“At Shingle Street we cross the quietly famous ‘shell line’: a trail of white whelks laid side to side that stretches from a fisherman’s cottage, out over the shingle for 200 yards or so, before dipping towards the sea. A woman is on hands and knees near where we reach it. She seems to be mending a hole in the line. She stands, talks with us. Her name is Lida Kindersley and she is the maker of the line.
She survived cancer and decided to start the line with a Dutch friend of hers: a way of connecting those two North Sea landscapes. Now it’s a case of keeping the line complete, she says, for it’s always getting broken by dogs or walkers or wind. We leave her to her mending – Penelope to her tapestry, Scheherazade to her story – step carefully over the line and walk on north.” Robert Macfarlane, Big Issue, 25th June 2012
Photo: Shell line, Shingle Street, July 2012
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