A breeze was blowing, and I could smell salt, seaweed, and sun-bleached shore. I knew, once again, that I’d found home.

–Sue Hubbell, Waiting for Aphrodite

I never tire of the coast because it’s never the same twice. The tides and the weather change its physical shape, and they bring different things to look at. There’s always something new. Perhaps if I had settled in a landscape of fells and lakes unchanged for thousands of years, my overriding sense of my environment –my apprehension of the natural world –would be of something solid, immutable, reliable, fixed. But this stretch of coast has an entirely different spirit. It’s all about change, shift, ambiguity. It reinvents itself. It has a talent for concealment and revelation. Things turn up here; things go missing.

—Jean Sprackland: Strands A Year of Discoveries on the Beach