Damaris West
Ayr is well provided with parks, but to me these green spaces feel as if they’re inhabited by melancholy ghosts who doom me to match their strolling pace. Beaches, by contrast, don’t allow for such appropriation because the sea is a diva representing the wonder and cruelty of the universe.
I find myself wishing sometimes that Ayr beach was white-shell sand and the water was clear turquoise, but the waves are no less fascinating for their steely opacity and the hem of creamy froth they lick onto the sand, like milk on a child’s lip. Late in the day, the declining light can make the sea look pure silver and as still as an inland loch. Arran, beyond, is sometimes scarcely visible as a blue blur, but at other times it appears in sharp details of mauve and dun so that the 16 miles which separate it from the mainland could be much less.
Although right on the coast, Ayr isn’t for the most part windswept. Many of its streets are as leafy as lanes in Oxfordshire. It’s only when venturing as far as Heads of Ayr Farm Park that the coast rises and you can look back at a vista of sea and shore opening out below like a great fan. Following the road on, there is then the sudden, startling view of that most iconic of landmarks: Ailsa Craig, a gigantic currant bun floating on the waves.
As with most coasts, there are separate ways down to the shore each with its own characteristics. Do I need shade so my older dog can stay in the car while I walk with the younger one? Will there be ripe blackberries? Might I meet other cars on the stretch of single-track road without passing places?
The coast immediately north of Ayr is too urban for my taste. However, heading south, without even reaching Maidens, there is everything you could wish for.
At Greenan Shore, low tide allows me to walk practically dry-shod across the inlet beside the estuary of the River Doon, after which I’m on an exhilaratingly expansive foreshore. My spaniel takes off after the gulls and crows, with no hope of catching anything of course. The tideline here is one of my sources for finding sea glass or, to be accurate, beach glass, since much of it still hasn’t been fully blunted or acquired an over-all frosted coating. A ruined castle broods on the skyline.
Dunure also has a ruined castle, situated next to a beehive-shaped dovecot and close to a labyrinth. For such a small village, there is much to see and learn: the castle is associated with gruesome stories of torture, the TV series Outlander used it as a setting, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent time there with his artist friends. At high tide, small boats bob up and down in the harbour and you could be treated to the slightly disturbing sight of hundreds of live brown crabs being landed in crates. At low tide, you might find sea anemones in the rock pools, or you might stroll along the shingle and find sea glass and tiny semi-precious stones. Parking is scarce beside the harbour, but the restaurant has its own car park and there is also a café and gift shop.
Continuing south, the beaches are wilder but in many ways just as alluring. In some cases they aren’t signed, so that discovering them is a delight in itself. They’re frequented by dog walkers and the occasional intrepid swimmer. Sanderlings purr over their reflections in the wet sand: clockwork mice with jabbing beaks that look like an extra leg. Herons wait patiently in the shallows and cormorants fan their wings on the rocks. Oystercatchers peck and pipe, or whirr in flocks, glinting like snowflakes in a snow globe.
To be by the sea is to attend a live musical performance with the percussive beat of the waves as the rhythm backing track. There’s a maxim which holds that every seventh wave is bigger than the others, but the patterns are so complex as to make it impossible to tell what actually counts for a wave as they cross and merge and break, hissing forward and sliding back.
The sea is sight and sound, but also smell. Researchers were baffled until relatively recently by what caused that immensely evocative sea smell (was it salt? fish? seaweed?) although they’re now agreed that it’s the result of gases emitted by bacteria as they digest phytoplankton. It’s a vast and pleasant odour, to be sucked in on a deep breath.
The swilling margins of the sea along this coast are bitty with fragmented seaweed and fleshy stumps of the kelp which, after a storm, may be dumped in huge quantities on the shore. There are always shells washed up: different kinds in different places. Thick, robust white cockle shells are typical of Ayr beach but nowhere else. Otherwise there are limpets interspersed with topshells, periwinkles and tellins. Scallop and clam shells only ever seem to exist in fragments. It’s a coast somehow with an element of everything: sand, shingle, rock and cove, vista and marsh, harbour and estuary.
In winter I hear the boom of the sea from behind my house, past the other houses and the sycamore trees. Maybe one day there’ll be a flood as waves roll in over the esplanade, and then driftwood will pile up at the traffic lights. No-one really knows what the sea is capable of, when led astray by storms. No-one can predict, either, what they may find on the strand after the next drop of the tide.
The sea is unpredictability. It looks scarcely any two days alike because of weather, and the variations in its behaviour mean that it’s almost impossible to establish rigid patterns of life around it. It defies boundaries and programmes.
Like children falling asleep to music or the sound of adult conversation, we can be lulled by the mesmerising pink noise of waves, and the changing rhythms of the sea are in themselves soothing to the troubled soul even though (or because) they’re nothing to do with us. They’re responses to forces far greater than us. The sea is cat-like since it offers solace through indifference. Mountains would be the same except that they simply exist, while the sea is movement, life, threat, promise, barrier, mystery, and at times ferocity personified.
People who live by the sea are supposed to be happier, but also poorer on average. There must be a connection. Looking daily into the impersonal face of something greater than oneself is a steadying force. The sea giveth and the sea taketh away. Life is cyclical. I wouldn’t say that ambition is necessarily blunted, but it’s put in its proper perspective. The sea, which covers so much of Earth’s surface, is the greatest of levellers.
