The Story of Ballyferris. Chapter Twelve. The Beach Take Two.

The grey beauty of the Irish Sea.

When I became bored of waiting my turn on the beach, on the sand in front of the van where my brother Ian made those serious structures... I've written about already... with the other lads whose families also had vans on the field by the beach....I went walking .

I've mentioned that many liked to promenade in a summer evening along the silver sands as the sun lowered  over the peninsula. When aunt Helen...mum's sister ...came to the van it was de rigeur to have a walk after tea. Teatime then  being what I now call dinner. 

But soon it became a place of gathering for the young people from our field and the smaller field to the right of the lane. In our early teens the gang was mainly the younger Cathcarts, Vicky Pollock, the McKee girls and myself. the leader of the pack being Vicky, she who must be obeyed!

This was seldom a leisurely stroll. This walk was invariably brisk and our given instructions were to collect shells.

Not just any old shells

They had to be either "pearlies" or tiny cowries. And to this day I keep a glass bottle full of cowries on a window ledge in my home in Morecambe...and if by chance and good luck I happen upon a "pearly" on some distant shore, why a little whoop of success leaves my lips.

Of course I never could compete with the number of precious shells that Vicky gathered, because we all had to walk behind her, thus making sure that she spied them first....and wow betide you if you thought that you could somehow sneakily get in front of her because you were then in danger of receiving a little friendly nip or punch on the arm. We remained good friends through grammer school and college until we both went our separate ways as adults never to meet again.

I was actually more of a lone wanderer.Leaving the van I liked to take the beach to the left. It was more rugged and I found it interesting with seaweed and shells and those little hopping sand fleas!. It also gave me the chance to see what the folk along the edge were up to. Always inquisitive I was, maybe a bit nosey.

I especially loved the double decker bus I've mentioned before and was always hopeful that I might catch a glimpse of one of the occupants and be invited into their van.  It didn't happen. I never saw them there. Perhaps they had come to Hope's field wanting quiet and peace. 

There was a headland about thirty yards away from our van with quite a rocky promontory and there the area stopped being Ballyferris townland and became Ballywhisken... as far as I can remember. One of my delights was to clamber alone over these rocks and climb right out on to the very edge of them where the water was deepest. Then as the tide came in a surge smashed up into the crevases in the rocks soaking my clothes and hair. Imagination ran riot in this place. I saw the footprints of giants and dinosaurs and thought of the generations of children who may have climbed these rocks before me and who might have dreamt of someone like me in the future. I too dreamt of my future, who I would become, what I would do in life and I even thought of the children and grandchildren that I might have one day. Such dreams as these sustained me and kept me positive in my later life when disappointments came my way, as of course they do for us all.

If I was feeling really daring I would climb over the grassy hill at the back of the promontory and walk on to the next beach. 

And that was a very different environment, with a completely different feel to it, as if, as in the old testament, other gods or princes of the air were holding court in that empty seascape! Actually...it was just the way to a favourite shop in Ballywhisken, but if you were going by the beach you had to negotiate the sucking clay that melted below your feet and if it succeeded in trapping you to free yourself took a mighty muscle wrenching effort. 

A cliff of sand separated the coast road from the beach. There were no fields behind it to house friendly caravanners and therefore the beach was normally deserted. Here the tide went out very far and left great acres of shining silver with what looked like little rivulets of water. But wow to the one who tried to take the path through this expanse for if the clay didn't get you then the the depth of those little streams might offer up a surprising shock. It was worth the risk as the sand was littered with beautiful stones. Stones that sparked as you struck them against each other...flints! My pockets were often so heavy with them that my shorts were in danger of falling down. And this too has left me with the joy, whether Suffolk, Spain ,Morecambe or Donaghadee where I woud seek out pebbles seawashed and beautiful. I have read that stones may roll down rivers in one part of the world and reappear somewhere else much later, with the sharp edges rounded off and ready to slip nicely into the palm of a hand. A comforting thought. 

A path led eventually through the cliff and on to the road by the little emporium in Ballywhisken.

A wooden hut with rows of glass bottles full of sugary treats. Hilda's shop.Now although there were other little shops around further on in Millisle and Ballywalter, none compared to this. Hilda's was a place of magic. Now gone the way of all good things, gone the way of progress! Possibly woodworm ate away at the structure or perhaps one stormy night it just took off and flew free of the cliff it was balanced on so precariously. Dougie, my dad, had a way of flirting in an Armagh sort of a way and Hilda was one of his favourite flirt partners, if there is such a thing. I loved to be there when he was flirting. He charmed, she responded and mum just raised her eyebrows and waited for the loaf of bread or the bag of sweets or whatever it was that she had gone in for. As far as I'm concerned...nobody took it seriously, least of all mum, and in a way it added a frisson of fun and excitement to our days.

*

I may have asked for a bag of dulse.....but that's for another story.

 

A Poem for Thursday.

A Poem for Thursday

Today at the writers' workshop the prompt was from Shauna. She gave each of us some pages with interesting lists, to make us think about our lives and the people associated with us at various stages of it.

Time Line..............I choose 10 - 15. ...it was the 50s, it was Co Down, and all was well in my world.

Before the Fall

Time was endless, friends were many.

Vicky and Sandy, and I was Gerry.

We laughed a lot, linked arms and talked

About boys we fancied and those we stalked.

A caravan was where we gathered 

Under the stars at Ballyferris

Our bare feet kicking the silver sand.

Where time was endless, nothing planned.

"There's  Cassiopeia and there's the Plough".

"Oh your luck's in, there's a shooting star!"

We raced down maran covered dunes

And harmonised on Western tunes.

And miles away on the far horizon

Were ships bound for ports in the land of England.

We seldom thought of our futures then,

But time and tide don't wait for man.

They pass unseen and never waver

Then gather up all in their net without favour.

And I daren't go back to that holy place

Where time stood still. A time when space

And mercy was real, before the fall

That enveloped and overwhelmed us all.

The Story of Ballyferris....Chapter Eight...The Beach

The Beach

The name... Ballyferris...  is enough to set me off on a sweet daydream.

Growing up in the suburbs of Belfast city... life lived by the Co. Down coast meant freedom.

 The flat landscape, the open skies, the ever present blue-grey Irish Sea, became a raison d'etre for living ...yes I think it's not going too far so say that this became a truth for me .....and the main reason for this obsession was definitely the beach.

 Nowadays, with cheap air travel we  have a greater knowledge of beautiful expanses of golden sand and turquoise sea, from Portrush to Portugal, India and beyond..at least on the internet!!

But nothing can compare with early memories, and mine are of the beach at Ballyferris.

 Waking up to the smell of an Irish fry, bacon,eggs, mushrooms and toast. Knowing that a whole day and the exploration of the beach was ahead of me. No homework, no responsibilities,this was tantamount to heaven. I didn’t analyse it then, and it’s taken me a lifetime to work out even a little of why I loved it so much.

Come with me, as we walk over the little grassy ridge at the coast edge of the field.  Come down to the beach, there you will find yourself treading the worn path that many have taken before. Around you, the smell of  beach daisies.... a type of camomile. My love for these innocent flowers  has stayed with me since.( I even wrote a song about them once... “I love the flowers, I love the trees, but most of all I love daises.” ...not exactly  Larkin or Heaney!...)

When I walk on other beaches, Morecambe, Southwold, Portrush or Brighton... I strip some seeds from the abundance of the seedheads, to drop on coastal areas bare of daisies.

 Rarely did I return to the caravan without a bunch of these flowers for mum.

So, on past the daisy strip, which by the way could take any thing up to an hour, on down the beach, heading to the sea.

If the tide was out , I squelched my way over a mound of sticky brown seaweed, treading lightly in my bare feet, for fear of some squirming creature having been caught there, left by the receding tide. The hard sand was cold beneath my feet.Truth is it was very cold, and this was probably why my patient mum always shouted after me to put on wellington boots ...as I ran off from the caravan. Clothes for Ballyferris were basic.... a t-shirt or at the most a felted woolly jumper, a pair of cotton shorts and bare feet. I’m convinced,  this is one of the reasons why I still have fairly healthy... if rather large feet! Reach the water and take a tentative dabble at the edge with toes in, before running  back up the beach to warmer sand.

At the end of the summer the sand at the top of the beach had dried up in the sun and shone like silver dust. It was very fine and a joy to scrunch under your feet until they were covered by the earthy warmth.

This poem below was on a post by Anthony Wilson ...writer , poet and blogger...

and reminded me of that girl and the freedom she had in those days...

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does she seem not to hear, though I call to her?
Where does she come from, and what is her name?

Why do I see her at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when she walks, does she cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at her back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the waterside now?

Why does she move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near her so that I may hear her,
why does she say that her name is my own?

Charles Causley, from The Collected Poems for Children  

Leighton Moss...Autumnwatch...

I was only 15 when I first came to The Bay...

 ..that's me looking like a tomboy rather than the glamorous two beside me!

...the Bay of course being...

...Morecambe Bay..

..with the most amount of sand in any of the British bays...though often...deadly....100 sq. mls of it!!

...it's quick...very quick!!

Skirting the bay is a wonderful nature reserve called ....

...Leighton Moss.

Up on a twitter site came the information that the BBC Autumnwatch  series this year was to be based by the bay.

So we went... and loved it...

...not so much because of the birds...we are not birders let alone twitchers..

...nor the deer just entering their rutting season...

..also interesting..

...and we didn't catch sight of the beavers...bah...

..no we just went to be nosey I suppose, and then got caught up in it's otherworldliness.

I took the Lumix Panasonic DMC-FZ45 with me to take some pics...

...but my tiddling little camera was as nothing compared to the whoppers owned by the serious snappers..

...why some even had a sort of structure on their back to hold the length of the thing!!

So I resorted in the end to my Apple ipad and took some views on Instagram...which I have to say is such fun!!

But you know me...I haven't yet worked out how to transfer them to my blog...

one day!

So here are a few pics taken with the camera..

and edited a smidgen on Picdeer, beavers, birdsMonkey.

..you can see that it's well worth a visit.

Maybe catch you there one day...who knows!!

Sunday at Grange-over-Sands

It was Prom Art again on Sunday ...gosh it comes around so fast I can hardly get my breath.

Well... we love Grange and The Prom Art...but not the rain that stopped the people from promenading with their families and dogs!

So it was a matter of covering up the stall and in the heavy showers hauling in the paintings while the ceramics could look after themselves!

    

  The stall looked good..

...even in all the wetness!

.and Robert....chief organiser, if you don't count his gorgeous wife !...

was to be seen as usual, walking up and down the prom encouraging us.

 yellow hat glowing... so we would know that he was around.

We had some new tiles on the stall...         
               hares......!

 yes... I know you all realise I'm besotted with them at the moment...

                       but there you go!

...you must blame Derek Jarman's cottage for it all!













There's always a bonus at Grange.....
...the bay was glorious with massive rain clouds  hanging over the hills around Arnside...
I just had to take loads of pics...

Then just to be seen away in the distance at the oppposite side of the bay...

...leading his people like a modern day Moses across the treacherous sands....

the Queen's Guide, Cedric Robinson

I listened to two little girls discussing the sands...

..." If you fall in there the sand will swallow you up"...

...unbelieving look..."Really?"

Well it could have been a Dr. Who moment!

A Poem for Thursday.

The Outing to Dungeness

Prospect Cottage

Basically it was just a hut
A fisherman’s hut
Along with all the other huts
Now I love a hut
I would like a hut by the sea
Not too much to keep tidy
And the sound and smell of it all…


Basically it was not really a garden
Just the way you collect bits of plants along the beach
And hope that they might take root
And help you to remember that day
By the sea on the beach
In the shingle…

Really it was not sculpture
Not what those earnest artists
Like Andy or the Welsh man would think of as sculpture
More like me when I walked the sands at Ballyferris
And picked up the rubbish that the others had dropped
Well I say the rubbish
I never actually thought of it that way…


Really I wasn’t too sure about the yellow windows
And the writing on the end wall
All about the sun
Though the mist obscured it that day
And the words were a bit small
Now that my eyesight is not what it was…


So what made me cry?
For it was only a fisherman’s hut
It was only the shingle all around it by the road
It was only railway sleepers upended
Standing like a modern Stonehenge
And the perfume of the gorse
And the yellow horned poppies…

No really …there was not much there you know.


[This was the day that we went looking for Derek Jarman's house on the shingle in that magic spot called Dungeness. The brochure say the largest area of shingle in Europe. Full of wild sea flowers, protected by the local authorities....mysteriously beautiful.]

Visiting Humphrey II

The landscape stretching out from the Head is quite amazing.

A seemingly endless vista of sand and sky...
... soothing the mind and freeing the soul.

Large gullies form and reform with successive tides.

...and strange unearthly formations are constantly being brought into being.

Grassy areas grow and prosper...only to be decimated by storms that smash them and reform them elsewhere.

These are the Eastern Lakes in the distance...past the salt marsh sheep grazing on the herbal plain...

...and the mouth of the Bay to the south...stretching out across 100 square miles of emptiness...

...to the west the blue mountains of the Lake district ...

...and to the north ...the plain left behind when the ice receded.

We climbed up on to the top of Humphrey... and the wind though hardly noticable on the flat sands, gusted and pushed against us.

...the potter thought that he would give the wind a hand in the sculpting of this ancient thorn tree!

...you can only smile...

Beloved Poem

Sheila Glen Bishop

And I've remembered always

Snailshells and butterflies

We trod between the seed pearl bubbles

Clinging to our hands

So cold, so beautifully cold

And white, so white the sand.

Photo taken on a Donegal beach.

A Poem for Thursday.

Not Getting Wet

The wet dress
warm sand running through her fingers
tiny shells
unprecious stones.

No point in being
by the sea and
not getting wet.