Glorious Godrevy

In a long run of grey, wet and dismal days, I was very fortunate to have a dry morning and even a few splashes of sunshine. A member-led photowalk by the Landscape Group of the RPS took us to Godrevy Point in West Cornwall, and was a real creative tonic. (The lighthouse on Godrevy Island is thought to have inspired Virginia Wolf’s almost-eponymous novel.)

The broad sandy beaches and sea-worn rocks are home to huge colonies of mussels, the inevitable barnacles, and some limpets. Seaweed is mostly wrack and gutweed: this is a well-known surfing beach and I imagine the big waves take their toll on algae trying to establish a hold on the rocks. Under overhangs exposed at low tide, the shaded surfaces are home to lots of common anemones, orange encrusting sponges, clusters of whelk eggs, green leaf worms and probably lots of others I missed!

The rocks and sand are another source of interest. Sand patterns always give me pleasure to look at, and the proliferation of ripples, runnels and dusky shadows didn’t disappoint.

The rocks are Devonian mudstones laid down in an ancient ocean, and then slumped and folded by seismic activity and the Variscan orogeny (a later period of mountain-building as continents collided to form the super-continent Pangaea). Some of the quartz has been dissolved out by heat and pressure into white veins cutting though the rock. The cliffs above are much more recent sediments laid down during the ice ages – considered important geologically, but not very photogenic, being a rubbly mixture of stones and brown mud called “head”.