The mighty Chesil beach
In a five-week month I add an extra picture prompt and this photograph was taken in September 2015 looking from the top of the Camelia walk at Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens along Chesil beach towards Weymouth.
So, although not Autumnal in content, it is Autumnal by date so in my book that counts.
Although it’s in Dorset on the South Coast of England and is part of the world-famous world heritage site, the Jurrasic coast, Chesil Beach is, for the most part, a lonely and forgotten place inhabited by fishermen and the occasional south coast path walker. The part you’re looking at can only be reached from the beach car park near the gardens and it boundaries The Fleet, an inland tidal lagoon.
The challenge this week is to consider a natural local landmark near you. It might be on the coast or in the depths of the country. What makes it special? And why is it there? It may be the stuff of legend or the result of a natural phenomenon.
Please feel free to leave your first line, paragraph, stanza or even a title in the comments below.
And here’s my effort .. please be kind 🙂
Chesil beach, dead man’s bay to the locals on account of the many shipwrecks. A place of smugglers and ne’er do wells, especially at Moonfleet. The manor still stands I’m told, a hotel for guests fascinated by the talk of gold and murder. Eigteen miles and counting and the pebbles sift themselves by size along its length. Magic we call it, the hand of God we say protecting sacred Dorset from flood and perhaps worse.
I used to be a mountain, now I’m just a grain of sand
On Chesil Beach.
I was down on Chesil beach last Thursday and looking at the fine grains of sand in amongst the tiny pebbles – I don’t know if you know but Chesil Beach is naturally graded with larger boulders to the East at Portland and finer and finer pebbles as you move West.
I wandered off through my recent photographs, and started to think about the whole concept of landmarks, and that maybe we should make our own. So here’s my little offering and you’ll find the picture of the ‘saved tree’ glowing green on my website.
LANDMARKS
We think of famous places,
natural untainted spaces, or those
magnificent castles and country piles
of bricks, and gentry lives, but whose
landmarks are those?
What relevance to your growth
and being who you are becoming
registers in that earth, or those walls?
Make your own marks on the land!
Create your true points of reference, and
raise the smallest statues to your beliefs.
Or plant – or maybe save – a tree, to
shine golden in the evening against
life’s stormy sky.
An excellent point Lesley and I suppose based on your suggestion that the allotment my husband and I work on together is our landmark – oh and the tree we planted in the garden last year.