Boggle Hole

Fresh landslips nibble at the path from Bay Town. Pale grass quivers in obeisance to the west wind announcing the next cyclone. I pause in the lee of a hedge strangled by brambles the colour of venous blood. A couple of silent chaffinches, too chilled to tweet, patrol the shifting border between field and cliff. The tide is out to the east, revealing the concentric arcs of Landing, East and Cowling Scars.  The faulted cliffs of Ravenscar rise above High, Billet and Flat Scars to the south. I am looking for evidence of more recent trauma: the biggest storm surge since 1953.

The Cleveland Way tunnels through a mass of blackthorn, whale-shaped by the wind, and drops down into the narrow valley of Mill Beck. Boggles are said to be close relatives of boggarts, little people who are up to no good. It was the storm, not the boggles, which dumped a tangle of kelp at the foot of the youth hostel yard, high above the usual tideline. The bay is fringed by swathes of dead seaweed. These are whole plants, not just their fronds, uprooted by the storm and spat out below the cliffs. In some cases, branches of the holdfasts are shorn off, revealing pale discs with rims like octopus suckers. Some younger kelplings had wrapped their holdfasts around the sturdy stipe of an older one, but that offered no protection, they were all lost.  An inverted holdfast masquerades as a flower, its stipe ‘planted’ so deep in fresh shingle deposits that I cannot shift it.

The pebbles scattered here, bright-washed by the beck and the sea, have offered me semi-precious stones in the past – jasper, carnelian, rose quartz and, so preciously, an ichthyosaur vertebra. The Jurassic bedrock contains its own treasure. One of the layers of shale on my way to the sea’s edge has bullet-shaped belemnites and pyritised ammonites, glinting gold on the grey.

A solitary curlew probes the sand at low water, aloof from a pair of pipping oystercatchers. The sea sighs on a strip of sand.  Spray shoots high and irregularly on a far reef; the swell has more power than the placid shallows suggest. A heron flies down the coast against the darkening sky, shifting its angle of attack with each wingbeat as exuberant gusts of wind channel between slumped clay cliffs.

Stoupe Beck is dammed by sea-thrown rocks. A boulder of Shap granite, with its signature pink feldspar crystals, looks ready to fall from the glutinous embrace of a boulder clay bluff.  Diagnosed as a ‘glacial erratic’, suggesting a wayward unpredictability, it could crush a human head. When the glaciers swarmed across the North, they scoured the land beneath, plucking anything in their way, grinding the mixture into the slew of brown aggregate known as boulder clay.

There are recent cliff collapses all along the bay. The laid-back angles of clay confirm its lack of resistance and contrast with the vertical defiance

of the older rocks. An improbable mini-Matterhorn of grey clay, all acute angles up to a vertical spire about my height, stands proud above the slough.

The tide is advancing. Stratus clouds have chased any remaining blue sky to Denmark. It is time for me to retreat. Somewhere in another orbit is the Gaia spacecraft, launched yesterday. It will detect and document about a billion stars in our galaxy, one percent of the estimated total.

A rounded lump of boulder clay studded with pebbles lies at my feet, one of many strewn across the strand. It looks like a dropping from a stone-eating dinosaur. One of the pebbles on its surface is a heavily-ridged Gryphaea or ‘devil’s toenail’ a species of fossil oyster. I pluck, wash, inspect and discard it. My back creaks. Perhaps I was too hasty? I read later that the Scots call these clach crubain, crouching shells. Folklore says they will treat or prevent rheumatism, an example of ‘sympathetic medicine’ as their contorted appearance suggests arthritis.

Wandering back across the scars, I find a slab of sandstone. Almost two hundred million years ago, another sea made ripple marks on another beach. Now fossilised, these meandering undulations lie next to a virtual copy in today’s sand. How much of today is in that sand? Some of its silica crystals must have been formed near the dawn of our planet.

Everything is stardust.

© David Cundall

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