A path is a suggestion
Exploration of the Great Outdoors is fundamental to the Myconaut Way. Getting out of doors is the beginning; the interesting part is what happens to attention once it gets there. This Beachy Head expedition, dated 17 June 2024, has left fifteen photographs: a gravel track, a town, horses, a lighthouse, flowers and a considerable amount of sea. An unremarkable inventory, until you start looking. Then the familiar business of a coast becomes agreeably peculiar.
The track descends between verges that appear to have taken a rather liberal view of their boundaries. Leaves overlap, stems lean in, green spills over green. A path promises direction, which is comforting. The hillside seems to favour a less managerial arrangement. Somewhere between the two lies a useful approach to exploration: have a way forward, but allow the surroundings to interfere.
And what a capacious word “green” turns out to be. It covers the smooth sweep of the distant hill and the elbowing mass of leaves beside the track, as though a library and a jumble sale could be satisfactorily described as “books”. Stay with the foreground for a moment. The sea will keep.
The town remains in the picture
Three small figures appear on the grassy path. Beyond them, pale cliffs lead towards buildings, a tall tower and a pier. The town has wandered into the nature essay and shows no sign of leaving. Good. There is something faintly dishonest about admiring a coast only after mentally evicting everyone who lives beside it.
The closer view brings out the shore’s repeated divisions and long curves. The pier draws a straight line into the water, a wonderfully human gesture: confronted with the sea, build a bit more pavement. Above it, a narrow pale track climbs across the rougher green. Lines everywhere, some purposeful, some simply inviting the eye to follow.
Those distant walkers make the scale briefly manageable. A person is a quantity the imagination can work with; a sky is another matter. Here the figures are tiny beneath its generous expanse. It is rather cheering to find the human proportion restored without anyone having to deliver a lecture on humility.
An equine interlude
The horses provide a change of company. Pale animals stand together on the left; another stands apart to the right. Chestnut bodies lie low in the long grass. Behind them, darker shrubs stipple the hillside. As assemblies go, it looks admirably free of an agenda.
There is an equine talent, at least to human eyes, for making standing about seem an entirely sufficient occupation. Set against our appetite for destinations, achievements and sensible footwear, this is quietly provocative. Imagine the expedition report: occupied a hillside; remained a horse. A sound day’s work.
The grass matters here. It comes up around bodies, conceals legs, breaks outlines. What looked like a green surface in the earlier views has become a volume large enough to accommodate substantial mammals. The hill has acquired rooms. How much else disappears into the landscape when we insist on looking only at its general appearance?
A tower beside the fracture
Then comes the lighthouse: red and white against silver water, with the great pale cliff rising beside it. A tidy vertical object in a thoroughly untidy setting. Its bands have the pleasing certainty of a diagram; the cliff is full of seams, interruptions and broken edges. One looks designed to be understood at a glance. The other could occupy the rest of the afternoon.
The sequence keeps returning to this partnership, widening out, drawing in. Quite right, too. “Lighthouse: seen it” is a poor return on having eyes. Change the frame and the tower becomes a punctuation mark, a principal character, or something small beside the extravagant face of the rock. The subject stays put; its significance will not.
The dark cracks draw attention away from the bold outline towards the material itself. How does a broad face divide into these particular planes? Where does a seam lead? The questions have a pleasing physical stubbornness. Rock brings philosophy down to earth: permanence is a grand idea until you begin examining the joins.
The edge has an interior
From a distance, a headland makes a decisive silhouette. Land here, sea there; very clear, thank you. Closer in, the arrangement becomes gloriously complicated. Ledges, loose white fragments, green strips and deep-looking seams interrupt the face. The edge has an interior. A line on a map turns out to be an address with several tenants.
Purple flower spikes rise above pale rock; vegetation occupies shelves and sloping recesses. There is something splendid about this shift in scale. The cliff supplies the monument, then a stem quietly disputes the billing. A whole landscape can be reorganised by a flower small enough to pass unnoticed in the first view.
And there, beside the cliff, is a bird. Just a small suspended shape in the open sky, but suddenly the composition has a different kind of life in it. The lighthouse possesses excellent visibility and a striking colour scheme. The bird has the advantage of being able to leave. Architecture must occasionally find this galling.
Patterns without a legend
Look down and another coast emerges. A long projection of rock reaches into the water; pale surfaces, darker bands and blue-green patches make a complicated map below the flowers. It has the look of a document written in several scripts, none especially concerned with the convenience of the reader.
Why does that band run so far? What gives the hollow its outline? How much of the pattern belongs to the rock, and how much to the water and the light? These are the sorts of questions that can turn a view into a small investigation. The eye commutes from stem to shore to horizon, making enormous journeys with very little expenditure on transport.
The lighthouse returns in close view, its finer details softened against the bright water. Its blunt, banded shape is almost toy-like here: a small emblem of human tidiness beside that extravagant geology. Pull back again and the spell changes. This is one of the delights of looking closely: even a familiar landmark can refuse to settle into a single role.
Room for the small things
In the final pair of photographs, the view stretches out again. The town and pier retreat towards the left; sea and sky occupy great swathes of the frame. Across the foreground, purple spikes and small yellow flowers interrupt the grass. After the cliff’s imposing white face, these modest particulars make a persuasive case for changing the subject.
A horizon is an excellent place to send a large thought for exercise. It may return improved; it may simply return larger. The flowers offer a useful check on proceedings. There is the immense view, certainly, but there is also this stem, this patch of colour, this particular piece of ground. Infinity can wait a moment while the foreground gets a hearing.
What makes an expedition rich is often this traffic between scales. A town gathers into a distant shape; a hillside opens into grass and bodies; a cliff resolves into shelves with plants on them. Each adjustment offers another way into the place. There is more going on than a sweeping view can comfortably sweep up.
Enough to begin again
By the last photograph, the coast has become harder to summarise. It began as a track leading towards a view. Now it has horses concealed to the knees, flowers competing with architecture, a white face full of interruptions and a town that quite properly stayed in the picture. The familiar has developed complications. This is progress.
There is pleasure in letting a place be both itself and a provocation to the imagination. The lighthouse can resemble a punctuation mark without ceasing to be a lighthouse. The horses can trouble our ideas about productivity without accepting an invitation to discuss them. Out here, a thought may travel a considerable distance while its starting point remains a perfectly ordinary patch of grass.
Exspecta : Observa : Vide. Give the place a little time. Let the eye stray from the impressive thing to the small thing beside it, then follow whatever question turns up. The Great Outdoors is remarkably generous with starting points. At Beachy Head, even a gravel track opens on to more than one kind of distance.