Day Forty-One: Beach walking and train writing

The next morning I walked to St. Bees beach again and it had totally changed. The sea was all the way out, revealing a sandy beach. It was beautiful. September sun hit the South Head and lit up the sheep that were like tiny dots of wool. I walked up and down the sand, and right up to the rocks that had been inaccessible the day before.

As I had a very quick change over between two legs of my journey, and because I had to check out at 11, I decided to go the long way round and to leave an hour early. I got the train along the coast from St Bees to Barrow-in-Furness and from Barrow to Lancaster. Again I experienced a stunning train ride, with the Lake District on one side of me and for most of the way, the shoreline on the other, including some train stations that were right on the beach. As before, I couldn’t do much but write sense impressions of what I could see on this part of the journey. For the rest of the journey I worked on my story about St Bees. Aside from the beach and the coastline itself, I was inspired by a number of things.

  • ‘Miss Brill’ and Katherine Mansfield’s clear, fresh prose-style.
  • Hartley’s Tearoom, a café right on the beach at St Bees.
  • The loss of life in World War One and particularly my ancestors who died at Ypres and the Somme.
  • Antony Gormley’s sculptures. I didn’t see the figures at Crosby Beach – further down the coast – but I did see them on the roof tops in London, and was thinking about them
  • My visit to the St Bees Priory.

You can see some of the places I went by following the links from here.

Read Day Forty-Two

Day Two on St Bees beach:

#writing