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On the very margins of coastal places, as you move closer to the seashore, it is possible to see how precarious the human occupation of the land can be at such territorial extremes, particularly where life sprouts up in places that look as if they really belong to – or could be claimed by – the sea. The foreshore at the exposed edge of the sea is a space that changes character due to the movement of elemental forces that have remained beyond human control. This is the kind of place that provides the best vantage point from which the rhythms of the changing tidal conditions can be seen, subject to the celestial pull of gravity.
In the culture of maritime societies, unsurprisingly, the waters just beyond the comfort and safety of the land could quickly become transformed into an unknowable and forbidding place, where the most sober imagination conjoined with the spectacle of powerful atmospheric conditions could easily conjure up unwelcome or frightening visions – of ghosts and apparitions that lingered over shipwrecks or submerged vessels. The sea has always been a violent and deadly place – an inhospitable, inhuman foe that indiscriminately gobbled up human lives – and, as such, an endless source for tales of death and destruction. In John Stagg’s 1810 book of Cumbrian legends, Minstrel of the North, a traditional Cumberland verse titled ‘Messenger of Death’ retells the fate of a local nobleman lost at sea, whose spirit was said to haunt the shore near present day Workington:
Near where the foaming Derwent rolls,
its currents westward to the sea
There on the beach, by Solway’s side
Lord Walter anxious waits for thee.
More recently, further down the coast at St Bees, a shipwreck from the turn of the 20th century, the masts of which for many years would become visible as the tide went out, provided a reminder of the deadly foe that these settlements positioned themselves against. Images of other ships run aground on the Cumbrian shore were also produced as postcards, unusual mementoes of the power of nature along the often-precarious shore.
Such exposure to nature’s elemental power may have been one reason why some of the earliest places that existed along the Cumbrian coast and noted in the historical record were monastic retreats. The most well-known of these were at St Bees and Holme Cultram (near present-day Wigton), perhaps because to realise the monastic ideal in the Middle Ages it was necessary to locate oneself in a remote and preferably dangerous wilderness. The choice of location would have been in keeping with the practice of most of the monotheistic religions, which had always valued wild or uninhabited places, precisely because the absence of human comforts was believed to be the best way of elevating the spirit above its earthly material needs. It was one means whereby the committed believer could be plunged into a condition that arose out of the fact that a physical boundary – the edge of the land, in this case – magnified the sense of ‘living between two worlds.’ Following the example of the desert fathers who founded these religions, whose tales of days and nights roaming deserts may be familiar to us, the holy men of north western Europe, lacking deserts, sought out instead ‘landscapes and environments which were correspondingly forbidding’ in their own way.
Some areas along the coast of West Cumbria are more marginal than others, not only in a spatial or geographical sense, but also in terms of almost existing beyond the boundaries or zones of control that have, for centuries, established the very limit and geographic extent of places, as well as the ownership and legal status of the land. In such in-between zones you will find the perhaps not-so-visible line that separates the safe place from danger – from the violence of the sea.
The remarkable (and apparently ad-hoc) ribbon development of dwellings found south of St Bees Head – stretched along precarious plots of land that find some shelter on the land side just beneath the route of the adjacent coastal railway line at Braystones, Nethertown and Coulderton – originally consisted of holiday homes: chalets for seasonal visitors from other parts of West Cumbria and further afield. They were planted on a space between the historic low and high water tidal marks, which marked the territory out as common land. As such, they existed beyond the reach of local government efforts to prevent anyone who fancied the impressive sea views from improvising their own beach home using old railway carriages or any other self-assembly options that might have been viable.