One of my favourite vistas is salt marsh. Hard to explain, but like moorland, it feels more accommodating to my eyes than, say, an urban landscape, with lots of long distance focussing, fewer verticals to punctuate the skyline, and no harsh or glaring colours. Perhaps something in me that is bleak and featureless corresponds in some way.
Anyhow, before we get too metaphysical, I made a flying visit to Sussex yesterday to spend time with my daughter and her partner, during which we drove to one of my favourite places, Cuckmere Haven.
Any day trip to Sussex from Bristol is necessarily rushed, but yesterday the timings got really messed up, as we opted to stop at the pub for lunch first and they must have been short-staffed in the kitchen or something. It was nearly two hours before we were served, and as lovely as it was sitting around the table chatting and escorting wasps that strayed indoors back outside, it would have been lovelier still to exchange some of that news while sitting on the beach or poking about along the shoreline. But so it goes.
By the time we'd eaten, we only had about an hour and three quarters before we had to be back in Saltdean to pick my daughter's partner's car up from the garage, so we walked briskly down the chalk path that runs between the naturally meandering river and the straight channel that was cut in 1846 to alleviate flooding upstream.
One thing that struck me yesterday was that there were a lot fewer flowers - and butterflies - than the last time I was there, almost exactly two years ago. I did see the brilliant flash of a few Chalk Hill Blue butterflies, but none lingered long enough for me to photograph them, and since we were on a route march, neither did I. Maybe the long dry period in May and early June contributed to the dearth of wild flowers.
rock sea lavender
Stone mushrooms!
hagstones
'This is the closest I'm getting to the sea!'
Cwtch liked being on the beach, but even though she was determined to shadow me, there was still no way she was going to get even her claws wet in the sea, and she spent much of her time standing right behind me at the water's edge.
Seaford Head
the remnants of Viper's Bugloss
the last few yards of the River Cuckmere before it meets the sea
I don't normally wear patterned clothes but couldn't resist this flowered top
As we hurried back up the river to the pub car park, one of us mentioned our forthcoming visit to the Bluebell Railway to ride on the Flying Scotsman, and how much my late father would have enjoyed hearing about it, only for a Spitfire to materialise overhead at that very moment, as if he might have heard us and wished to point out it was planes he fixed during the war, actually ...
... followed by (we think) a Hawker Hurricane.
Perfect timing, as was dropping my daughter's partner off to pick up his car with a minute to spare, before the long drive home. A lovely day, but next time I'll spend longer on the beach.
