When the tide is out it is possible, for a limited period of time at least, to walk to it from the shore. Many tourists and the 35 people who live on the Mount do just that. It’s a strange sensation, to make that five-minute crossing along the man-made causeway. That may be due in part to the fact the mount was once surrounded by trees, a now long-submerged hazel wood. The historic local name for the mount is literally ‘the grey rock in a wood’. One is put in mind of Robert Macfarlane’s walk across The Broomway, another tidal path over the Maplin Sands to Foulness Island (nicknamed The Doomway as it is allegedly Britain’s deadliest path) though in reality it is not at all isolated or dangerous. St. Michaels Mount, I understand, is one of 43 tidal unbridged islands around the United Kingdom accessible on foot from shore. I’m not entirely sure whether it is it a mount or an island really. The word ‘mount’ is suggestive, as a verb, of an ascent, of fixing to a support, or of organising, preparing and setting in motion an event (such as a walk); one mounts a horse, mounts an attack and mounts a play. Islands, on the other hand, feel as though they not only are, but should have always been, surrounded by water, whilst a mount at least feels as though it would be situated on (or in)land. There is a risk that this mount, like much of the Cornish coast, is vulnerable to flooding, even submergence, with rises in sea water level and natural erosion. Sand doesn’t make the best building material precisely because, even on quite small scales, it is so easily washed away. However, the quality varies greatly from beach to beach, some being sharper or more gritty. But by far the greatest determinant in successful sandcastle construction is the moisture level of the sand itself – too dry and it risks dispersal in the wind, too wet and you precipitate the inevitable collapse-under-its-own-weight. Sandcastles – scaled up versions of the beach variety – would never work as human dwellings, though they would be fun and cheap presumably. We could
all be kings and queens, build our own homes and even live with a sea view. And imagine entire office blocks, built by their own work force, communally and all in a day. Would we behave as we do on beach holidays (playful and carefree) or fear imminent structural collapse? The fact that these structures are so ephemeral is their magic and their tragedy. Oddly enough constructions created in sand on beaches are called castles regardless of whether or not they are citadels. They have a mediæval fortified form with their moats, keeps and towers with crenellations, the result of the buckets used as a moulds. The particular, slightly conical shape of a bucket that allows the packed sand to be easily released from the bucket mould is better able to sustain its own weight. The forms that maintain the mark of their builders’ hands (sandcastles made without buckets, instead through scooping sand) are especially pleasing I think, where the little hands have patted the surface solid and smooth. And I am touched by the ones whose forms have softened in the wind, mid-demise, still retaining their paper flags and seaweed decorations. Castles have associations in the imagination and references in history; knights in shining armour, stranded princesses and dragons are the source of many a child’s fantasies. They allow for the mental investigation of escape and capture, safety and risk, alongside learning about tides and flows, depth and height, modelling and construction. The sandcastle I recorded on film that day will no longer exist, washed away by tide, if not already destroyed under a child’s foot hours or even minutes after my photograph was taken. But it will be have been replicated, time and again, by countless others since then, all under the shadow of its big sister, just 500 metres away, or its topographic counterpart, 200 miles away, across the sea. As Jimi sang, “so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually”.
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A O’C: I love the contrast between the whimsy of the sand castle – constructions, imagination and impermanence, and the mount. The connection between the sand castle and the mount is in ways of seeing, or representing landscape, rather than material or geologic references. Perspective and perception is so critical in landscape, as is representation, and I found an interesting dialogue here between the mount, the romanticised sand castle and moat, and the photograph of the two together.
This could lead into a discussion of the authenticity of our representation of landscape (goes back to Desiree’s piece
M H: this makes me think of Bachelard’s ‘poetics of space’ – the miniature and magical worlds in the nooks and crannies of our homes, or the fractal islands and the matter of sand and sea that inhabit the corners of the land. I can’t help comparing this to Troel’s memory maps – here are two examples of how we might frame the land in our minds. Troel draws maps of Aarhus in a rational tradition, Graham paints a picture of the Cornwall beach for us through free association, shifting between scales of geographic landform and microscopic matter.
S W: On our coast, the eastern side of Vancouver Island beaches were thick with driftwood logs and seaweed: these were the building materials to make forts rather than castles. Is it because we didn’t have St Michael’s Mount as a guide? Canada doesn’t have castles, but it does have forts. Is it the building materials that lead to form, or is the naming the thing that leads to form? A castle is a castle, even in ruin; a Hudson’s Bay fort is a fort, even in a national park.
on national parks) - referring to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. A completely different direction – food for thought!
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