Kirsteen McNish finds herself buffeted by Cornish squalls.

Time is suspended marionette-like, away from multiple challenges and distractions. The ghosts of the tin-mining industry are ever-present here, looming monoliths amongst burial chambers and imposing coastal stacks. The jutting cliff edge looks like serrated teeth, or a Dimetrodon spine teetering down into the sea. Opposite the house the Brison rocks rise from the ocean, locally nicknamed “General De Gaulle Having A Bath” — a sharp profile and belly rounded like Homer Simpson. Instead of De Gaulle, I see a bulky sea creature on its haunches jealously guarding the cove, or a pregnant woman in exhausted repose at the end of the world. 

What thrilled me on arrival soon feels disarming as the house vibrates and murmurs in the building storm. I flip through the guest book and notice my partner’s ex-girlfriend once came here, her handwriting neatly looping across the page. My partner stands in the kitchen reading her entry — something dancing across his face I don’t quite recognise. I catch sight of my wild hair in the mirror. It has lost many of its curls this past year or two, and I look like a rattlebag of misshapen things. It occurs to me I will be sleeping in a bed she’d have slept in here before me. Her fingers may well have cradled the cup I am pouring his tea into, her lips rested where his are now. I am curious; I wonder what she may have felt arising within her in the wild winds around this sea room, instead of a pang of something approximate to jealously.

I wait with my daughter whilst my son and partner run into town for fish and chips before they head off back home. My daughter dances in the middle of the main room to the sound of the wind battering the windows like she is partying in a festival tent, not fearful but wildly exhilarated. As I open the balcony door to peer at Land’s End Lighthouse, I am startled to see a small hawk just above my head determinedly facing the storm, its feathers buffering hard against the wind. I look at this small bird fighting the jet stream, its compact body fiercely holding its own. I know what this bird symbolises, so seeing one in such proximity at night hits me firmly in the solar plexus. I find my sea legs again. As the car’s rear lights blink their goodbye, I sit alone in the dark, listening to the roar.

Tracing back to my paternal side of the family I found some predecessors in a tiny coastal village in the Scottish borders, one from Northern Ireland, and a loose scattered line back to Norway. I find a coastal preacher, a family of kiltmakers, a musician, an unpublished poet, and a young housekeeper in Liverpool who ended up in the poorhouse with a child from an “unknown”. The child was subsequently taken in by a sister, but their mother’s own story tails off into the dusty dead end of unretrievable archives. I realise from this research where there is a story, there are often rumours or myth to adjoin it.  I too, could craft threads of genealogical reasons I am drawn to the sea, but they are often tenuous. Perhaps honouring this pull is reason enough to feel I am allowed to be here. 

*

Unusually while I am here I do not remember my dreams. The sound of the sea has unexpectedly held me tightly. I find myself with no errands to run, no-one to dress, cajole into eating breakfast, no-one’s hair or teeth to brush, appointments to attend, or to dance with in the kitchen to raise a smile. No-one to decipher or respond to. I feel a thrill surge through my veins, and my body shakes, it seems, from this sudden release. I open the door, holding it hard as I peer into the dark to prevent the door smashing against the paint-stippled plaster wall in the wind. A fine spray rinses my face, staining me. I cannot believe I am finally here in December, the bonniest month, and caught in Storm Bram – the most gothic of all tempests. 

*

Multiple layers of the sea’s song soon become apparent. Unseen forces brew stealthily. Foam deities battle with the veiny rocks, arms flailing wildly in serpent’s hisses. A huge snare drum sound from the Brisons surprises me, and an amber weather warning pings loudly on my phone. I cannot still my phone with two hands to take a photo easily because of this trickster wind, making my limbs feel strangely elastic. In the darkness of night I hear a metallic, ringing noise, reminiscent of masts of quayside boats tinkling or the ghost of a theremin. Something, somewhere, squeaks and chips in morse code patterns, either a flag post being knocked or an alarmed bird. The wind hits the front corner of the house whispering its secrets, sirens gathering in its cracks, hissing their sorrows…

*

The day meets me bright and cold. The odd walker ambles past wearing a thick coat that stiffens their arms like a toddler. Small groups of friends link arms and peer at information boards, and one group tries the door of a café obviously boarded up for winter. I feel completely dislocated from anything festive and it feels good in my marrow. I can, however, detect togetherness between the few people I see. An elderly man makes his way gingerly down the start of the slipway to the cove, his grandchildren and a woman, perhaps his daughter, warning him to be careful. I intuitively hold back. The woman holds the man’s elbow with tenderness, her scarf flapping so hard it wraps around her face, leaning in. Dove-like cooing sounds drift past on the wind as she talks. His grandson runs effortlessly up the slipway and beams a smile my way, as open as a seal’s face bobbing in the water. I am struck by this openness and directness for a teenager around my son’s age. Perhaps he feels sorry for my lone figure on the well-worn bench, not knowing that being alone is something I have longed for. He waves goodbye, his short blonde hair ruffling in the wind, waterproof tracksuit making a plasticky put-put-put sound. It is then I see a man who has been waiting for them, leaning against the steps, sucking on a vape, forehead set in deep creases and black hair in a flame, waiting darkly for the rest of this group. as brooding as a crescent moon. 

The hammers and ploughs of the waves push up dirty foam which collects in bubbles around veiny granite boulders – all man-made mistakes reaching this pointed cove. The car radio on the way here reported that a huge number of crates of bananas and soft fruit will soon be washing up on the Cornish coast, escaped from a carrier for Tesco’s, with strict instructions not to touch them. I imagine countless swollen yellow fruit washing up on beaches like surreal toothless smiles, rotting in shards of wintry sun. 

*

Four hundred feet up the winding cliffside sits the remains of Ballbarrow Cairn. I am told that painter Wilhemina Barnes Graham once walked to create impressive sculptural abstracted forms on canvas, now displayed in Tate St Ives. As I drag myself up the slope the surf below turns into what looks like thick swirling snow in crested peaks. The brutal wind splinters painfully into my ears making them whistle as I grasp firmly onto my hat. I reach the burial chamber which is large and squat, shaped like a ring donut, its stones beautifully woven, encasing a deep inner chamber filled with bracken and moss. I climb to the top of the chamber and the stones feel good and rough under my fingertips, the wool from my gloves sticking to caked-on flakes of lichen. It is said online that late at night eerie lights can be seen flickering from this cairn. I search for these embers deep into the night but see nothing other than distant house lights peppering the clifftop, and the winking of arcing satellites above. 

*

Walking mid-week to St. Just I look back to see fast waves. They sound like hundreds of envelopes being torn by unseen hands. I can see why this place is called a cape. The Atlantic sea wraps itself around the headland, meeting the English Channel like a fanned Elizabethan collar, the buttery slices of softly mossed hills sloping down to two steep shoulders of cove. Behind this sits the gull’s nest of a  precariously perched coastguard look-out which holds fort, watching for incoming squalls. 

I read later that the Brison rocks were once a medieval prison — offenders would be cast out onto the rocks as punishment which almost certainly spelt death. One of the last major wrecks took place in the 1850s — a ship Jamaica-bound, having left its dock in Liverpool. It was said to have hit a violent storm, smashing the rig against the rocks and sweeping 6 crew out to sea, leaving three survivors: the captain, his partner, and the ship’s cook, who somehow in torturous circumstances fashioned himself a raft to cling to. After clinging onto the rocks all night in her nightgown, the woman died after being submerged in a wave attempting to get into the courageous Cornish fisherman’s rescue boat — likely from exhaustion and hypothermia — leaving her partner to bury her at a cemetery in nearby Sennen Cove. I cannot fathom this harrowing scene, but I can believe it. This stretch of colliding currents feels like a harsh mistress with nocturnal whips and chains. Despite a glittering daytime jacket of dots and dashes of silver scales, somehow she is always raging. 

*

A day later at the Kurt Jackson Foundation I speak to a friendly curator as the tin roof is battered and bellows in response. I comment on the distinct sound of Cape Cornwall and why it seems like a telegraph wire of hums, whirring and slamming. She makes a groan tube sound between the palms of her cupped hands to demonstrate that she thinks the undersea mines act as a boom for the waves, their hollow tubes creating acoustic microphones magnifying the cacophony. I think of those mine workers, often young, with the deafening sea booming overhead. As kids we would shout whoooooos in the concrete underpasses of our housing estate, making our voices swell and echo through the walkways to startle passers-by. Kids spooking each other. I cannot imagine the acoustic effect and adrenaline of all this noise on one’s body as a juvenile worker under the waves, the same age we were then, not knowing if you would make it home broken-limbed, or indeed at all, cloistered deep in the hollows within the waves.

The slap of the waves against the headland sounds like tin baths being tipped off the cliff whilst I am safely in my bedroom — a nut tucked into a tree knot. In the morning I drag the wheelie-bin back from where it’s rumbled towards the sea wall and re-stack the heavy granite boulders that sat on its top, thrown effortlessly by the wind like draught pieces. I sandwich a sliver of a tea-towel into the door frame which stops it sounding like the Valkyries are hammering at the threshold. I realise whilst here, too, of how attuned I am to threat, perhaps absorbed in one’s DNA as much as the same green eyes that skipped generations, a predilection to the esoteric finding its home again in visions, or the inherited ability to play complicated music by ear.   

The sea does not know my fear. It does not know it’s the Winter Solstice. It knows nothing of my words. It knows itself in relation to the moon, the fists of the wind, the cliffs and the wheeling sea birds. It knows itself by its constant pull and its crashing frayed edges. And here in this wind, the sea feels as if it’s rallying against a world that has lost its grip on a great many important things.

And yet, everything is still, somehow, singing.