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Author Archives: solwayshorewalker
Limestone: ‘pavement’ plants
Great Asby Scar, in the Orton Fells on the east side of Cumbria, is one of the best limestone pavements in Britain. From Victorian times until fairly recently, areas of the pavement were plundered and damaged due to the fashion … Continue reading
Posted in LIMESTONE, limestone pavements
Tagged clints, ferns, Great Asby Scar, grikes, Romano-British
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Limestone: the language of pavements
Clints, grikes, karst, karren and kamenitsas – they are evidence of the power of water in its liquid or frozen state, the power that sculpts limestone to form ‘pavements’. Smooth surfaces, reflecting light from the sky when wet; slippery underfoot; … Continue reading
Posted in LIMESTONE, limestone pavements
Tagged Carboniferous, clints, Great Asby Scar, grikes, kamenitsa, karren, Westmorland Dales
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In limestone country: Clints Crags
The village where I live is at the foot of a limestone plateau on the north-west edge of the Lake District. It is one of a line of low-lying villages where springs arise to feed becks that flow out onto … Continue reading
Posted in LIMESTONE, limestone scenery
Tagged dolines, erratics, limestone and drystone walls, limestone pavements, sink-holes
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Limestone in the Lake District: an Introduction
During the third lockdown, at the start of 2021, I re-visited some limestone kilns, a short walk from where I live. Coincidentally, I’d been re-reading some of Norman Nicholson’s poems and one in particular, The Seven Rocks, kept drawing me … Continue reading
Posted in geology, industrial archaeology, LIMESTONE, limestone, an introduction
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Snippet 15: The continuing mystery of the piddocks
The tide is ebbing and, along the inner edge of a shallow channel on the shore, it has deposited a line of offerings, neatly sorted: predominantly mussel shells, some black, some striped, all shining wetly in the October sun; a … Continue reading
Posted in Allonby, Found Objects, sea-bed & undersea, shells, Snippets, submerged forest
Tagged Pholas, piddocks, Zirfaea
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The fog and the froth
Diffuse, pale light glimmers and shifts with the fog above Skinburness saltmarsh. Two crows call harshly and fly swiftly towards a broad-winged shape, a buzzard, who slants his wings and flaps away, fading and disappearing into the whiteness. Along the … Continue reading
Posted in mud-shrimps, mudflats, saltmarshes
Tagged Fog, saltmarsh, samphire
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Snippet 14: Long-lost piddocks and the peat
The shore at Beckfoot, on a sunny, windy day in May: the Solway is a churned, pale brown, and a wavering white line far off in the Firth marks where the incoming tide is beating against a sandbank. Towards the … Continue reading
Posted in mud-shrimps, peat, bogs and moors, sea-bed & undersea, Snippets, submerged forest
Tagged molluscs, piddocks
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Fish traps on the Mawbray shore
It is a low spring tide, chosen especially because it allows us to scan a vast area of the shore. Above Mawbray Banks, pilot Andrew Lysser turns the gyroplane in a circle, its rotors buzzing and clattering, and I lean … Continue reading
Posted in aerial views, archaeology, fishing, stones
Tagged Beauly Firth, fish traps, Mawbray, Severn, Strangford Lough, weirs, yairs
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The saltpans at Crosscanonby
The tides and currents have sorted the sizes and colours of the shingle, and here on the upper shore near Crosscanonby I am walking over shapes that are large – and predominantly red: lumps and discs of the New Red … Continue reading
Posted in aerial views, Allonby, coastal heritage, salt
Tagged Crosscanonby, kinch, saltpans, wooden pipe
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Ice
In January and February this year, people living at Bowness and along the Upper Solway started posting photos of tidelines – not of drifts of hornwrack, kelp and driftwood, but of ice and snow. As the freezing weather continued, so … Continue reading
Posted in ice
Tagged art and science, ice-floes, razorshells, Solway viaduct, Wampool
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