Lying just off the Suffolk coast is a desert. Orford Ness is a shingle spit twelve miles long and up to two miles wide. It is unpopulated, and in its hundreds of grey acres, the only moving things are hares, hawks and the sea wind.
The Ness is the largest and strangest of the series of vast shingle peninsulas that jut from the coastlines of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent. To its north are Scolt Head and Blakeney Point, and to its south is Dungeness, the fulcrum on which the North Sea pivots into the English Channel. These spits are created by the action of tides, currents and seasonal storms. Like sand dunes, they are in continual slow migration, forming and reforming their shape as they shift. In their movement, they are as close to organism as anything only mineral can be. Their shingle is made mostly from flint, which lies about in its several forms: big chunks, white and bulbous like knuckle bones, or long translucent bars, shiny and nubbed as the skin on an alligator’s back.
There is an exquisite patterning to the structure of these spits. They organise themselves in designs so large that they are best witnessed from the vantage of a falcon or an airman. At Dungeness, the shingle is arranged into giant floreate blooms. Orford forms itself in long parallel ridges, each of which marks a time when a storm cast up thousands of tonnes of gravel along the shore, and fattened the spit. These ridges are the stone equivalents of growth rings in a tree trunk. Aerial images of Blakeney show it to possess the complex beauty of a neuron: the long stem of the spit, and to its leeward a marshland that floods and emerges with every tide - a continually self-revising labyrinth of channel and scarp.
Wave and tidal action will always tend to round things off if they are soft enough. This is as true of a peninsula of several hundred square miles as it is of a stone or piece of sea-glass. Millennia of oceanic massage have given East Anglia its humpish outline, from which the spits strike out. The contrast between the north-western and south-eastern coasts of mainland Britain could not be more marked. On the north-west the long fingers of peninsula and sea lace intricately - a handclasp speaking of pax between rock and water. On the bulge of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, however, the land is constantly ceding to the sea, or weaving with it. There is an eeriness to these littorals, born of their perpetual motion, and the dialogue between solid and liquid.
On a hot summer afternoon, I travelled to the East Anglian coast to see these shingle deserts. My aim was to join up some of the spits: to draw a wild ley-line down the coast, from Blakeney through to Orford and perhaps beyond. I was following, too, I realised, a geological logic, or a geo-logic: in my journeys, I had moved down a gradient of mineral resilience - from the igneous coastline of Coruisk and the volcanic north-west, through the soluble limestone of the Burren, down to the sandstone and chalk of the holloway counties, and now to these transient and fraying south-eastern edgelands.
I had begun to think that the history of Britain and Ireland could be well comprehended through the history of its six great rock types - granite, sandstone, slate, chalk, limestone and flint. There were others, of course: basalt, shale, the clays. But these six rocks, it seemed to me, formed the strong mineral skeleton of the archipelago. Whatever we did to the skin of the country, the skeleton would remain.
I reached Blakeney on a warm late-summer afternoon. Big drogue-shaped clouds hung in a blue sky. Above them was a lattice of cirrostratus, hinting at weather trouble to come. A steady wind blew onshore, scouring the face and drying the skin.
I stepped down on to the gravel of the spit, and began the crunching walk out along the spit’s four miles. Blakeney is a terrain of extended lines: the gleaming ridges of the gravel ramparts, the water’s edge, the wrack, all sweeping away to a distant coincident point. The spit possesses the firm perspectival vision of an Uccello painting, guiding the eye towards its limits.
Only a few hundred yards along, I lay down on the warm dry shingle, and sighted the spit’s summit ridge off ahead of me. I looked along it at pebble level, over the gleaming stones, each of which held an ember of the afternoon’s abundant light. Scattered here and there were walkers, making dark uprights in this horizontal landscape.
Inland, a big wood fire, burning out of sight, was hazing the air above the marshes, thickening the sky between me and the mainland. Only the simpler shapes of the land were visible: a windmill, a four-square church tower, oak trees, pines. I could hear children’s voices and laughter, carrying over the marsh. Ahead of me, two swans were trying to beat out to sea, but the wind was so strong that they were making no advance at all, beating and beating and remaining still. With the loud wooden creaking of their pinions, and their stasis, they seemed like early flying machines being tested in a wind tunnel.
Then a skein of twenty or so wild geese flew inland over my head, the slow Doppler of their honking causing me to look up. As they flew they formed and reformed the pattern of their arrangement, first as an arrowhead, then a horseshoe, and then back to an arrowhead. A single white goose flew just off the nose of the arrow. Thousands of feet above the geese two Tornado jets, out on manoeuvres from RAF Marham, played. Both planes tilted sideways in unison to show their full hawkish silhouette - raked back wings, biro-top nose - while their contrails disintegrated behind them.
After an hour of walking, I stopped and hollowed out a seat in the gravel. I sat, watched the sea, drank some water, and picked up flint pebbles. They were beautiful stones to hold. Each was differently patterned. Some wore a mesh of chatter lines, like the craquelure of old oil paint. Some had cortical furrowings. Others were patterned with swirls of sediment and colour - cream, blue, beagle-brown - which resembled map-markings, indicating borders, coastlines, islands, seas, and they reminded me of pelts of the Enlli seals.
I got up and walked along, scanning the shingle for the best of these mapstones. Near the water’s edge, I found a white flint egg that wore a rough blue map of the spit itself, and a big whelk, bleached chalk-white by salt and sun, hollowed and smashed so that the spiral construction of its interior was visible: a central post about which the shell chamber helixed.
Then, a mile or so further on, as though summoned or anticipated by the barnacle geese’s airborne cuneiform, I found an arrowhead. A small one, two inches long, with gently convex outer sides, so that it sat well in the palm of my hand. There must have been something about its form, some indication of its workedness by hand, that caught my eye, lying as it was among those millions of other stones shaped by the sea. At its base it was the blue-black of storm-cloud, a colour that changed to grey towards the head’s point. I held it, wondered what other hands had touched it in the thousands of years since it was knapped out. I slipped it into my pocket. I would keep it, I thought, for a year or two, before returning it to the same shore.
Two miles further out along the spit, on the sand plains that stretched away to its seaward side, I reached the hull of a big wooden boat, sunk deep and permanently into the hard sand. The curved lateral timbers of the hull, weed-hung and blackened from unnumbered submersions, stood up like the ribcage of some great beast. Around it, the hard-packed sand was set into ripples, which repeated their own patterns on smaller and smaller scales. I thought of the optical effects of the limestone pavements in the Burren, and also of the sand desert of Forvie, on the coast above Aberdeen: a Saharan zone of the far north, where the dunes were so extensive that you could walk within them for three hours, and their migration so relentless that they had overwhelmed a village.
The old hull was sunk within a hollow of its own making and keeping, eight or nine feet deep, filled with water that had been left behind by the last tide. It lay as a clear brimming pool. I took my clothes off and slipped into it. The water had been simmered all day in the sun, and was warm as a bath. Florid cabbage-like seaweeds grew from the timbers, red and green in colour, and translucent gobies, disturbed by my arrival, darted about: the pool was busy with life. I sank down, until the water ringed my neck, and kept myself buoyant with flutterings of my hands. Looking around, I could see only the gravel ramparts of the spit, and the North Sea, and I watched as wave after wave began its spiralling break on to the shore, and gravel was churned in the base of each wave and then flung from its curling summit.
Natural forces - wild energies - often have the capacity to frustrate representation. Our most precise descriptive language, mathematics, cannot fully account for or predict the flow of water down a stream, or the movements of a glacier or the turbulent rush of wind across uplands. Such actions behave in ways that are chaotic: they operate according to feedback systems of unresolvable delicacy and intricacy.
But nature also specialises in order and in repetition. The fractal habits of certain landscapes, their tendencies to replicate their own forms at different scales and in different contexts: these can lend a near-mystical sense of organisation to a place, as though it has been built out of a single repeating unit.
The Dakotan tribes of North America found evidence of circular forms in nature nearly everywhere, from the shape of birds’ nests to the course of the stars. The Pueblo Indians of the American south-west, by contrast, tended to apprehend landscapes in rectangular terms: they found parallelograms and rhomboids to be ubiquitous - a form which they almost certainly derived from the regular dihedral shapes into which the red rock of the south-western deserts erodes. Jonathan Raban has written beautifully about how the recurring unit of the art of the Indians of the British Columbian coast is the lozenge, which he relates to the distinctive shape into which light forms when it falls on gently moving water.
Britain and Ireland have produced their own versions of this natural monadism, this obsessive hunting after singularity in nature. Thomas Browne, in his slender work of 1658,
The Garden of Cyrus
, proposed that the ‘quincunx’, the disposition of five items with four at the corners of a square and the fifth in its centre, existed with such ubiquity that it ought properly to be considered the figure upon which the universe was constructed. Browne found the quincunx repeating itself throughout natural and artificial forms - in five-leaved flowering plants, and in astral motion - and took it as hermetic proof of a Universal Spirit of Nature. In 1917, the mathematician and biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published an elegant book,
On Growth and Form
, in which he proposed that the form of the spiral had its play throughout the natural world: in seashells, spiderwebs, the distribution of seeds in the head of a daisy, the curve of a beaver’s tooth, the turns of a narwhal’s horn and an elephant’s tusk, in a pine-cone’s configuration of scales, and in the curve of a sea wave as it broke.
As I had travelled, I had become increasingly interested in these monadists, these fearsome concentrators. Roger had told me about his friend John Wolseley, a British-born artist who had become obsessed by the dunes of the Australian deserts, and who in 1991 had spent eight months in the Simpson Desert, trying to map and comprehend the dunes and their shifting sedimentary histories. I had also heard of a contemporary photographer called Kevin Griffin, who for years had been taking images of the Atlantic waves that crash into Dun Loughan Bay in Galway. Griffin’s method was to stand in the surf with a camera strapped to his chest, its focal length preset to seventy centimetres, waiting for what he called a ‘well-shaped wave’ to appear: his images were taken at the instant before the strike of the wave. Immersion, involvement, these were Griffin’s fascinations, and they had cost him several broken ribs and near-drownings. Still he continued his project, trying to fathom the behaviour of incoming water along a 200-yard stretch of a single Irish beach.
The oddest and most wonderful monadist of all, though, I came across quite by chance. Finger-walking the shelves of a library one morning, I discovered the books of a man called Vaughan Cornish. In 1895 Cornish had moved into a small house on the Dorset coast near Poole, the precise location of which I was not able to establish. During his years there, Cornish became beguiled by the waves that fell upon the beach beneath his garden. ‘Every day,’ he recalled in a memoir written near the end of his life:
the waves of the sea - beautiful, mysterious and insistent - drew me more and more to the path on the cliff whence I could watch them curl and break, and listen to their splash upon the sandy shore. I stood there on the afternoon of a calm day in early autumn at the time of low water of a spring tide. The little waves, gliding slowly in over the flat sands, bent round the ends of a shoal, as waves of light are refracted, and, meeting, passed through each other, each to continue its own course.
Over several years of observation, Cornish convinced himself that the wave was the key to all geographies. So committed was he to the proving of this idea that he sold his home on the south coast, and became instead an itinerant explorer-geographer, moving between wild places, where he could dedicate himself to the pursuit, refinement and proof of his theory. ‘I wandered abroad,’ he wrote, ‘among sandhills, and snow-drifts, explored amphibiously the sandbanks of estuaries, measured waves in storms at sea, timed the throbbing surge of torrents, the heaving of whirlpools, and the drumming thunder of waterfalls.’ He sailed out into tempests in the Atlantic Ocean and on Lake Superior in order to observe the formal clash of gale-driven waves. He followed storm surges down the Ure, the Swale and the Tees, tracking the generation of ‘roll waves’. He worked often at night and during full moons, in order to catch the right tides to make his measurements, and this research brought him into dangerous situations: out on the sand-flats of estuaries at Morecambe and Southend, for example, where the sea could come in subtly and swiftly. In January 1907, he happened ‘by good fortune’ to be in Kingston, Jamaica, when an earthquake struck the town. He ran out of the house in which he was staying and ‘mapped the seismic waves that traversed the island’.