Heading south on the coastal path, we leave Old Hartley village, drawn magnetically by St Mary’s Island with its tall white lighthouse. The sea is a muted grey, with two vast container ships at rest near its meeting with a paler sky.
The footpath skirts a tufty hillock where a kestrel hovers over rough grass, fenced off from the path by chestnut paling. I catch the medicinal scent of mugwort, its glaucous leaves curling and turning winter brown. The scrubby clifftops are a tangle of rose briars and brambles, safe thickets for stonechat and wren. Amongst the windblown tussocks are seedheads of wild carrot, yarrow and knapweed, with late flowers of red clover.
The sandstone cliffs have shed great slabs of rock onto the beach many metres below. A top layer of boulder clay has slumped into the sea in places, making the edge of the land unstable. It curves round to Curry’s Point, named after a local glassworker who was hanged in 1739 for the murder of Robert Shevil, landlord of the inn at Old Hartley. His body hung from a gibbet on this spit of land where steps lead down to a causeway, access between tides to St Mary’s Lighthouse.
This has long been a hazardous area for shipping and for 400 years a beacon of sorts was lit here on this part-time island of hard sandstone. The lighthouse, completed in 1898, was however decommissioned by Trinity House in 1984, rendered unnecessary by modern navigational techniques.
The waves are calm and families potter around the rock pools. Children with fluorescent green and pink nets peer into plastic buckets or turn over rocks. Their cries of excitement are echoed in the high piping of seabirds.
There’s a cluster of whistling and wheezing starlings dotted over the rounded lighthouse roof like currants on a bun. I listen to these sounds of the sea’s edge: a skirmish of gulls, the overlapping fluting of oystercatchers, rapid notes of a redshank, a mournful curlew. Not until spring will I hear them at home when the waders return to the North Pennine moors to breed.
