A wild and windy morning – down at the Observation Point, Burt’s carved stone tablet…
“An iron coast and angry waves,
You seen to hear them rise and fall,
And roar, rock-thwarted in their bellowing caves,
Beneath a windy wall”
…seems particularly apposite today. In typical Burt fashion, he took a fairly cavalier attitude with Tennyson’s original words (from the ‘Palace of Art’), as he did with the quote from ‘The Tempest’, carved into the cliffs at Tilly Whim, where he transposes several lines! Quite characteristic of the curious mixture of romanticism and spirituality and blunt pragmatism Burt seems to embody.
Down below, Guillemots flicker in and out from the ledges on tiny black and white wings, with many more huddled onto the ledges as the sea crashes against the cliffs below them.
Shags labour against the wind, flapping along with beaks full of nesting material, with a few bright white Gannets, Herring Gulls and Great Black-backed Gulls also on the wing.
In the relative shelter of Caravan Terrace, Goldfinches are picking over a dry Teasel stem, their lovely crimson and gold plumage and jangling calls illuminating a drab morning.
Nearby, pale yellow Primrose flowers are spreading across the bank, along with blue and white Field Speedwell, along with the tiny white flowers of Whitlow Grass and the yellow flowers and heart-shaped leaves of Lesser Celandine (always reminding me of a child’s drawing of a sun) tightly furled this morning.
Out on the downs, Early Spider and Early Purple Orchid leaves stud the grassland, with a few Primroses in bloom in the meadows.
Sallows dance in the breeze this morning, covered in tightly furled buds, while Elder is already covered in fresh green leaves.