Sentiments of Simplicity

Our B&B host had a list of places worth going that weren’t on anybody’s itinerary, and this was one of them. They told us the slate hut up the beach was left over from the company that made roofing tiles here — the slate that ended up on most of the roofs in the area and a good deal further afield.

The beach itself is slate. So are the odd low walls scattered along it, and so is the hut. Just offshore there’s a wooden trout boat riding at its mooring, and there is nothing else in the scene that belongs to this century.

That’s the whole of it, and it’s where the title comes from. You can stand there and construct a life out of what’s in front of you: that hut to live in, that boat to eat from, this shore to walk. Whether it ever worked that way I don’t know.

It was mostly cloudy that day with a parting that let some blue through and put sun on the autumn trees behind the shore. We walked a stretch of the beach. Slate shingle is slick and it’s sharp, and you spend more attention on your feet than you expect to. But it’s just these places that you have all to yourself that seem to stick in my memory the most.