On this windy day the sea is powering across the sands between Marden Rocks and Seaton Point. Light bounces off the shining beach and it’s hard to look at the water for its brilliance. Wiggly piles of lugworm casts lie in neat coils and oystercatchers probe and stab with mud-tipped red beaks. There are just a few dog walkers today, but plenty of birds taking advantage of the turbulence.
Wheeling flocks of golden plover are flashing green-gold then silver as they turn in unison. Redshanks and turnstones work the sea’s margin and starlings scrabble among newly deposited heaps of seaweed. Every time I come here the beach has a different character: washed flat and empty, lumbered with boulders or metre-deep in weed, redolent with oozing black liquid that I wish I could bottle for my garden.
Today, though, the whole sweep of the bay is transformed by a finely textured black grit, scuffed by dog prints to reveal the sand beneath. The retreating water has left waving patterns, branched like tree roots, flowing like river systems seen from the air. This is sea coal, something regularly washed up on the Northumberland coast, due partly to erosion of underwater seams but mostly to historic dumping of waste from coalmines.
Back in the 1970s, when I lived in a damp rented farm cottage, we’d burn this cheaper coal, its sea-sculpted rounded lumps splitting and exploding in a red hot fire. “Seacoalers” made a tough living from gleaning what the tide washed up using horses and carts instead of easily corroded motor vehicles.
Further down the coast, a community of seacoalers lived next to the now closed Lynemouth power station. Their harsh way of life was captured in black and white photographs by Mik Critchlow and Chris Killip, and was the subject of the 1985 Seacoal by Amber Films. In 2000, the country diarist Veronica Heath wrote of visiting her seacoaler friend.
Today the beach is nearly as black as the closing scenes in Get Carter, as black as the cormorant standing atop a red warning pole. Yet next time I come the beach will be different again, as the weather and the tides bring with them constant change.
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