Saraband are starting a beautiful series of essays on nature, with the first release by Linda Cracknell: Writing Landscape. Here is an extract from the essay, Lunar Cycling. We can’t wait to see the rest of the series!

Writing Landscape
By Linda Cracknell
Published by Saraband

Lunar Cycling

My desk: a scatter of books, maps, letters, pebbles, and amongst them a relic which recalls me to another place, another daily pattern, another way of counting time. Mundane, yet treasured, this pedal from a child’s bicycle is made of moulded creamy-white plastic and trimmed with two intact strips of reflector. I’ll never know how it separated from its crank and chain and frame and wheels, or where it came from or whose foot once pressed it.

What’s left of the spindle is rusty and encrusted with Acorn Barnacles. They also cluster on its surfaces, on one side sparse and tiny as punctuation marks; on the other, swarming in a small colony and anchored into crevices between the treads. I know now that they once swam in a throng of delicate cyprid larvae, until they dropped from the sea’s surface with a finite time to find a trustworthy home. Head down, appendages or leg-like ‘cirri’ up, they landed on the pedal and cemented themselves to it, growing six shell-plates around vulnerable head, gills and legs, whilst at the top four flat plates made a diamond-shaped ‘door’ to open and close with the tides.

This transformation, one of several including six stages beforehand as nauplii larvae, is as audacious as the butterfly’s emergence from a cocoon, although in the opposite direction – from free-moving to sessile. For the remainder of their lives, which can be up to eight years, these crustaceans would remain fixed to a human tool of travel and revolutions; passenger-barnacles who cycled through the tides.

***

I found the pedal in the summer of 2017 during a month’s stay at the Cove Park Artists’ Residency on the Rosneath peninsula. Low-lying, with a higher spine of snarly moor and plantation forest, the peninsula dangles south into the Clyde with Loch Long to its west, bringing the wild to snag against the lawns of Victorian mansions at Cove. The waters of Gare Loch to the east bump up to caravans at Castle Point where holiday-makers from Glasgow swell the population each summer. Attached to Arrochar and its craggy ‘Alps’ only by a narrow isthmus, it was easy on this leg of land to imagine myself cut off.  Once there, I designated as my fourth, northern, shore the road running coast to coast from Coulport, and committed myself to ‘island’ life.

I knew I’d need daily exercise, an escape from my desk, and that a new landscape would compel me to explore, so I decided to walk the entire coastline, tackling each section at the lowest point of the tide. Being there for twenty-eight days I’d witness a complete lunar cycle: two neap tides, when the difference between high and low water is smallest, and two spring tides around the full and new moon, when it is greatest.

With a tidal cycle taking roughly twelve and a half hours, I left my desk at a different time each day, gradually progressing from morning to evening. My days were regulated, but in a way, irregular; my low-tide walks an unbreakable daily appointment offering a cosmic discipline and a stroll with a sense of purpose. ‘Ardpeaton for the 9.52’, I recorded in my notebook on day eleven, as if I was catching a bus. The next day, I caught the 10.41.

Using my bicycle (pedals still attached), I circled the twelve-mile loop of road to a different coastal point each day, finding rocky shores, occasional mudflats, little bays of sand and shingle, leggy jetties. In this way, I learnt the place through its shoreline, with its pillboxes, fishermen, mussel beds.

Where deciduous woodland met the coast around Rosneath Bay, the canopy had been salt-pruned by spring tides so that during the ebb, foliage hung to a sharp horizontal line well above the shore. High tides had also quarried soil away leaving tree roots cage-like, proud of the bank, reminiscent of mangroves. Occasionally I passed CCTV cameras, signs for Neighbourhood Watch, and experienced a shiver of surveillance. Walking around Rosneath Point one evening beside uneasy, clattery woodlands I passed a fire which had been left raging and unsupervised on a boulder whilst curlews and oystercatchers called and seals howled from Perch Rock.

Although the range between high and low-tide is moderate here, a significant space opened up when the sea withdrew. My explorations developed a pattern. I first crossed the wet ‘intertidal zone’ to reach the water’s edge, sometimes over rock slippery with bladder-wrack. Watching for waterborne birds or vessels, I’d feel the wind direction, notice how a change in weather often accompanied the pendulum swing of the tide. Then I’d step along the wet space, teeming with visible and invisible lives following their interwoven biologies. Tidal pools captured a marine microcosm of fixed creatures or slow-movers, encrustations, vivid colours, the dance of light and water, things that waft: a lavish chest spilling treasure that had nothing to do with me.

I also observed the strandline where the spring tides leave their gifts. It’s not uncommon for gunshot cartridges from Newfoundland to be washed up on Scotland’s west coast as well as ‘drift seeds’ from tropical waters, in folk custom marvellous enough to hang as a charm around a neck and be called ‘puzzle-fruit’, or to find soil and grow into something exotic.

On each walk I took photos, made sound recordings, scribbled about sensory observations.

Writing Landscape by Linda Cracknell is published by Saraband, priced £8.99.