The directions I’ve cobbled together read like a treasure quest: a tiny sun-baked island; unlikely-sounding rock formations; a sandy cove; granite pinnacles; a hidden pool.
The turf is crispy with drought, and arrays of desiccated thrift vibrate like the wires of an arcane musical instrument whose bass is too low for me to pick up. Instead, I hear the incessant chirping of house sparrows – a soundscape of childhood, the audio equivalent of Kodacolor. There are gulls crying, too, and a stonechat chipping away in the gorse.
Crossing from turf to beach, I pick my way over seaweed dumped in a recent storm – a wreck of wrack, fronds of kelp lying like banners dropped in a battle. There are two rock pinnacles, granite stacks with cracks and rakes smoothed by the fingers of wind and wave into forms that feel aboriginally significant. From an elevated shelf on the first, I spot the pool on the next, above high water but beyond a neck of boulders. I calculate that I have an hour to climb there and back before it will be cut off by the tide. But among the boulders are pools of such wonder they might have been created to waylay me. Candy pink, viridian and magenta algae, studded with anemones, topshells, limpets, periwinkles, and framed by fanned, feathered and tentacled forms so beautiful I can hardly bear to tear myself away.
I reach the pinnacle, and the pool there is different – a lido, with sunlit edges and deep, green-shadowed depths. All is still as I approach, but a flicker in my peripheral vision, a swish and a splash lead me to what I came for. Monsters. Tapering speckled bodies, 8cm-20cm long, frog-faces, topaz eyes, and huge but delicate pectoral fins that appear to hug the rock. Giant gobies, Gobius cobitis, are the largest fish of their kind, found only in this far south-western extremity of the British Isles, for now at least. Their pool looks inviting, the water pleasantly cool. But it is their world, not mine, so I lie on my front, my nose almost touching the water, and we gaze at each other across the divide.
Giant gobies are protected under schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which prohibits killing or taking by any method.
