BAMBURGH
[2022-2026]
Footprints, animal tracks, a feather, seaweed torn loose, the stumps of a drowned forest, a plastic bucket — and the birds, which leave nothing at all. There are no people. There is a shadow at the beginning and a shadow at the end, and between them the place goes on without anyone in it.
I walk the same stretch every year and it does not remember me. The footprints are gone by evening. The weed I photograph in the morning is somewhere else by dusk, and so is the sand it was lying on.
I used to think going back was a way of keeping something. It isn't. Nothing here holds — and the word for the thing that tries, the root that grips the rock until the water is stronger, is holdfast.
The only mark I make is a shadow, and the tide takes that first.
Northumberland. To be viewed in sequence.