Walking down to the sea, with the hills behind me, with the miles inside me, what lies before me is immense, a glittering and shining expanse, both limit and release.

A slow curve of shell sand, sand of white silica, Torridonian sand or sand of grey basalt; these are the margins, tracts of delay and preparation.

If fate is the fruit of character, what does it mean to come down to the sea?

As bladder wrack will float a stone, contemplation of the horizon brings a perceptible lifting of the centre of gravity.

A stretch of sea can lie between hills like an acre of bluebells in sunshine.

No amount of looking will ever exhaust that which can be taken in at a glance.

Looking is an acknowledgement before any recognition.

A contour in the hills may contain the sea, as the body may be full of loneliness.

The complacent to looking is listening, to lie back in the marram grass with eyes closed, while oystercatcher, redshank and whimbrel call the distances.

Barnacles sing, tangle rots, the summer days are long and inconsequential.

For a brief season, a bewilderment of butterfiles, a broadcast of colours, ragwort, clover, tufted vetch, self-heal, eyebright, wild thyme, is steadied by the blue of the sea and sky.

Within the idiom of the tide, ripples in sand, or the edges of receding waves have the clarity of a statement.

Sand, shells, pebbles, boulders are graded in an order that is always open to revision.

After a gale, a snow or ash of sea-spume, a froth of spent rage, covers everything, a wounded guillemot drags itself over a litter of boulders, in the massive calm before a new front approaches.

There is a darkness in excess of light, a lull in the crash of thought, on a walk beside the flowering blackthorn of the wave.

Above the tideline, an old blue rope is entangled in a bramble bush.

What was looked for in the hills and in the recesses of the forest is found at least in the sea; the transformation of qualities into quantity.

Time lost looking at the sea is precisely lost of time.

On looking at the sea, it is not the sea but the looking that is redemptive.

On some mornings it will take all the blue of the sea to wash the sleep from your eyes.

Where waves were driven as spray over the dunes, a clear water stands in weed-held pools.

Whimbrel, redshank, oystercatcher; all the distances awake echoes.

Every inscription is erased, every direction countered, that it might be the sea, not current, tide or wave, that rests in the gaze that rests upon it.

Every distance has an internal duplicate which can be measured and sustained.