now considered a secondary aid to navigation, with GPS (or GNSS – global navigation satellite system) being considered the primary. All very well while the satellites and the systems remain accessible – but I fear maybe something is being lost in this drive to rely on the high-tech stuff.
It may be that the previous twelve nautical miles was never necessary in terms of who would be navigating these waters. Nine may well be sufficient, may always have been sufficient. I’m not a sailor, I’m not a local, I don’t know these waters. I have no idea.
But what I do know is that in the increased reliance on the newer technology there is the danger (if not already the reality) that navigators will stop learning the light-codes of the old lights. Worse, the codes themselves will be eroded as unnecessary.
Eventually, by asking a much simpler question of my search engine, I did discover that although the range and light-source have changed, the code has not (not yet). Peninnis still flashes white at a twenty-second interval. Perhaps knowing which light you are looking at is still paramount in the circumstances in which you need to rely upon your sighting, even if it’s only a back-up.
I can only trust that our young boatmen and sailors are required (or are interested enough) to keep this knowledge alive – and that just maybe the land-sea-dogs understand why it might be important to do so.
The light at Peninnis was never fully-manned. It is relatively new, by lighthouse standards, having been built in 1911 to supersede St Agnes’ light. It marks the southern point of St Mary’s Sound, the channel between St Mary’s and Gugh – the islet off St Agnes.
For those who care about such things (which sometimes includes me)
- the tower is 14m high, with a base of open lattice steelwork with a white gallery and black-domed top
- it was originally an oil-fired incandescent burner
- the third-order rotating optic was powered by clockwork – presumably this mechanism was re-set whenever the Trinity crew came to top up the pressurised oil tanks
- in 1922 it was converted to acetylene operation– I looked it up – I don’t understand – but apparently this powered the rotation of the optic as well as fuelling the lamp
- it was not converted to electrical operation until 1992
It was in its centenary year that it was updated and downgraded. Its reach was reduced as the LED was added to the outer rail, and the whole operation became automatic managed from Trinity’s base in Harwich.
Of all of this, the thing that most intrigues me is that the original lantern and the rotating Fresnel lens are still in place.
When I think of that – and of the close-up views I had of such lenses and the learning of how they worked (much forgotten) that I had on a rainy day in Penzance decades ago – the structure becomes a ‘she’ again, not an ‘it’. She looks blinded. Her lens is protected in shrouds. Her old watchful eye bandaged. Part of me can’t help feeling that this is not sentiment. This is protection against the day when the old ways will be returned to. That, when the satellites fall or the internet is finally compromised beyond use, we will return to candles and rotating prisms.
I don’t expect a single swiping away of everything that we use now, but given the slow unravelling of resources running out, the capitalist empire falling (as all empires do), labour rebelling, the pollution
and the poison taking their toll, I do not see an unending progress ahead of us, I see a reversal. Shrouded lamps, protected, suggest to me that Trinity House is also hedging its bets.
Such musings are prompted by the lighthouse itself, and by the work I’m doing on my father’s memoir, in which he frequently identifies the lights he passes around our shores. I have no idea if he knew their signatures, or simply deduced them from his map reading. He was such a young man at the time, he would not have then known much of what he later came to teach me. He taught me a lot of things, but light-house/ light-ship codes were not among them. Thoughts for other days.
Because on this day even the light tower feels out of place. This is a day on which the cloud has come down to the ground and other creatures rise out of the mist.
These creatures are rock-form. Tall and sinuous, splintered or solid. They take on ur-shapes and dominate everything around them. The sea roars unseen below the cliffs. Birds call from a wave-spattered stack. The rocks speak more clearly.
The rocks pull me back a few thousand years. Or more.
These islands were inhabited then, we know that. We know that there were villages, and fields, and livestock, and fishing, and trade with far-away places, through chains of hands and of boats and of travellers with tales to tell.
In those days, there would also have been misted days like these. There would have been thin days when the rocks (just a few eye-blinks ago to them) would have stood in their frozen mid-dance, with their shapes like birds or gods or lovers or leaping seals.
And people would have come to be among them.
I feel this place would have been a place of pilgrimage, of myth and magic.
I feel it would have been a female place of communion.
I came away with a story that wants to be told, or at least an evocation of a time and place. This is not the place to tell it, but only to note that it was born here.
Archaeologists are quick to attribute ‘ritual significance’ to any site they have no understanding of, even if it might have been merely a midden, or a granary, or a homestead. I find it strange, in that light, how slow they are to recognise that not all sacred sites are tainted by the hand of man, that there have always been places where women have gathered – to tell their stories or to sit in silence – and that these were more likely the natural places, places that were mystical in their own right, and that those women left no mark upon them.
Women have less of an urge to change the world, it seems to me, and more of a one to let the world change us.
So I sat for a while, and wandered for a while, among the Peninnis stones, in the mist.
And I listened to the whispers.
