Protective talismans seek out Kirsteen McNish, in her garden and on the beach.

At the end of the so-called cruellest month, the birdsong seems to have picked up into new levels of vibrancy: clearer, sharper and cooler in tone than I have noticed before. The birds are extremely skittish this Spring, more urgent, like some impending doom we humans can’t see is hovering on the horizon. Travelling along a minor road, I flinch as a female Thrush bounces off the grill of an oncoming car – dashing across the road like a blinkered teenager trying to reach friends. My friend C tells me she saw three feathered bodies on the roadside the night before. The desperate need to feed their young means that the songbirds’ gathering of foodstuffs is frenetic – or perhaps there are slimmer pickings to be had, keeping the birds from their young for longer, all the keener for the quest. I know I now notice more via the prism of my pause-intense daughter, who could study a blade of grass for hours, teaching me the value of the here and now. Or is there something else ramping up with newfound velocity in the heady glister of the morning?

My head swims with the headlines — war, human rights violations, PIP cuts and the already struggling — infused with my daughter’s sleeplessness and some slight hangover of last year’s concussion. When I touch the circular scar it feels numb and alien to my fingertips, like it isn’t part of me. It seems that my daughter is picking up on strange vibrations at night too, her fingers spinning around each other like she is winding a bobbin, eyes like an owlet in the dark, unable to slip away into the waves of sleep. I recall her hungry screams as a baby, the panic to get to her as she wailed with a hurricane force, stubbing my toes and buckling sleep-worn limbs trying to reach her cot to sate her. The familiar, primal reflex of care was never very measured — particularly as I couldn’t yet distinguish what was pain or just plain survival. She doesn’t speak with words but rather with movement, and I realise I am still somewhere on this highwire nearly 16 years in — not quite as freshly biting, but still looking closely and coiled to spring. 

*

As I walk down the steep curved lane towards the conversationally bubbling river Avon, I feel for the hundredth time there is something sharp digging into the arch of my foot; a small stone I have become used to feeling in my trainers but never get round to removing — because there is something always more urgent to attend to, or perhaps because subconsciously I like it puncturing my thoughts. As I take my trainer off on the rough path, I am surprised to see it’s a stumpy, rusty nail which has made its home in the rubber sole like a limpet on a rock. Here I notice that the ground is teeming with load-bearing ants, glistening beetles, and within seconds I’m surrounded by a cloud of unidentifiable cardboard-coloured bugs, hoverflies and wasps that sound like fast-drawn zips, and which promise to nip me on my way if I lurk too long. 

I notice, for the first time this year, the small spires of Yellow Rattle in the familiar hedgerows, and they are something like newfound hope. Everything suddenly seems to be waving in the shimmering light, saying don’t forget me, don’t forget me, still here. I count the plants I recognise like a walking meditation, and recall their folkloric meanings:

Stitchwort – starry, frothy (can cause a thunderstorm if picked)

Red Campion  — upright and bright (the protector of bees)

Viper’s Bugloss – bruised and blue (resilience, favoured by Druids)

Borage — the last cup holders of the dew (used for courage and battles)

Herb Robert – abundant and soft (the trickster)

Speedwell – bright birds’ eyes (the traveller’s charm)

Cleavers — acid-bright and sticky (the love weaver)

Nettles — lush and plentiful (the gateway plant of the living and dead)

Primroses — innocence and openness (a portal and a blessing)

Cow Parsley — elegant and balletic (harmful to mothers, good for incantations)

Celandines – the harbinger of Spring, heliotropic (prophesy bringers)

Wild Garlic – the guardian of hedges (the farmer’s helper)

Toadflax – diminutive and stealthy (the wild rover and fae flower — supposedly brought over from Italy climbing marble statues)

*

Back home I pick out a tiny china head from the soil where I found the old Shamanic bronze figure. Its tiny youthful face with curled hair has evidently been pushed up by the ferns, raised from the dead of the earth. It is by the same wall where I have discovered ancient glass bottles, huge square rusty nails and sealed jars. My sister tells me over the phone in the encroaching dusk that these were used for protection against malevolent witchcraft. She asks what herbs grow in our garden and I report Rosemary, Lemon Balm, and Sage are thriving in the borders, which she tells me are grown to protect a dwelling. As I look over the seemingly benign fields — acid-sharp lemon and terracotta curves carved as if by a pallet knife through buttery clay — I wonder who lived here before us, and felt so provoked by unseen energies. I wonder if those same energies are what is hampering our efforts to find the right way forward of late.

*

On Bank Holiday Monday, we drive for the first time to neighbouring Dorset. I have a wafty romantic notion of walking the beach at Charmouth in sea spray and finding the odd fossil on the shoreline as the sea comes crashing in around us. What is in my head and what we are met with are at angles, strange and somewhat surreal. We walk over a bridge and gully to the seaweed-whipped shoreline, and I feel like I am in a fever dream. I hear a flinty, unfamiliar noise like a quarry of falling shards. At least a hundred or so people are crouched under a grey sky in brightly coloured rain macs. It feels like someone has unspooled a wide ribbon studded with mechanical creatures beavering away, the odd bare-legged child running a bucket back and forth as if in a Victorian workhouse. 

No one, it seems, is looking at the sea.

Two children precariously squeal on the sheer summit of the cliffside as others pass with backpacks, steadfastly striding on, ignoring the warnings to take other routes. A large dog barks maniacally at a deep hole. Stones are bashed with other stones and special hammers and chisels – no one looking in each other’s direction, limpet-like clusters on the sand in determined focus. The temperature oscillates wildly, and people take off clothes, put them back on, take them off again. 

The sound is eerie and somehow muffled in the receding humidity, with encroaching water swiftly rushing towards the rock’s edges.  I feel the eeriness of accidentally happening upon a fervent convention or congregation. My thoughts flit back to the beginning of the pandemic and footage of hordes of people panicking in supermarkets, filling trolleys in worried haste. This time it’s relics from the past which are sought to fill the gaping mouths of buckets and plastic bags, as if these talismans of fossilised life will cement their finders’ lives in the present somehow.

I pick my way to the sea fringe and recall a play about J. M. W. Turner I had seen at The Arcola Theatre in London some years ago. He tortured himself trying to capture the roll and thrall of the sea, and how light danced across its surface. I stand and imagine the smarting of his retinas, dilating and focussing again, scanning the cloudy horizon — a rapidly shapeshifting scene which would surely have inspired a mix of creative frustration and giddy elation. I look it up later to find that he was indeed a regular visitor to the South West, and in particular the Jurassic Coast. I think too of the work of artist Garry Fabian Miller, and how he adapted during turmoil; his creative practice changing as his own life changed dramatically, becoming both a diviner and barometer, yielding and reacting to what glimmers before him. Both artists are seers of the overlooked.

I feel ghost-like, picking out a pathway amongst the living, as no one offers the eye contact or passing smile I am used to now on local beaches. The sun meekly tries to whisper away the fleeting spots of rain and the tide feels ever more furiously demanding. I note the lack of audible birdsong or gulls screeching, and it’s like we are in a weird vacuum.

As I look up to see where the jagged cliffside meets the damp air, I wonder whether its chiselling is fashioned by the rising tides or largely made by a great many plucking hands. Squinting in uncertain light, I see a tumble of earth, small rocks waterfalling as if pushed by the sky itself. I look around to see if anyone else has noticed and I see two men, each grasping a takeaway coffee, craning their necks to watch the same trickle. Neither talk to each other, or to me, and their rooted legs are planted widely on the spot as if they are at the pitch edge of a Sunday 5-aside game, all of us mute voyeurs. I Google later to see if it caused a landslide, but it seems that the last one was in March, and just a footnote in the local paper. 

Some years ago, I would go and stay alone in Skipsea, near Hull, in a sculptor’s sea shack, and walk down the cliffside to haunt the beach, whispering my own incantations of hopes to the sea whilst the lighthouse beam excited the air. A string of hagstones would clink together on twine, tapping against the doorframe as I drifted off to sleep.  Some years later I learnt from my friend that this beloved haven had since fallen off the eroding cliffs and onto the beach in a storm, taking all its belongings with it, and thus dissolving the hope of ever going back to this higgledy-piggledy strand line of hand-built dwellings. My throat tightens as I remember the light sweep across the room in a kind of quiet prayer.

Before I walk back to the car park, I notice the small miracle of one-after-the-other hagstones washed up before me, and within minutes I have twenty or so jangling around in my pockets and bag, clinking against each other like loose change. Soon they will join the solitary one I have carried around in my shoulder bag for years. This stone, from its jostling against haphazard belongings, has pen marks and lipstick blots, and still feels satisfyingly cool on the hottest of days when I feel the most unlike myself. Like the others on this beach looking for fossils, I too take my own treasure which has been washed up, caressed and care-worn by the sea.

*

Days later, I turn this familiar stone in the fold of my pocket as I watch the hypnotic Daisy Rickman perform to a heaving room. When she introduces her song ‘Where The Sun Meets The Sea’, the audience leans in in silence, lines of enraptured wading birds at her water’s edge. The holed stone rolls in my pocket as Rickman’s vocals roll like a welcome squall around the room. It rolls in my pocket as the sea rumbles around nearby Burgh Island’s darkening granite, and it rolls in my pocket as the tides rise and swell within my body. This feeling is cairn-like, familiar and intoxicating, and I want to make a home of it. 

The following week, I parcel one of the Charmouth stones up to a friend and his partner in London, as I am told that hung above a bed they can cure insomnia, which pokes nightly at my friends’ frayed edges. A stone that didn’t come from a beach close to me, or indeed him, but a portal of the in-between, somehow notionally there in the quiet gaps, suspended. 

Dedicated to Sunnifa, Sian and Malcolm.