Saturday 9 August 2014

A reflective look at some of the fantastic photographs taken on our walking workshops - with four more submissions.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Building

Near the ferry terminal is the ice cream kiosk with sloping roof.  Out of sight, is a sloping roof at the rear, of concrete. The roof at the rear one can walk on. This gives a view across the bay and estuary. The steps that lead up the side of the kiosk to the hidden viewpoint are famous. They are known as “the John Lennon steps”.  I think the famed Beatle was brought here on family holidays when young. To find, play, and jump off, this secret roof space, onto the sands of the Ferry Beach or to dream while taking in the peace of the view, is a joy to a child now, the same as to John Lennon age 9.

David Conroy





 

Flotsam 
 
Washed up, salted and dried out.
A fading beauty, over exposed,
curled up at the edges by searing sun
 
through cold, lonely nights. 
 
 
Surfed in by an easy wave,
 
stranded in the rock pool.
I try to climb out.
Almost made it,
the tide was against me,
sweeps in too often.
Tumbles me back into the pit. 
 
I crave comfort from the sea,
reclamation by the tide.
Deep briny darkness calls me home.  
Adele V Robinson


  



Walk Of The White Lady
Footsteps echo, crunch and turn
Talk a walk and let us learn…
River swirl, let it fall
As the White Lady begins to call
Shadows of a distant past
Let my love so sweetly last
I see the church, a painted spire
Like earth’s core my heart on fire
Ring that bell a faraway chime
Strike and bellow let it rhyme
Sodden to the very core
Let it rain – begin to pour
As the wet starts to spray
Tractors lift, bring in the hay
 
A hawthorn bushy full in flower
Our walk is done within the hour 
 
Pam Tufnell
 
 
  




The Net Weaver’s Cottage
 
Board-blinkered windows smother out the light.
Squeaking screws squeezed sunshine out that day.
When steel lock clacked down for the final time,
the sand-whipped lime-wash would not fade away.
Integrity of cobbles could not rest
and grew through tarmac’s crumbling, tenuous grip.
Discarded coils of hemp, an empty nest
dreamt its weave with sea foam at its lips.
What fate befell the rough and clever hands.
whose left thumb wore this sneck to golden gleam,
whose skin snagged workings clinched the trawler’s land
in mining Irish water’s living seam?
What grit is left of pearl tales partly told,
imprisoned in jet and frozen in the cold? 
 
Heather Taylor
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 




Sunday 3 August 2014

Come rain or sunshine - The Wyre river rolls along gracefully.


 








Wyre’s Sweet Summer Song On A Rain-sodden Day

Soft dripping rain
Turns torrential
God’s tap is in full flow

Lush meadows
Sprinkled with buttercups
The yellow sun, broken into fragments
Twinkling across dewy fields

Cows
Munch away on the sodden grass
Oblivious to the driving rain, the ceaseless traffic drone
The walkers who watch and moan
About the weather 

Centre piece of this scene
Is the majestic River Wyre
Flowing serene
A sensuous, sleeping serpent
Wrapped around the fields and fells and glistening dells
Of the countryside

Sweet Wyre’s song of a sodden summer
Is a joy to behold
Even in the pouring rain
Its timeless beauty
Is there for everyone... 

Angela Norris





We Sailed

Oil-barrelled rafts of youth
Ripple the waters no more
There eager shadows sought
Fortune awaiting abroad
The fading echo hailing
Lone ferry to cross bank
The photo sepia
The memory vivid. 

Barry McCann



Fleetwood Fires 
Wyre light -
designed by a blind man
to give sailors sea-sight
and safe passage by night
along the rolling salt-road
to their Fleetwood home -
you stood two miles off shore
in Morecambe bay
and shone diopic bright
a century or more
until yourself consumed by fire
in nineteen forty eight…
 
Lower light -
securely land based,
whitestone faced
and only half the height of anterior Pharos -
you sat classically squat and square
on elevated Wyrebank
but were far from inferior;
pivotal, rather,
in this trinity of incandescence
back in the day
when trawler captains used your nine-mile beams
to fix their fishy way…
 
Finally [upper] Pharos light -
eighth wonder of the world?
flaring deep sandstone red
on sunny days -
you rose majestic
as a totem of this once aspiring town;
solid, steadfast, shapely tapered tower
topped by that magical prismatic mirror
which had the power
to magnify a candle’s brightness
and throw it far into the bight,
pinning the blackness of the night… 
 
As epilogue -
Victoria Pier burned down in two thousand eight.
Britian’s penultimate was both the shortest
and the shortest-lived.
Now only a masonry stump remains
plans to rebuild it proved in vain -
and so, lights sputter
gutter
and are gone
leaving a history
of ghostlike wraiths of smoke
in their wake… 
 
Steve Rowland

 



 
 


 
 SD563543
 
Across creased landscapes, wide enough to fill a floor
the lines are drawn, nail-scoured a divot deep
cross Beatrix Fell, past Shooter’s Hut, Camp Bridge
her finger crushing vaccaries beneath
gouged damage
where a dint erodes, makes sinkholes swallow sheep,
sends trees on downward heltering
here, where a rabbit run, a badger path, marked with shaving bristles,
caught on staves of fencing, moles as minims
became a rut, a route, a coffin-path, a road,
once was a unique view, hair first wind parted
here
was once a quivered mesh of grass
seen from five foot high
heart opening to the sea.
 
Rachel McGladdery