Overwhelmed by The Sea

I've been doing a spot of writing again (you never know, one day I might finish that novel) and in the process of describing a place in Scotland I visited last year I foud myself utterly engaged by it once again.

We spent a week in what had once been a fisherman's cottage, built end on to the shore to protect it from the sea. Steep cliff's towered directly over the back wall of the building and the sea was barely fifteen meters away from our front door.

The term awesome is overused thses days, but this place truly filled me with awe.

The full power of nature was, essentially, all this place had to offer, but my goodness did it offer it in spades. A strip of sand and a harbour nestled between high craggy bluffs was the view from the garden. Not just the beauty, but the sheer power and energy of the coastline (and the vastness of the sea) was overwhelming. It had been a long time since I was so taken with a place that the rest of my life seemed to disappear as unimportant, my work, interests and hobbies seeming irrelevant compared to the majestic rocky outcrops, life-rich rockpools and endless coves to explore.

It felt wild. It felt free.

For the first time since childhood (as far as I can remember) I found myself awake at 5am, as excited as a little boy on Christmas day and snook out to take enless photographs of an unspoilt dawn.

Yet no-one really lived in the tiny village anymore. A few local families still held properties as summer homes I was told, yet most of the (delightful in summer but cramped and utterly exposed in winter) dwellings were holiday lets. I felt a kind of sadness at a way of life made impossible by a changing world, found myself intrigued by the iron heel of a kid's work clogg we found embeded in the old tar of the sea wall - a slender trace of that vanished life - yet the utter inaccessability of the place had kept it safe from negative change.

In this tiny, isolated cove on an unspoilt coastline, nature ruled - and it's awesome majesty was all consuming.