The walk to Elbury Cove

 

When I started blogging, I never imagined that I would achieve the milestone of 250 posts. What started as publicity for “Walking with Gosse” (the blog taking its title from the sub-title of the book [1]) has grown to encompass wider fields related to many aspects of Nature, Creation and Religious Conflicts. To celebrate the 250, I would like to describe a walk, part of the South West Coast Path, that has always meant a great deal to me and with which I associate many memories, both distant and recent. I was raised in Torbay and the coastal landscape of the bay inspired me in important ways. It was where I could escape from things that troubled me and it instilled in me a Romantic approach to life that replaced the religion of my upbringing.

The walk began at Paignton Harbour (above), where I loved to spend time watching the tide and the boats. and, from there, I followed the coast to the beaches at Goodrington, the location of the well-known Gosse family outing in 1887 [1]. The path then led uphill, past Saltern Cove (where I sometimes sat to ineffectually revise chemistry, among other subjects), and onwards to the next sandy beach at Broadsands (all shown in the sequence of images below).

 

My destination was Elbury Cove, but not as far as the shingle beach that seemed so different to the golden sands more typical of the bay. It was the limestone outcrops that I liked and I walked out to be close to the sea, listening to it lapping against the shore and looking down in the hope of seeing fish. In summer, I would stretch out on the smooth rocks and, in other seasons, become fascinated by the way waves crashed in. From the outcrops, I could look across to the cove and see Lord Churston’s bathhouse that allowed his lordship the chance to go sea bathing [2]. Set against the dark woods, and adjacent to the steep shingle beach, the bathhouse ruin would have appealed to landscape painters, especially those in the Romantic tradition and the view certainly appealed to me. All this is seen in the following images:

 

I must have made that walk scores of times when I was living in Paignton, and at school in Torquay, and it is always something I love to do on my rare visits back to Torbay. Nowadays, I stick to the path, but when I was younger, I also walked on the beaches and, at low tide, walked round headlands by jumping from boulder to boulder. I had no real sense of danger and it wasn’t just the physical exercise, excitement, and feeling of isolation that I enjoyed, as there was also much natural history to observe, both in rock pools and on the rocks themselves (see below). I became fascinated by creatures like limpets, mussels and barnacles that attached themselves, often in huge masses, and I wondered how they had arrived, and how they survived. I knew that barnacles and mussels lived by capturing particles from the sea, but had no idea at the time that my walks to Elbury Cove would provide inspiration for my career in biological research.

 

My interest was always in aquatic biology and my research work was mostly on suspension-feeding animals. Although I didn’t work directly on barnacles and mussels, I developed an appreciation of the types of particles that they captured and these were not just planktonic plants, but also dead organic matter. Some organic particles were from the breakdown of plants and animals, others were formed by aggregation processes at the micro-scale, often involving exudates from cells. I learned about the importance of waves and bubbles in particle formation and that, of course, took me right back to my walks. When I look out at the waves at Elbury Cove now, I not only see a Romantic vista, but also the source of my understanding of how aquatic systems work, something I was able to describe for others (see below). I guess that’s the result of being a Romantic, too. It's been quite an adventure

 

 

[1] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse: Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other e-book sellers.

 

[2] https://davedoeshistory.com/2018/07/31/elberry-cove-bathhouse/