Yesterday I took a trip out to Crosby Beach and the Sefton coast, just north of Liverpool. The main attraction was to see an artwork called "Another Place" by artist Antony Gormley, which consists of 100 cast iron figures (cast from the artist's own body) placed in the sand. I figured after that after seeing them I could walk up the coast about 7 or 8 miles to Formby point for a nice afternoon out. I got more than I bargained for I think.
The figures themselves are fascinating, spread out quite far apart from each other, some close to the sand dunes and others partially submerged by the sea even at low tide. They're corroding in interesting ways and some are even covered in barnacles. Add them to the farm of huge wind turbines just off-shore and you can't help wondering - if humankind disappeared tomorrow, what would future beings make of this peculiar landscape?
I spent a while wandering between the figures taking pictures of them and the turbines (I love wind turbines! and how they dominate the seafront here) and the beached jellyfish slowly evaporating to nothing in the sun - one of the quietly strangest things I've seen for a while. It was a great place to spend an hour watching ships coming and going, and distant flocks of seabirds darting around like swarms of bees - an angry smudge out to sea.
Walking up the beach I passed a UFO-like building that turned out to be a leisure centre with a very nice looking swimming pool visible through the tinted glass, and I was sorry that I'd decided not to bring my trunks and towel. I like to swim in new places and my recent trip to Hathersage pool had reminded me of the kind of fun water can be when you give up on swimming lengths once in a while. Maybe I'll come back out here again sometime and give it a try.
The Gormley figures are dotted along roughly 2 miles of the beach, and after a while I started to get that Groundhog Day-like feeling that surely I'd already passed this figure a few minutes earlier? In spite of the potential that the figures seem to offer for "decoration", only a couple stood out - I suppose that the sea and other elements take their toll and clean the figures up pretty effectively. Elsewhere the beachfront reminded me a little of the boardwalk around Seagirt and Spring Lake in New Jersey, with big houses set back from the beach behind the sand dunes.
Finally past the figures I followed the trail through the sand dunes, seeing some interesting trees, flowers and butterflies, but at some point I must have missed a turning because I ended up in what looked like a rather well-appointed suburb in Hightown. From here I struggled to find the trail again, eventually finding a path that skirts the Altcar rifle training camp from where I heard sounds of gunfire from behind the sand dunes as I plodded onwards. Finally I found a path that headed back towards the beach, lured by the sight of the blades of the wind turbines (which looked tantalising close but - like the moon - are actually always the same distance away wherever you are).
The stretch of beach that I came out on was like a wasteland, devoid of people but with a line of debris next to the dunes that disappeared into the distance - wheels, road signs, rubber gloves (so many rubber gloves!), trees, gas cylinders, on and on and on. The whole scene was reminiscent of something from the film "Addicted to Plastic" - with the oddest sight being this collection of odd shoes:
I'm guessing that I walked past at least a mile of junk before I finally reached Formby Point, footsore and ready for something to eat. I figured that I would walk to the station and get a train back to my starting point near Crosby, but even that turned out to be less than straightforward - the police had closed off the access road to investigate a fire-bombed building (I've since read that it was the result of an arson attack on a restaurant).
Eventually however I made it back to Crosby beach for high tide and a last look at the figures before heading home. It was a long day and more than a little surreal in several places - to be honest the desolate beach with washed up junk was probably the strangest, and my pictures from there don't convey even a fraction of what it was really like. But it was certainly a memorable trip and I'm glad that I went.
See my pictures of the Gormley figures, wind turbines, debris and other stuff on Flickr.
No comments:
Post a Comment