At Abereiddy

Walking south along the coast path of St David's Head in the Pembrokeshire National Park, amongst the bays and headlands of rugged and ragged cliffs and worn-down volcanic hills, one lesser, lower, headland stands out for its clearly man-made feature.

The squat little tower of Abereiddy, standing on a headland that is barely still there, more hole than headland, where the Blue Lagoon has been carved out as part of the long lost local slate mining industry.

Standing sentinel over the little bay and beach, and the little street of houses behind.

More photos in the Pembrokeshire gallery

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Kilve and Lilstock Beach

Where the Quantock Hills AONB meets the Bristol Channel on the West Somerset coast.

And the waves from the Atlantic wash away the silt of the river estuaries and undercut the shale cliffs.

Leaving great intertidal platforms, sections through the Lilstock Formation of Jurassic and Triassic rocks, and revealing the fossils of ammonites and dinosaurs.

While ships pass up the channel to Bristol and South Wales, guided by the landmark church tower.

Pictures from April 2008. More in the Somerset gallery.

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Brean Down

A great limestone scarp runs the breadth of Somerset, the Mendip Hills, famous for their karst landscape — the gorge at Cheddar and the caves at Wookey Hole.

Where it meets the sea in the Bristol Channel, it takes the form of a 2km long peninsula beside the village of Brean, Brean Down, and 4km beyond that headland an island, Steep Holm.

Brean Down stands 98m above the surrounding flat farmland and wetlands of the Somerset Levels, with views south to Brent Knoll, north over Weston-super-Mare bay, out over the Bristol channel to Wales and inland along the Mendip scarp.

The Down was home to an iron-age hill fort and a Victorian coastal fort, later taken over for rocket and weapons research in the Second World War -- a large concrete arrow directed bombers to one of the test sites.

These days its main claim to fame is as the site of the often-proposed-but-never-got-very-far Severn Barrage, which could in theory generate 5% of the UK's electricity.

But at the moment it's home only to a few people walking around the rocks and windswept rowans.

And a herd of National Trust goats.

Most of these were taken one day in february 2007. There are more photos under the Brean Down tag.

Helmsdale Harbour

In the winter, while I neglected to post on the blog, I spent some time out of the way to concentrate on work. Helmsdale in Sutherland was about as out of the way as I could find.

It's on the east coast in the far north of the Scottish Highlands, on the railway half way between Inverness and Thurso.

At the mouth of the Helmsdale River, otherwise known as River Ullie, which flows down the Strath of Kildonan (Strath Ullie) from Loch Badanloch.

It has a little harbour with big old breakwaters where the snow gathers and stays pristine until the stormy seas crash and overtop the walls.

Built in 1818 during the Highland clearances, when subsistence farmers were evicted by landlords who wanted to develop more profitable industries and agricultural practices on their estates.

The harbour was built to accommodate herring fleets, worked by the displaced farmers, and it was extended in 1823 and 1892, and refurbished in the last couple of years.

At one time the tiny port was home to 200 fishing boats, one of the largest herring fleets in Europe.

Now it's as much a tourist town as a fishing port, but a few boats remain, out every day, even in the darkest mid-winter.

More pictures in the Highlands gallery.

From here to a promontory

The rocks that rebuilt London

were pulled from a distant limestone island

where the wastes from once great quarries

now give way to stormy seas

where the racing tides of the Shambles bank are kept safe and shipwreck free

by Portland Bill.

A True Story.

More pictures in the Portland gallery...