My name is not Ishmael, but like the narrator of Moby-Dick, sometimes I have the urge – with little or no money in my purse – to see the watery part of the world. November is a damp and drizzly month in the soul for Ishmael, and I too have grown a bit grim about the mouth, so I head south-west to the sea, and along Chesil Beach to the Isle of Portland.
The sun shrugs off what has been weeks of cloud and damp, and the air is sharp, promising frost later. It feels like a quickening. Just the sort of tonic that Herman Melville would prescribe to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.
I park next to the grim edifice of St George’s church on the western side of the tied island and walk along a footpath leading to Tout quarry. The stone for which Portland is famous lies all around: tumbling down to the water’s edge in slabs, hunks, steps and outcrops. As the sun sets, I clamber around a giant’s playground of limestone blocks. The split rocks reveal sea creatures that last saw the light of day 150 million years ago, their spirals and curlicues peppering the stone, delicate as the ossicles of the inner ear.
Stone has been extracted from Tout since the late 18th century – the last significant hunks hauled away in 1983. Since then, this 13-hectare site has been managed as a nature reserve, home now to a host of wildflowers and one of the UK’s rarest butterflies – the silver-studded blue.
It is also a sculpture park, with the artworks left to be found with neither signpost nor labels, as if released into the wild rather than placed in an open-air gallery. The art is all around, it seems: latent, needing only time and weather to be revealed. From a certain angle, one piece of cliff turns out to be a face – the noble profile and full lips of a man, half-eroded on one side, staring fixedly out to sea.
Above me, the gulls take on a crow, the air is filled with their petulant three-note hinge-squeak punctuated by the crow’s disgruntled cronk. It’s a suitable soundtrack for the melancholy grandeur of this landscape, itself carved from wind and wave. I cannot escape the thought that even this great face, so apparently immutable, will eventually crumble to become just another pebble, one of the countless stones on Chesil Beach.
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