Photo by Elaine Brennan, by permission.
We set up our camper van on a blasted moor, back of Sennen, half a mile inland. Then the storm slams into us and doesn’t let up for a week. The van rocks on its suspension. Sometimes we wake in the dead of night, in glossy dark, the wind all roar and clatter like a train. The van pitches and rolls like it’s about to capsize.
Mornings thick and grey with rain, sudden hailstorms so fierce that we bow and buckle beneath them, and the sea a chaos of snarl-edged swell deep enough to bury ships.
The concrete steps from path to beach have snapped off. They end in midair, earth and rock armour measured in tons sucked out from under them. The beach is now home to an archipelago of little grassy islands, lumps of turf dragged out and left there by the retreating tide. Rusted steel cables that once held earth shoring in place now like the broken roots of some great storm-felled tree.
The news is full of stories. A youth missing along the coastal path. A young family, drenched and humbled and relieved to be alive after venturing too close to massive swell that hurls against and over sea defences and harbour walls. Floods, houses collapsing down crumbling cliffs, roads forked with cracks, like the aftermath of an earthquake. Extreme surfers are flying in from all over the world, the report says, to ride the 30ft waves smashing against our shores.
We walk the strandline at Gwinver, a brightly colour mess of plastic detritus so chewed up it looks like it’s been through a mincer. And there, among the human debris spewed back at us by the wild seas, we find a delicate glassy shard – the ‘sail’ of Velella Velella, also known as by-the-wind sailor or sea raft.
We watch the waves pound rocks and beach. The wind whips our hair across our faces. Our cracked lips taste of salt. And in my hand I hold this tiny sail, this fragile memento left by the storm.
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