Postcard 42: Reach Poetry 133 and Dozmary Pool

Dozmary Pool, Cornwall

Jamaica Inn, Cornwall

Chough

I never cease to be amazed at the influence of the Arthurian legends. Dozmary Pool plays a prominent role in the stories, so it was interesting to view this remote and evocative stretch of water on Bodmin Moor. Needless to say, there was no sign of Excalibur!

My poem resulting from this visit has just been published in Reach Poetry, issue 133, (Indigo Dreams Press, edited by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling). In Cornish mythology the return of the Chough is said to herald the return of King Arthur.

Dozmary Pool was surprisingly hard to find; but geographically speaking, it is not far at all from another famous Cornish landmark, Jamaica Inn, where there is a small exhibition about the work of Daphne du Maurier.

• Do you have a favourite Daphne du Maurier line? If so, why not share it here. The well known, well loved opening sentence of Rebecca does not count, apparently, for this purpose.
  

Postcard 36: To the Lighthouse?

Godrevy Lighthouse,
Cornwall
Photo: copyright David Gill

This beautiful lighthouse, supposedly the inspiration for the novel, 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf, has been sold for £80,000. The lighthouse in the novel is on The Hebrides (realm in real life of the Stephenson dynasty of lighthouse builders), but Woolf drew on her memories. She had spent childhood holidays in nearby St Ives.

Postcard 18: Monarch of the Isle

You are invited to view the February Seal Card Sale on my Coastcard site.

Speaking of seals, I photographed this magnificent and comfortably curious creature on the Isle of Skye. There are wonderful seal colonies and it is a joy to travel by boat in search of them. Many make their home on the skerries or reefs of little rocky islands that abound around the coast and sea lochs in this area. The word 'skerry' comes from the Norwegian language. A 'sker' in Norse is a rock in the sea. The Gaelic form is 'sgeir', and in Norway, the uneven rocky edge of an island fringe is known as 'skjærgård'. The Scottish coastline around the Western Isles, with its indentations and offshore skerries, is the outcome of a relatively recent submergence. The Scots term for fjord is 'firth'.

I grew up in East Anglia, where there are seal colonies along the North Norfolk coast. Occasionally a seal runs into danger, and it is always heart-warming to read of cases like this story form the Eastern Daily Press in which a sea creature has been successfully rescued, restored to health and returned to the ocean.

I was thinking about seals in literature. It is easy to name poems and prose pieces about a number of our sea creatures (notably The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll), but how many seals can you recall from literary sources?

For a veritable marine menagerie I would recommend the poetry book, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (scroll down the linked page) by Susan Richardson, published by Cinnamon Press. The poet follows in the footsteps of Gudrid, an eleventh century 'Viking heroine'. Within the pages of the volume you will encounter not only seals but also whales, the hermit crab and a colony of penguins.

Sea Creatures on the web

• Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (poem) by Susan Richardson on the Sea Stories site
• Be sure to visit Susan Richardson's amazing new website
  

• Irish Seal Sanctuary page: Releasing Seals by Gary Jermyn
• How the whale became by Ted Hughes
• A selection of sea creature poems from the can-teach site
• My Helford River poem, Sea Horse Song
  

Postcard 16: a Madeleine Moment

Above: 'St Keverne' in bloom
Middle: Coverack, on the way to St Keverne
Below: Sign in the flower border: Middleton, Wales

The scene outside my window was a very wintry one yesterday morning, with white horses on the sea and grey clouds overhead. I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee. It was even darker in the dining room, that is until my eyes alighted on the startling Spring gold of the daffodils on the windowsill. It was a Proustian moment for me, as I remembered the madeleine.

Back in the late autumn we had been at Middleton, the National Botanic Garden of Wales, where we saw a green plant label in the earth saying 'St Keverne'. We looked forward to seeing these bulbs in flower, as St Keverne on the Lizard in Cornwall is a place that holds happy holiday memories for us. At that stage, the soil at Middleton was bare and there were no daffodil shoots in sight. Imagine my delight some weeks later, when we found 'St Keverne' bulbs for sale in a local garden centre, planted up in pots for Christmas.

We bought three pots, and kept one for ourselves. Hence the splash of gold on the windowsill. It transported me back to a happy day two summers ago when we were in St Keverne, a place I thought I knew well, with its fine church in the corner of the village square and its road to the treacherous rocks, aptly named The Manacles. On that particular day, we discovered something quite new to us in the vicinity of the village, and that was a small private museum of archaeological finds from the Lizard peninsula. The museum was at Poldowrian, on the site of a mesolithic-to-bronze-age settlement, and visiting hours were by appointment with the custodian. The site outside the museum building included a Bronze Age roundhouse. There was a lovely garden and an Iron Age cliff castle nearby. It was an idyllic afternoon.

It is strange how the human mind makes involuntary connections, and how a particular 'madeleine' - in this case a bright yellow one - can take us back unexpectedly to a past experience. As I look out over the estuary towards the Hartland light at the northern end of Cornwall, all I can see is a blanket of low cloud. I am grateful on a day like this for the splash of colour that transported me back to a carefree summer holiday in the Cornish sun. Proust can have his madeleine: I would prefer a saffron cake!

• Stop Press and on a different note: Festival Fever and Carnival Mania! I am delighted to get a mention on the February Festival of the Trees. Thank you, Ashley. We are thrilled, too, that thanks to Chris, David's podcast features in Carnival of the Arid.