The tides today were later than I normally work with and from the tide tables it didn’t look as though I would be able to use the tides. When I got down to the site it was apparent that there had been some large tides since I last came here and there was lots of seaweed to mark the high tide line, more seaweed than I had seen here before.
Also when I got here I was very surprised to see that the spiral I had laid out on the clay beds had to a large degree survived. What seemed to have happened was that the sea had deposited some of the fine grains of sand in the gaps between the pebbles and made the centre more secure than ever. Only the outer sides had been washed away. To survive three weeks of tides was something remarkable and I wonder how many people had stumbled across it and wandered who had done it, and perhaps why?
I’ve noticed when walking along the beach here that there are often small streams that carry fine grains of the clay and deposit these on the beach to create “mud rivers”. After some pondering (including wondering whether to just enlarge the spiral) I decided to try to recreate this flowing movement but on this beach where the stones are much larger.
I found a suitable rock and dug underneath it so that the ‘river’ would flow from under it and using the same technique as the spiral (i.e. using the stones linearity). It takes a long time for this technique to be effective as there need to be a lot of stones lying in the same direction in order for the effect to become apparent. Used a lot of stones and could have done with more time.
The sun was hot and there were several small falls of rock from the cliffs today making the place eerie and quite scary to work in.