Last night we walked to a favourite spot on the coast just a few miles from our house, Dancing Ledge. Extensive quarrying in the last two centuries opened up a sizeable chink in the Purbeck cliffs here, and the quarrymen even carved out a small tidal swimming pool for local schoolboys. We donned wetsuits and sampled the pool, before leaping out screaming and jumping instead into (oddly) much warmer sea.
We camped, as always enjoying a much more restful and lengthy sleep than we might have managed back at home. As the sun went down, I convinced myself that I could see shore lights 65 miles away right across the English Channel, including those of the island of Alderney (where we hope to be paddling in two weeks’ time). Heather was pretty sceptical, and was irritatingly proved right when it became clear that the lights were moving up and down the Channel…
Early this morning, I grabbed my camera gear and climbed along the cliffs to the location of Purbeck’s small puffin colony, in the hope that they might perform for me. However, rather unobligingly, they proved unwilling to make an appearance. After a while of peering fruitlessly at their ledge through a very long lens, I began to notice the maritime plants around me. I changed lens and pointed the camera in a different direction …
