Just across the bay there’s a decommissioned North Sea oil platform, sawn off at the knees and propped up in the sprawling scrapyard of Able Seaton Port to decay in the sun and salt air. It looks like a mirage, a hallucination, a crash-landed spaceship. This is Teesmouth. Between me and the platform, a work party of oystercatchers is busily processing the broad, dark sands of the bay. A dozen or so seals have hauled out a bit further along, and lie torpid in the hazy sunshine.
In the north, we’re used to wildlife thriving in post-industrial habitats – flooded gravel pits, old spoil tips, rewilded opencast workings. But this isn’t post-industrial, it’s (still somehow) industrial. I drove here slack-jawed, following straight roads through steaming cities of metal architecture, what we might call industrial gothic or robot baroque.
Seal Sands is the name of both the bay and one of the vast chemical manufacturing clusters on the north bank of the Tees. For a while it was sort of a bad joke: between the 1930s and the 1960s, you were unlikely to see any sort of seal here. But the area was declared a site of special scientific interest in 1966, and they’re back now, both grey and common seals. They don’t seem to mind the oil platform or the chemicals works, or the shadows of Hartlepool power station. Not many people come here, and that’s how they like it.
Walk a couple of miles inland and at Saltholme Pools, near Stockton, you can watch the year’s first avocet chicks picking their way on blue legs through the fertile mud, while their parents – pristine in black and white, only occasionally dropping the cool act to do a funny little hopping dance – sweep the waters with those remarkable retroussé bills.
Look up and there in the near distance is the Middlesbrough transporter bridge, the tanks and towers of Navigator Terminals North Tees Ltd (a fuel storage hub), Whitetower Energy power station, all the titanic industrial clutter of the 20th-century Tees. Look back down and there’s a lapwing chick paddling in the shallows. There are dunlins, little ringed plovers, black-tailed godwits in bright summer russet. These are not, for the most part, benevolent landscapes. But there’s always hope (the thing with feathers).
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
